Island of Demons

by Nigel Barley

  Clean! That reminded me. I was not entirely happy about the pool. If the new toilet discharged into the river, then it did so upstream from where we were. Consequently, we were bathing in its effluent.

  “Walter,” I said. “That new toilet. Does it flow into the river?”

  He looked, as it seemed to me, shifty. “Of course not, Bonnetchen.” He gestured vaguely. “It’s piped away. Over there somewhere. Behind those trees.” I was not convinced. That would have required a lot of expensive pipework. I did not recall ever seeing so much pipework on site. “But you are well aware that the rivers are always the most convenient places to shit unless there is a pig stye to hand and there is always someone upstream, even here. But you are right, Balinese decency demands that men should be upstream of women and not the other way round”. He turned to Vicki:“You must remember, dear lady, if you are ever obliged to use a pig stye to check that it is empty. Sometimes the swine are so enthusiastic for your present that they gobble it down before you have quite parted company with it. Nasty injuries have been suffered.”

  “In Darmstadt,” Vicki trod water, “they still do not have mains drainage. When I lived there, the municipality delivered this great bucket thing once a week, ‘the can’, and horrible little leather-clad dwarves used to take the full one away, slopping it all down the stairs. God, those were bad times. There was no coal and it was so cold.” She shivered despite the tropical heat. “If you had any sense, the only time you ever left the house was to go to Aunt Dorothy’s.”

  Walter looked puzzled. “You had an Aunt Dorothy there?”

  She laughed. “An Austrian expression, Dummkopf. The biggest pawnshop in Wien is on the Dorotheenstrasse. So, when you needed to pawn something, you simply said you were going to see Aunt Dorothy. Of course, the can was never big enough and large families were reduced to the most appalling straits. Even friends would come round for a cup of tea at the end of the week, having held themselves all day, and pretending they just wanted a pee, dump a hundredweight of turds in your can and fill it up. There were fights over it. People even killed each other. Luckily, most of the city was starving which meant less in, less out.”

  “Thank you Vicki, lovely subject for a painting.”

  She laughed. “Walter, you’ve never told me where you learnt to paint.”

  He ducked down till the water flowed around his shoulders. “Mostly, I taught myself from books – Gaugin, Rousseau, Klee. The only real instruction I had was from Oskar Kokoschka when I was at Hellerau. Do you know him?” She did not. I did. Palsied hysterical strokes, wobbly landscapes painted through steam, a lunatic. He should never be allowed near young people.

  “A great original artist. But what most attracted me to him was his character. You know he had an affair with Alma Mahler when he was little more than a schoolboy? Alma Mater he used to call her – she was very much older than him. It ended in tragedy of course and he went into the army and got wounded and had some sort of breakdown and had this full-sized mannikin made of her, precise in every detail – yes that one too – and he went around with it and spoke to it, lit its cigarettes and even took it to the opera. It was sort of his Bonnetchen.” He fired me a smile to take the sting out of the joke. “The police were always after him for obscenity or something and finally he tired of being professor and resigned by leaving a note with the janitor and he just disappeared. I sometimes think I will do that too.”

  She grinned. “I can only use this line once, so I shall use it now. If you did, I suppose it would mean you were suffering from … Waltschmerz.” We groaned, Walter laughed and splashed her in outrage. I, memorable of the possibility of effluent, forbore.

  “Your book,” I urged. “What will become of it? I mean, how will it end?”

  She looked suddenly serious. “With the mass suicide, the puputan, the Balinese walking into the machine guns, dressed in all their finery. Death is always the only really convincing ending for a book. In this case, it is also the outside world breaking in, the end of the closure that allowed the Balinese to go on being themselves.”

  “Sometimes,” said Walter, leaning back Moses-like into the bullrushes, “I wish I could build a big, high wall around Bali and keep it just as it is. No electricity and cars, no grubby blouses, especially no corrugated iron. Then I realise that God gave Man free will just so that he could make all the wrong decisions and maybe I should not try to be more than God. Leave that to the Dutch – like Bonnetchen.” Before I could object, Vicki leapt in saucily.

