by Nigel Barley
I dispensed coffee, milk, sugar like a chemist.
“Who is Sampih?”
A haunted truculence settled at the corners of his mouth. “Sampih is my friend.” He seemed to expect me to challenge him. I said nothing. It is often the best way to get people to talk – not that I cared much either way. It was getting late. I had other fish to fry. I was still a young man. The fires on which I would fry those fish still burnt hot in those days. “You know the river at the bottom of the hill? A nasty, dangerous river, prone to flash floods if there’s rainfall up in the mountains. I was down there one day and suddenly the level started rising. I made the mistake of trying to get back across and found myself stranded in the middle on a rock with this great roaring sound coming from upstream. I thought I was a goner when this little kid popped up, leapt across and grabbed me by the hand and led me over, showing me where the stepping stones were under the water. Seconds later, this great wall of water came round the corner and crashed down right where I’d been standing. I looked for the kid to say thank you but he’s just run off. That was Sampih.” He sipped coffee, choked, went into a coughing fit and soothed it with another cigarette. “I looked for him, asked around. You know the way, here, that boys run around in gangs and feed where they can like flocks of birds. Well, finally they directed me to this little shack down on a poor scrap of land where his family lived. You can’t imagine the filth and poverty of the place.”
People were always telling me how many things I couldn’t imagine, whereas I am actually rather good at imagining things. I could imagine all sorts of things between McPhee and this boy. The story of their meeting sounded to me rather like shopgirl fiction.
“The father’s a bully, a total moron. The mother’s a slut. They greeted me with all that smiling courtesy. You know the way they are. When I turned up, Sampih ran off again. Anyway, I explained what had happened, gave the father some money. I don’t doubt it went on booze and gambling. But then a few days later, I saw Sampih down by the river. It was like coaxing a dog that’s been beaten. If you moved suddenly or raised a hand, he would snarl or cower. I had to put cigarettes down on a rock and back away. Poor little sod had never known a kind word in his life.” McPhee looked as if he needed a kind word from me. I gave him none, not greatly liking the way I saw this heading. It was too late for the lapangan kota now. My evening was quite spoiled.
“How old is this child?”
He shrugged. “Nobody knows. The mother says four. The father says thirteen. Balinese don’t have ages. You know that. They don’t think that way. What difference does it make anyway? So – back to the point – little by little, he got used to me then one day he just came to the house and silently walked around looking at things, touching them. The cook gave him some food and that was it. He came again, sat outside, then on the verandah, then in the kitchen. Soon he was working for us, helping out with the cooking and so on. He was the brightest, happiest little fellow you ever saw, so curious about everything. Jane was against it from the first. You know her first husband adopted a child in Tahiti? Well that ended rather badly.” I poured more coffee, spinsterishly equitable. “Then I came back one day and caught the boys playing one of the gamelan records – well I say ‘caught’ but they have always been so careful with them that it was allowed – and there was Sampih on his knees doing this wild kebyar dance with the boys laughing and clapping along. All right, it was rough and crude but full of fantastic energy. Of course, they all scuttled off right away and a professional torturer couldn’t have got Sampih to talk about it. But the boys told me he was crazy about dancing and, of course, I got to thinking of my own beginnings as a musician … It must be the same with Walter and those kids he teaches how to paint.”
“Yes,” I assented. “Except that he somehow dumped all that on me.”
He looked up, put his hand on mine. “That’s because there’s something about you that inspires confidence, Rudi.”
I was touched – literally, metaphorically. I gaped. I, myself, do not receive many words of kindness. “Really?”
He returned, unheeding, to his story. “So I offered to find him a teacher, to arrange for lessons. He said nothing for three days and then came to me and said that if it would please Tuan, then he would do it. I rather liked that. There is nothing harder to bear than someone else’s gratitude. So Nyoman Kaler came and took him on but they didn’t get on. He is old and pedantic and – for a dancer – totally inflexible. Sampih could never put up with that. But now I’ve found him another teacher, a woman, someone he likes, a retired legong dancer in Bedulu. I saw him give his first performance the other night. He’s blossoming. There’s a fantastic talent there. But the thing is … I have to go back to the States with Jane for a while. We have some issues. I need to get back to composing. Here, I get nothing done.” He gestured futilely. “I need someone to keep an eye on him, to keep the teacher up to scratch, to make sure she gets paid and that Sampih is properly looked after. There is money in an account in Denpasar. I thought that you …”
“Me!” I positively screeched. “But I detest children. They should only handled by experts – like corrosive waste. “Why don’t you ask Walter? I’m sure Sampih would adore Walter.”
