by Nigel Barley
“Where exactly did they go?”
She looked confused, and reacted to the confusion by pouring more tea into the already abandoned cups. “Well … I am not entirely sure. Lieutenant van Gennep had an address from a fellow officer.”
“I see.”
She looked around at all the English tea-takers and dropped her voice. “I know it is a lot to ask, Mr Bonnet, but I wonder if you might see if you can find them. Quite frankly, I hesitate to confront Mr Niemeyer without his daughter.”
So there I was, in a strange city, charged with the protection of a young girl’s honour and a missionary’s shame, coerced by a morality that sneered at my own feelings, indeed, regarded my tenderest emotions as criminal. Why should I collaborate in such hypocrisy? Why did I not declare proudly who and what I was? I decided it could do no harm to take a walk in the immediate environs of the hotel. It would set Miss Timms’ mind at rest and would otherwise achieve precisely nothing. I turned down a side road, then another, then another and found myself swiftly lost in a seething warren, some sort of market, echoing with sound and smells of sea and land. The stalls were so close together that I had to push between them, heaps of nameless vegetables, piles of cheap mattresses and oil lamps, a woman was gutting a fish. Suddenly, my passage was barred by a big man, a big man with a evil-looking monkey on his shoulder.
“Yes, sahib, yes.” He showed big crunching teeth. “Portrait. I do portrait for loved ones back in Blighty.”
“No thank you.” I was coolly firm. Then, I added foolishly, “I am not British.” He seized on it as the start of a negotiation.
“Where you from? From French? Spanish? Maybe you American? It not matter. My portraits work in all languages. Ha, ha! You make picture with monkey. Back home, they like.”
I tried to work my way past him but he locked in place and began to howl.
“No, please don’t push me. You hurt me! Show me some respect. I old man!” He must have given some order to the monkey for, without warning, it suddenly jumped from his shoulder to mine. Unbalanced, I twirled round, trying to dislodge the beast which responded by leaping on top of my head and ripping at my hair.
“Ow! Ow!” I spun like a Dervish, cannoned into a cheap liquor store, sloshing neat alcohol down my shirt, ricocheted and sat down into a pile of curry paste. I desperately tried to loosen the creature’s scrabbling paws and it responded with nasty screaming bites to my own fingers and face. Now the stall owners launched their own complaint, shouting and waving fingers in my face while an old woman began to belabour me with an enormous fat-soaked spoon and I sprawled back into other forms of curry as the monkey, no observer of Queensbury rules, continued to bite and scratch. A man who had no part in it came up, raised my glasses gently and poked me very deliberately and factually in the eye before going away and I howled louder and fell back again as glass crashed and warm oils seeped and oozed and then, thank God, there came police whistles, thudding boots, comforting khaki uniforms. I was seized by two skinny constables, lifted to my feet and presented to a dumpy sergeant, with a swagger-stick, who might have been the head-waggling brother of the chief steward.
“What is all this mess and noise?” he waggled. “Why are you disturbing these good people?” He sniffed alcohol fumes. “Are you drunk?”
“The monkey,” I slurred through puffy lips. “I was the one attacked.” We looked. There was, of course, no monkey, its owner having wisely decamped at the onset of the forces of law and order. The stall owners shrugged. “Monkey? What monkey?” They rolled their eyes and shook their heads. “He is crazy,” they seemed to say, “crazy as the Widow Traverso.”
“Look,” I said. “I am from a ship, the Bethoen, down in the harbour. I was assaulted.” I slithered in spilt curry paste and nearly fell, clutching a policeman for support.
“Drunk!” shouted a small man at the back, a barrack-room lawyer. “He is drunk! He is not even English whose right it is to enter the market drunk and break things and insult people.”
“I think, sahib, you must pay these good people for the damage you have done and then my men will escort you back to your ship. It is not good to come here and do bad things. You, who are a man of learning from his wearing of glasses, should know better.” He waved his cane. “We have these sticks for whacking wicked fellows.” He whacked a stall top in demonstration. “It is either paying or whacking.” It was paying.