  “You mean you would build, not a wall, Walterl, but just a fence, a fence that you can sit on right alongside Rudi”. Then I splashed her.

  In A Tale from Bali, that was the result of all this, the story is introduced by a selfless Dutch medical man, Dr Fabius, – her acknowledgement to Walter – with a whole rigmarole about this being her retelling of his yellowed version, found in a trunk, of the life story of an ordinary illiterate Balinese. The multiple layering is an unblushing theft from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. As Vicki always said with her bright smile, “Ideas are free!” The names are all plucked from the household and environs, Alit, Oka (the Covarrubiases’ landlord). The handsome, dancing, juvenile lead, Raka, I suspect, owes more than a small debt to our abused friend and Walter’s favourite, Rawa, whom she naturally saw perform. Dull, downtrodden, unimaginative Pak, through whose deeply conventional and constipated mouth Bali speaks its truths, alone seems to have no obvious model. There is no mention of me, of course, but the book does explore love in its many forms, a discussion to which I may claim to have contributed in some small measure. When I later came to read it, I found it quite thrilling, totally professional, packed with Walter’s rehydrated researches, a thoroughly good piece of knitting, yet bathed in an oddly relaxed homoerotic warmth, which was, I suppose, but an honest reflection of her actual experience in Bali. Or perhaps it was just effluent.

  12

  “Walter, I’m simply dying for a Baboon’s Arse,” Margaret Mead gasped, wiping her brow. They were exhausted after a day of mountain trekking, being in the midst of Walter’s tour-cum-assault course. I liked it when she used words like that. With her New England vowels and her first husband having been a preacher, she always sounded as if she were speaking from a pulpit and we savoured the contradiction. Walter nodded and rewound the phonograph. It was playing something syncopated and irritating that the McPhees had brought back from Europe.

  “And you shall have one! I rather thought that might be the case, so I have some cooling in the river. The boys will fetch one up.” A Baboon’s Arse, I should explain, was a cocktail survival from Noel’s visit – tinned grapefruit juice, cold jasmine tea, whisky and a shot of grenadine to give the appropriate glowing red. At least, that was the canonical formula, though, as with all cocktails, the contents of a particular batch depended on what happened to be at the back of the kitchen cupboard. In the unlikely event of polite society, it was referred to by its academic-sounding alternative title, a BA.

  I had returned from a swift visit to Holland to sort out family affairs, following the death of my father. It had left me with my own cocktail of poisonous emotions – pain from all the things that touched me and guilt about the many that did not. With Margaret’s arrival, it was as if the scouts and light skirmishers of anthropology had been suddenly augmented with heavy armour. I always saw Margaret as a kind of tank, smashing down all opposition and when she turned to talk to you, it was as if a grey metal turret were swivelling and bringing some great gun to bear. She often wore that peevish expression on her face that professional women have. She was in her mid-thirties, dumpy, big-chinned, with a pudding-basin hairstyle and dressed, as I always remember her, in one of those ghastly, wrapover frocks she wore on fieldwork, based on a hospital smock but with two great flat pockets in the front that she used to carry notebooks like tombstones. She always claimed they were conceived out of simple practicality – easy to wash, immune to the fluctuations of girth that fieldwork provoked – but it was cl
ear that she yearned to have some ritual mark of her fieldwork condition, like a surgeon’s gown and mask, with which she could enter the sacerdotal sphere and bring her rare specialist expertise to bear upon a comatose, but grateful subject. Or maybe she just saw herself as gravid with knowledge. Those notebooks were a form of intimidation that she used on her human as well as her anthropological contacts, whipping them out to note down any remark, no matter how trivially made, that she felt required further consideration and rebuttal. Weeks later, she might suddenly come up and say, anent an observation long forgotten, “What you said about the weather is wrong for the following seven reasons” and reel them off. The fact that she was usually right, made this no more endearing. She and Jane McPhee had clearly been trained in the same school. I had once come across the two of them in Walter’s sitting room, having an everyday conversation and both taking notes.