He sighed. “Walter is not reliable. Where is he now? Run off to Cambodia or somewhere. Oh, he would be kind and mean well enough but once the novelty of Sampih wore off he would just forget to feed him and he would run wild – just like Walter’s animals – and that can’t happen again. There are fewer distractions in your life.” Meaning I was deathly dull and had nothing better to do and would never displace McPhee from the boy’s affections. “I hoped you might do it, not for me, or even for Sampih, but because – in some way – you feel you owe Bali something.” He looked at me evenly, judgementally, like my mother reading a school report. There it was, the familiar tolling of that old bell – guilt, guilt. I would never be free of it. I groaned. He saw that my armour had been pierced and worried at the wound. “When you were younger, wasn’t there something you secretly wanted more than anything but didn’t dare pursue?” Of course there was. There always was with men like us. But mostly it was fairly brutish desires of the flesh that had nothing to do with cryptoterpsichoreanism. Then I remembered my art, my father, my mother.
“Look,” I said. “I’m not taking him on sight unseen, a pig in a poke. I want to meet him first. Then, this has to be at a distance. He lives in Bedulu. I just act as your agent and this is strictly between the two of us.”
It was as if I had waved a magic wand. The worry slipped from his face. He leapt to his feet, hugged me. “He’s outside in the car.”
“What?”
“Well I couldn’t bring him in here could I?”
Had he been so sure of me? It seemed outrageous to leave the boy out there, on his own for so long, like a parcel on a seat, but probably he would not mind. He would just switch off, as I had seen the people here do so often, and go to sleep. Sure enough, when we arrived at the car, he was curled up, dreaming of something, whimpering under his breath and twitching like a dog chasing rabbits. A perfume of frangipani hovered above him like an aromatic halo. He looked small and vulnerable and deeply angelic. Responding to the crunch of our feet on the gravel, he opened an eye and sat up, looked around as a dancer does when first stepping on stage, “looking for danger”.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he growled, tucked his hands under his armpits and stuck out his lower lip. He looked at me with the hostile eyes of a small, wild creature, peering from the depths of its burrow at an enemy. Sampih was truly the most shockingly foul-mouthed Balinese I had ever met and his Low Balinese was several degrees lower than any I had ever heard before. In a culture that treasures the smooth facade, the absence of confrontation and egotism, McPhee had found the surliest, angriest, most arrogant little demon imaginable. He turned to me with that stupid, enchanted expression that one often encounters on the faces of deluded parents.
“Isn’t he cute?” he a
sked, laughing, one hand on the door. It reminded me of the way Balinese laugh at funerals.
***
It came as no surprise that Walter adored aircraft. They were noisy, expensive and impractical, just like his menagerie at home. I had been alerted to his arrival by the wonders of modern radio-telegraphy which became less modern the closer it came to Ubud, its final incarnation being the skinny youth in the peaked hat who cycled from the post office. A message, naturally, took longer to travel the few hundred meters from the post office to the palace than from Batavia to Ubud. Sometimes, it could take days.
“He’s coming back,” he announced, yawning. “Flying back tomorrow, your big brother, Tuan Piss. If you can’t sign your name, put your thumbprint here.” I signed with a pencil plucked from behind his ear and tipped him a coin that he stowed inside the other ear. He was headed for the palace kitchens to rest and re-invigorate himself but, as usual, delayed – one foot on the pedals – to favour me with his views on the world. “No good will come of all this flying,” he announced. “It’s not natural. How does it work anyway?” He settled to fishing a cigarette from his breast pocket and lighting it with a match flamboyantly struck on the handlebars with a conductor’s gesture.
“I don’t know. I don’t know how bicycles work. I don’t know how matches work. Why should I understand aeroplanes?”
He shrugged. “I thought white men were supposed to know these things.” I felt a pang of guilt. Now I was being a bad white man. No, wait. I was an artist. This was not my job. “The pedanda priest says it will bring disaster down on us.” This was news.
“What’s so terrible about flying?”
He yawned smoke and stretched. “He says the planes fly over Gunug Agung, over the heads of the gods, and carry ordinary people over the heads of Brahmanas, so that the whole country is polluted and the gods insulted. He says there’ll be a dreadful reckoning, sickness, plagues of mice, barren women, a volcanic eruption. We will be attacked by great demons who will tear us apart. It will be a time of Rangda and Kala Rahu.” He listed the consequences with relish. Young men regard any change from dull normality as exciting, therefore desirable. “What do you think?”
“I think you should get back to the post office and under cover before it all starts or ask them for a bigger hat.” He barked a laugh of worldly cynicism and cycled off, knees pointed out, deliberately wobbling from side to side just for the sheer joy of it.
I was there, down by the beach, on time, which the plane was not. In those days, the world was still very big and defied timetables and flightplans and the Bali run was classed as a “pioneer route”, which translated as higher prices and even more irregular service. It was a hot, windless day and the windsock hung limp with exhaustion. A couple of military machines were parked up one end of the strip outside a basic radio hut, its roof decorated with a spider’s web of wires, before which a couple of men in uniform demonstrated their mastery of football, kicking one listlessly back and forth. In the distance, stood a large waringin tree overshadowing a shed, where, I deduced, McPhee’s gamelan was stored, together with his dream of saving Western music from its current impasse. A man was, most unBalinesically, playing with a tawny dog, throwing sticks into the sea and pretending to chase it as it pranced around, stiff-legged and refused to give it back. Those meeting the flight had gathered to marinate in their own juices under the trees, amongst a litter of vehicles, in attitudes of despair. Balinese beach idlers and little boys formed a sort of snack-munching chorus behind, curious to see this new thing drop from the sky. A man, reluctant to waste a crowd, had set up a satay stall in hope of their patronage. In front, stood some assorted white women who complained bitterly of the meaty smoke, a junior clerk from the governor’s office, Father Scruple who ignored me – I was doubtless classed as a lost soul – and a man from the post office who was coughing anxiously into a handkerchief and examining the product. In the early years, flights were subsidised by lucrative government mail contracts and the posts made much of the fact that we were all dancing to their tune.