I arrived back at the ship in time to see Miss Timms serenely climbing the gangplank with her two lost sheep – now found – in tow, all three aglow with feigned innocence and spotless white linen. At the top, I was greeted by a grinning chief steward, who looked me up and down and winked. Black eye, bites all over my face and neck, stinking of alcohol, trousers torn and besmirched fore and aft, escorted by two huge, panting, dark policeman. Now that was his idea of a satisfactory day ashore.
***
It finally occurred to me that, in shunning the chief steward, I was denying a part of myself that I would do better to embrace, at least metaphorically. So I confronted him, staying boldly in my cabin in face of his towelling perversities. He spoke excellent Dutch. His name was Anto and he was from Central Java, Solo – more properly Surakarta – proud cradle of Javanese high culture. He was actually a very nice man. He was married with three beautiful children – “But of course Tuan, all men must marry” – but since he was much away from home he had needs, needs that he preferred to satisfy with his own sex. This enabled him to stay faithful to his wife since only relations with women counted. Did she know this, Anto? Perhaps, but, in a marriage, Tuan, some things are best left unsaid. And while he was away, was she free to … ? Absolutely not. If he even suspected anything of that sort, he would beat her within an inch of her life, so great was his love for this woman. And now, Tuan, this business of you and me. Ah no. I shook my head. It had been a moment of madness from my too great affection for Hamid. Tuan really liked Hamid then? Then things could perhaps be arranged so that he should become, again, my friend. I had been too crude. He had been startled and ashamed. He was very young. The pocket gaped in expectation and was fulfilled.
The next day Hamid served me coffee and was all smiles. He put his hand chastely on my shoulder as he poured. Matters had been explained to him by Anto. Of course, he was my friend just as before. Being my friend seemed to mean that he was prepared to flirt with me and roll his eyes at any suggestive remark, to look over his shoulder smiling to see whether I watched him as he walked away. He would hold my hand, interlacing his little finger with mine, as he did with his friends in the village, when we walked together. He chatted happily to me – told me of his life in Java, his hopes and dreams for his children, his excitement at the approaching end of this his first voyage. I loved his beauty and his innocence and he accepted my admiration without offence and, alas, without consequence. I realised that I was trapped, not at all unhappily, in a medieval romance of courtly love. This must stop. And yet … it enabled me to savour and express my own most delicate feeling, notably a delicious pain and required me to do absolutely nothing. I was a part of the human race again, more, almost family, for he called me kakak, “big brother” and as a sign of his affection came to rub sea slugs in my face.
“It is minyak gamat,” he explained, “from an island to the north. It cures everything, all wounds, all skin diseases. There is a story.” All good medicines, in Java, come with a story. “Once there was a fisherman who trod on a sea slug and it oozed all over his leg and set so hard he could not get it off. So, in his anger, he took a machete and chopped up all the sea slugs he could find around his boat. When he came back the next day, the pieces had all joined up again, healed and bore no scars. So, people realised the oil from the slug made the body heal itself.” He daily rubbed generous amounts into my wounds in a curiously maternal way. It stank like rotten fish. “What a monkey hurts, a sea slug heals.” For him, it was all part of the neatness and balance of life, a divine design that worked. For me, it was his gentle fingers that
healed.
For the rest of the ship I had ceased to exist, bearing my albatross of shame around my neck. Van Gennep evaded me, seemingly always at the elbow of paterfamilias Niemeyer and complicit in his looks of contempt. From the troubled and guilty eyes of the eldest daughter, I suspected his pursuit might be progressing nicely.
At Singapore, Miss Timms left us with a clutter of old bags and umbrellas, being met by a choir of Chinese children on the quayside who sang Christmas carols in the hot sun in incomprehensible English. “Ha car hear all anger sing, Gory toad a nude porking.”
She expressed her thanks by throwing down handfuls of boiled sweets rather as Cleopatra must have cast down rubies from her scented barge. “I have not quite forgiven you for your conduct in Colombo, Mr Bonnet. At a time when I was in need of your help as a good Samaritan you chose, instead, to go off and become drunk as the Prodigal Son.”