  With her, was her husband, the British anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, freshly acquired in marriage in Singapore – without, one hopes, the deployment of the fieldwork smock. They had planned to marry in Batavia but the Dutch had frigidly disapproved of her two divorces and refused, seeing themselves as sticking Dutch fingers in a dyke that held back a wave of American immorality. They had done the same to Charlie just before, robbing us of another visit from him and his latest child bride. Margaret was a dumpy five-footer, Greg a lanky six foot five. Together, they looked like a comedy double act. He was big-boned and featured, when he sat, all knees and feet, with a resonant voice and hair like an irrelevance and seemed more in awe than in love, for Margaret was a woman of firm opinions in all matters, whereas Greg was possessed of the greater gift of doubt.

  “What will you have, Greg?”

  “A beer, no … maybe a whisky.”

  “Make that well watered.” This from Margaret. The McPhees, I noted, like myself, were simply offered small Arses without the option. Jane was all agog at the presence of academic eminence, willingly submitting to direction, hanging on Margaret’s every word, trying not to curtsey. Greg sighed and said nothing but made a face as of a man suffering a twinge of toothache.

  “So, then,” Margaret summed up, “it seems, Walter – would you turn down that music? People can’t hear me talk …” He, too, made the tooth-gnashing grimace that he had learned from the grinling gibbons but meekly crouched and complied, then spoiled the effect by returning to his chair with a knuckle-dragging monkey walk “… that we have a choice as far as fieldwork location goes. We can set up shop in a town in on one of the big, fancy kingdoms with all the ritual and music and architecture and craftsmen and have a nice house and easy communications and supplies. Or, we can pick a highland area, somewhere like Bayung Gede we saw today, and be cold and hungry and get sick and work on natives who wear rags and are despised and maybe unfriendly and we’d have no way of getting in and out.” Walter grinned thinly and did a monkey shrug, as if to say he had not made it that way but that’s the way it was. She exchanged swift glances with Greg. “Well, I think as anthropologists there’s no contest. We naturally go for the second. It sounds like paradise.”

  “But why?” To me it seemed crazy.

  “Scientific anthropology is not meant to be easy,” Margaret said with relish and made her chin even larger. “It’s like the way they taught me back in Sunday school. In the field, the toughest option is probably the right one, the crude not the cute, the steep and rugged pathway not the green pastures that some go for.” She looked meaningfully at Walter. “We want an unspoiled location, no schools, missions, tourists with as much pre-Hindu data as possible. The great thing is to avoid distracting events. What we want is not events but pure structure so that we can study the configuration of their culture and how it interacts with their personality.” She looked around, seeing the devil of green pastures in Walter’s furniture and cute paintings, looking for his concealed and distracting events. “What about a secretary?”

  “I have a man for you: Made Kaler.” Jesus. How many Kalers were there? Nyoman Kaler’s brother? No wait. Balinese names did not work that way. “Kaler” was a common enough name anyway. He ticked off qualifications on his fingers. “He’s been to secondary school in Surabaya, speaks and writes Dutch, Malay and Balinese with even a bit of English . He’s really bright and reliable. The only problem will be getting him to stay in some hellhole when, like all Balinese with an education, he’d expect to move to town and buy a pair of long trousers and a chiming clock. You’ll have to pay him well.”

  “What about a house?”

  “I’ll get my carpenter to build you one. It could take a week or two but you’ll need that long to get your papers sorted out and do some deal on the land. They’re bound to send you up to the Resident to be cleared. The people here won’t want to take the responsibility.”

  “What about house workers?”

  “I’ve got a couple coming to see you tomorrow. They’ll be here at about ten.” Margaret was impressed, despite herself. This was too easy. She was not suffering enough to make her data seem valuable. Too many events and nor enough structure. She looked unhappily on as Walter did a gibbering monkey dance – not kecak, pure, pre-Hindu monkey – of triumph and then shuffled over, arm-swinging – to chink Arses with her and turn the music back up.