At length, there came an irritating buzzing and, far out to sea, a small black dot appeared, turned gradually to white, then acquired blue highlights and the little, twin-engined KNILM Fokker circled the airfield suspiciously. Finally reassured, it came in low from the sea, shot past us all in a shower of dust and sand and roared to the far end of the strip, gradually calming itself before returning, bumping over the compacted earth and stopping with a definitive clatter and a fart of blue gas. Inside were two small, white faces wearing unmistakeable expressions of relief.
As the propellor juddered to a halt, a crowd of Balinese rushed forward, cheering and racing with each other, pulling open the door and slotting a tubular steel ladder into place to begin tumbling luggage from the rear. On this airstrip, Western time ruled. The passengers were all male and clambered awkwardly down, sweaty bums turned to the world. One had a newspaper tucked under his arm with a headline reading “America repeals Prohibition”. A second rush, this time of wives who kissed their returning husbands openly on the mouth with satay-flavoured lips to embarrassed Balinese giggles. Then, finally Walter, all refurbished – new suit, hat, shoes, reclaiming matching tan suitcases, doubtless Bärbli’s bounty – and shaking hands in sturdy male companionship.
“Bit of a rough flight,” he confided as though a seasoned flier gripping a pipe between his teeth. “A storm over Java. Threw us all over the sky and one motor kaputt. Most invigorating.”
Over his shoulder, I saw Scruple greet a thin subaltern and have his boys trundle a large trunk swiftly over to a waiting glossily episcopal car, engine left running.
“Looks like he got replacements for those seized bibles.”
Walter gazed over. “Bibles? That’s nothing, Bonnetchen,” he smirked and tapped his sleek attaché case. “Wait till you see what I’ve got in my luggage.”
A couple of hours later, we were sat at the forest giant table. The house buzzed with happy activity, Mas cooking to fatten up poor thinned-down Walter, the boys – intoxicated with little gifts and the payment of salary arrears – fair yodelling their sire’s return. Even the cockatoo had become hysterical and been forbidden the house until it returned to a state fit for human society.
“Angkor Wat was sublime, so primitive, so purely Hindu. You would have to spend a month there to see it in all its glory, these vast ruins with the forest trees thrusting up through them. It seems that they were built by the Sailendra dynasty that also constructed Borobodur in Java. I must ask Stutterheim about it. The dancing was grossly inferior to our own on Bali, a mere exercise in how long you can stand on one leg, though the costumes were stunning. Saigon was a thoroughly pointless French city. Do not,” he instructed, as though I were about to pack my bags, “waste your time on it.”
“So how was the wedding?”
Walter drank rich Java coffee, blew smoke from a Sumatra Cum Laude cigar and stretched his legs with relish in a familiar chair, the things a man does to reclaim possession of his personal place.
“Didn’t happen. The whole thing was a damp squid. Bärbli was still underage and the consul refused to perform the service without permission of her parents. He was a very unimaginative man. So much Wirrwarr. ‘Call him up then,’ she said. ‘I’ll pay.’ Can you imagine, phoning from Bangkok to New York just to fight with your family down the line at so many dollars per second? They yelled at each other for an hour and then her father obviously saw she wasn’t backing down and agreed that they could get married as long as they did it in Paris in a proper way. So I got all dressed up for nothing. But …” He opened the attaché case and swivelled it round so that I could view the interior, “it wasn’t entirely in vain.”
“Is this a joke?”
It was crammed, as in parody of a bootlegger’s suitcase, with banknotes, but not crisp packets of fresh dollar bills, neatly stacked, as in the movies. Instead, it bulged with heaped mounds of old Indies notes, higgledy-piggledy, all colours – red,
green, orange – and all states of besmirched decay – some torn, some folded – like swept-up leaves in autumn. A windfall.
“No joke. Bärbli wants me to build a house here for her.” He hefted a handful of notes aloft and let them flutter back onto the surface. Some were worn so thin you could see right through them, a metaphor of currency depreciation. “It will be the most beautiful house of all and she simply must have a pool.” He threw a second fistful up in the air, then laughingly upended the entire suitcase. “Enough to pay off all my debts. Enough to live without having to produce paintings against the clock with Stutterheim standing over me with a whip. Finally, I won’t have to work all day, every day, like a slave, like a dog as I have for donkey’s years, which is a coon’s age, which …”