I thought of the many complexities of the story of the monkey and decided that the strength of her compassion greatly exceeded that of her comprehension.
“I sincerely apologise Miss Timms.”
She softened at once. “Well, that being the case, no great harm was done.” She looked down and clasped her handkerchief to her nose. “Do you know, Mr Bonnet, I am suddenly aware of the most appalling smell. I do believe they have stored my luggage next to some fish that was not at all fresh and it has become permanently tainted.”
I had arranged to meet Hamid just beyond the dock gates of the new terminal building and far from the prying eyes of Van Gennep and other Pharisees. It was my first time in a large Southeast Asian city and I was alive to sights, sounds and sensations crowding in on me, the sheer number of people, the density of the throng, the mix of Chinese, Indian and Malay under a European flag. Only later would I learn that what I saw as Malays shivered into a dozen other identities: Buginese, Boyar, Madurese, Dayak and so on.
We spent a happy day visiting the landmarks of the city, crushed side by side in a rickshaw, myself only too aware of the sweat where his thigh pressed against mine. I knew better than to take him to the Raffles Hotel or some other Western haunt where he would feel uncomfortable and eyebrows would be raised against us. The Islamic restaurant in Arab Street met our needs, my first and best mutton biryani, with Hamid soothed by the big halal signs in green tiles and being able to eat with his hands, not inconvenient forks and spoons. Then, back to the rickshaw, Hamid with shining eyes and shaking drips of water from his fingers …
“We cannot go to the animal garden, kakak, to find monkeys for you to fight with. They do not have one here. Instead we must look for cocks. A friend on the ship gave me an address.”
Ah no. I know what you are thinking but you must remember that I was taking my first halting steps in Malay, a sensible tongue, where Hamid’s term, ayam, has no hidden undertones or sordid double entendres, being merely an innocent thing of beak and feathers. I can be quite sure of that since I had not mastered the word and Hamid had to mime it with elaborate beating of elbows and cock-a-doodle-doing so that the rickshaw-puller, pounding between the shafts, stared round in wonder, stumbled and nearly needed the application of sea slugs.
That afternoon was my introduction to the Malay world. It was not what we did or what befell us for we did virtually nothing and suffered no real events but it was the easy manner of our doing and experiencing nothing that struck me at the time, the absence of any sense that we had wickedly wasted time. We left the main road down by the shore, whirred down a smooth dirt track that ran out in sand and stopped at a simple wooden house on stilts, graced by a little carved tracery over the eaves and windows. Walter would no doubt have been able to tell you exactly the ethnicity of the style. Underneath the house was a mess of wood and bicycles, displaced doors and buckets amongst which children swarmed, a sort of attic in reverse. To one side, a man in a sarong was pouring buckets of water over his own head and slapping his chest as though in self-congratulation. Hamid climbed down and called up at the first floor, like Romeo to Juliet, where a fat woman appeared, knotting her sarong and smoothing her hair. She shouted something back and giggled.
“Javanese,” smirked Hamid, with relief. It appeared that we were in a Javanese kampung, a sort of home from home, then. We were welcome and the men were round the back. The Chinese rickshawman sat down on the house ladder and refused all attempts to be paid. We now owed him money and he would not allow this relationship to be so brutally cut. He would sit here until Tuan wanted to go back to the city and then both fares could be paid together. He was, it seemed, now our dedicated and loyal rickshawman, nobly refusing all other offers. The woman brought him cold water to drink from a can that made him gush with sweat and waved us again round the side of the house.
About a dozen men were squatting there under a tree, most old, some young, surrounded by cockerels under airy baskets like cloche hats. Their poses struck me at once. There is a posture you find all over the islands, a hunkering down, legs together, the elbows resting on the knees and flapping as from a loose hinge. It is a pose of relaxation but provokes a tension in the thighs, lumbar region and across the shoulders that I immediately yearned to capture with my charcoal. Hamid indicated the tree, lush and big leafed.