  McPhee turned to me and whispered. “Thank you for looking after Sampih.” Oh Christ. I had forgotten all about him. I didn’t even know where he was.

  “Did you find him changed?” I asked cautiously. He glowed like a tedious pigeon-fancier suddenly allowed to talk about his hobby.

  “Marvellous. He’s come on so far with Mario’s teaching and Rosa, before she left, was a great help. She managed to get him interested in politics as an outlet for all that rage. He now realises his enemy is not just his father but the whole structure of world capitalism.” I wondered how he would set about killing that.

  “Ah! Er … is that entirely a good thing?”

  “Absolutely!” His eyes glowed. “Thanks to us, he has found himself. He talks about organising something like the Pita Maha for dancers, a sort of union that would break the control of the rajahs and the aristocrats and control the new sponsors, the tourists. Dance can become a weapon of social change. Even Jane is keen on the idea.”

  “Have you talked to Walter about this?”

  He shook his head truculently. “Walter’s got nothing to do with this. You know how old-fashioned he can be. This is the future.”

  I had just had a bit of trouble with Pita Maha and the future. One of the duties wished on me by Walter’s sloth was the administration of the museum shop. It had done very nicely, bringing the tourist market and the artists together while avoiding bruising direct contact that could devalue the work they were producing. But while I had been away, behind my back, there had been some sort of campaign in the Press, alleging the incompatibility of the museum and the art business. I could not quite discover who was behind it all but I suspected the dealers in Java and Denpasar who saw valuable profits flowing back to the artists as opposed to their own ready pockets. Official pressure had been brought to bear and the shop had been closed, leaving Walter’s aquarium as the only big, local outlet. The effect on the artists’ income had been disastrous. Rolf Neuhaus had been treasurer of Pita Maha at the time and I went to the aquarium to find out just what happened. It was worse than I could ever have imagined.

  All the flags and Trara had naturally been put back in their box but the shop there was flourishing and I watched a charabanc-load of tourists passing through, snapping up the most ghastly fish daubings There were acceptable Pita Maha works on sale alongside but there was something odd about them too. Round the back, I found a sort of workshop with half a dozen men working away peacefully in an open pavilion, sitting and chatting as is the Balinese way, while painting the horrors I had seen round the front. The foreman, a mature man with a charming moustache, came forward to greet me. The others rested on their arms and smiled as I passed round cigarettes and asked casually, “Who is it th
at you work for?”

  “You speak our language? That is good. Tuan Rolf.” Yes. They all nodded. And what was it they were doing there with that black and white painting? I had seen it at the Pita Maha the week before.

  “Oh that is from the painters at Batuan where they only paint in black and white but Tuan Rolf says the tourists like coloured paintings better so we colour them in for the Batuan men.

  And in the shop, I observed, I had noticed that the names of artists were painted on the works but it seemed to me they were the wrong names. Perhaps there had been a mistake, some confusion?

  “Oh no. That is no mistake. The artists, of course, are like us, simple men who cannot write, so Tuan Rolf writes the names for them and tourists like some names, which are lucky names, and do not like others so he always chooses the most lucky names to write so they are happy.” There was no dissimulation. In Bali no one has copyright or authorship. For Balinese, as for Vicki, ideas were free and objects and music were made together in groups. A signature was just another part of the design that made people happy. Now, I must drink some coffee, black and cloyed with sugar, to make them happy. I settled, sipped. This work, was it good work?

  “Oh Yes! Much better than being fishermen which is what we did before. That was very hard and dangerous and sometimes we even enjoy the painting. There is a kind of satisfaction in it. It is best when I am allowed to use red paint but mostly, I only do the yellow bits.”

  Look, I told them, they must come to my classes. They could learn to paint better. They could use all colours. I would teach them in Ubud. It would cost them nothing. They giggled and blushed and shook their heads.