“Wherever you see this tree, there are sailors,” he explained. “It has big seeds that float so they use them to stuff the jackets to keep sailors afloat when they fall in the sea. The jackets get broken. The seeds get out. It is a tree we respect, a holy tree, for it saves the lives of sailors.”
There followed a long conversation in Javanese. The woman, embarrassingly, reappeared to bring a single chair and insisted I sit on it in majestic isolation in the shade while I was ignored by the men who seemed locked in some headshaking disagreement with Hamid.
He turned and spoke in Dutch. “There can be no cockfight today, kakak.” He smiled regret. “It is an unlucky day for fighting.” He gently pressed the hands of the old men. “Tidak apa apa.” No what what. Never mind, it does not matter.
But if there could be no fighting, there was no reason not to examine the birds and they compared them and showed them off with a passion no less intense than that of Vorderman with his Kandinsky and Prokoschka daubings. First, they passed round a magnificent, haughty bird with black plumage, edged at wings and rump with gold feathers like flames, bounced it on the ground, stroked its throat, felt its treading thighs, nodded and Ooh!ed and Aah!ed – or rather Wah!ed – in admiration. Other birds followed, bigger, smaller, some beautiful high strutters, some tawdry street-fighters, arguments raged, cigarettes were flung on the ground, birds squared up to each other – only to be put back under their baskets. They sat a huge cock on my lap and laughed when it pecked me and knocked me off my chair. I laughed too, stayed on the ground and lit a cigarette. Tidak apa apa. No what what. Then, they taunted me with the hundreds of different words for type and size and colour of cocks until my head was spinning, then tested me and stamped and cheered when I got one right by sheer luck. No what what. They soothed me again with cigarettes and coffee. The rickshawman crept round the corner and shyly joined us by slow degrees, an expert, it emerged, on betting on bad cocks. Soon we were all sitting in the kicked-up dust as they explained what to look for in a fighting bird. Checking the tight closure of the anus with poking fingers was, it seemed, a key factor. Hang on, said one, what was that smell of fish? It smelled like dirty women. It must, said one wizened man enthusiastically translated by Hamid, be the white man who spent all his time and money with bad, shameless women and ended up with their smell on him. Best keep him away from the cocks. No what what. I tried to get them back to the birds. They smirked, then sniggered, then fell about. No I could not say that. Burung “bird” was at best ambiguous, at worst a dirty word. It meant … They pointed between their legs. Back to the cocks. What then of breeding? How was that organised? Well, you could not have hens around really strong cocks. If one had been with a hen, it was weakened, lost the will to fight, would be swiftly defeated. If a hen came he
re, with all these cocks, Oh God, it would be torn to bits. So, how was it managed? Where did they get their eggs from?
They screamed and slapped their thighs. Hamid reached over, smacked my hand lightly and giggled. I could not use that word like that right out loud, “eggs”. He blushed. It was a slang word for men’s balls. Had I, finally, no sense of shame at all, no modesty of language?
***
It was only between Singapore and Batavia that I finally began to sketch Hamid. This did not lead, as I half hoped it might, to some new Luigi-like activity. Across from me in the hot, little cabin, he remained warmly distant and I returned to the familiar sensation of viewing my most selfless emotions as something not to be reciprocated but atoned for. And yet to explore the tilt of his nose, the flare of his nostril, the soft angularity of his neck and the spiky halo of his hair was a protracted act of permitted intimacy. I lay awake at night unsure whether I was being privileged, exploited, treated with sweet compassion or wilfully tormented. I was paralysed by fear of losing his regard and thus my own. As St Paul and Miss Timms would have put it, I burned.
The first scattered islands appeared, little clots of sand and palm with a house or two clinging on. I packed my bags, miserable and alone, as we edged through the Buginese sailing fleet of high-nosed vessels with lines of washing where Westerners would have had bunting. I dumped my language notebooks in a grip. Bunting was a Malay slang word meaning “pregnant”. I tightened the straps on my linen. Why did they have so much washing, I wondered, when no one wore any clothes? On all sides, bare bums, neither derisory nor seductive but simply nautical and indifferent, welcomed me to the archipelago.
