Island of Demons

by Nigel Barley

  Van Diemen’s final address was predictably nasty. What was at stake here, we were informed, was not the fate of one bohemian but the honour of Dutch rule and the peace and dignity of Queen Wilhelmina. The Dutch were in Bali as protective big brothers to preserve their colonial children from precisely such acts of exploitation and violence. Much had been made of the acceptability of such perverse and abhorrent relationships to the Balinese but that could not be the issue here. This was not a case to be tried according to local law. This was a matter of the Penal Code to which all were equally subject, from the highest to the lowest, Dutch or foreigner. It was clear that, in at least one proved case, established by science and government documentation, a partner of the accused had been under twenty-one, and thus a child, and the full power of the law must be brought to his defence. Failure to do so, would be to set at risk the whole civilization for which the administration and decent Dutch folk had toiled ceaselessly for hundreds of years. He asked for a sentence of not less than four years with hard labour. I gasped. Those about me clapped thunderously and smiled encouragement through hard eyes. I saw that what was to be punished here was not immorality so much as pleasure in the world and Walter’s trusting improvidence. De Jonghe yawned. He, at least, appeared incapable of fuelling sustained moral outrage. He lacked the energy.

  Walter looked pale. The words “hard labour” seemed to have shaken him badly. Koch rose and addressed Their Honours. “Walter Spies,” he informed them, “stands before you” – actually he sat – “not as a predator but a victim, beguiled by the lethal charm of the Indies. Much has been made by the prosecution of the irrelevance of the supine Balinese attitude to sexual aberration. I say it lies at the very core of this case. You, yourselves, know the threat to your children of the effeminacy and complaisance of the people of these enchanted isles. Walter Spies came to the Indies as a fine young man, steadfast in his own moral rectitude, a rectitude that is blasted, for his very manhood has been fatally undermined by his own romantic sensibility.” In other words, Resem had seduced him with dark arts, spun him round with a web of symbolism in which he had become fatally entangled. But Walter was not just assailed by oriental effeminacy, the enervating heat of these torrid latitudes had further sapped his moral fibre. “Alone and isolated in his remote hill station, amongst the bare and arid mountains, far from the comforts of a superior culture and stunned, day after day, by the rays of the pitiless sun, he made the fatal mistake of allowing himself a too great intimacy with the local people. All distinction was lost, the civilising mission of the West was thrown into reverse and he watched, with horror and disgust, his own degeneration into a Balinese. Walter Spies is a man deserving, not of your condemnation, but your deepest pity!”

  ***

  “It’s not the nine months in jail that I mind so much as Surabaya,” Walter pouted. “As you will have seen, it is a brutal city, lacking in charm, a Javanese Hamburg.” It was six months since I had set eyes on him. He was being brave of course. He had been brave on the jetty in Buleleng – “Take a terrible revenge for me. Bonnetchen. Paint a portrait of Smits’s wife” – protecting me from my own lachrymose and sentimental response to the judges’ verdict, the sight of him being shipped off in chains, the prison uniform too small and tight, as cut to native size. An acute visual metaphor. A painter thinks in metaphors and scenes. Absurdly, as I watched him being rowed out to the dirty ferry, I had recalled the sight of my own mother weeping as she sent me off alone on the tram, on my first day at infants’ school, talismanically clutching the little bag she had sewn for me. Dr Behrens had been there, full of apology for his testimony at the trial, pressing quinine and Collis Browne’s medicinal compound into his hands, Walter endlessly forgiving. “The best thing about jail is that it does cut down on the number of casual visitors, just wandering in. I have finally been able to ruthlessly organise my social diary.” He was gaunt, had been ill, lost weight. My gift of cigarettes lay unregarded on the bed – no wait, that had been Denpasar. My hamper of food now lay broken open and ravaged, tins and jars scattered like jewels over the torn sheet. He must be ravenous.

  “You are hungry, Walter? Oh my God! Aren’t they feeding you?” He paused, a ham gripped in each hand.

  “What? Food? The food’s no problem, Bonnetchen, boring but enough. I am as happy as a worm in bacon and Mrs Schweinstrumpf of the art circle sends me in a hot dinner every Sunday.” So he was not set beyond the reach of those that loved him. “But these I can trade with the white guards for canvas and paint!” He scrabbled through the debris, seized a jar of apricots and held it up to the light like a man appraising a diamond and his face was lit up in its golden hues, as if by stained glass in some pre-Raphaelite depiction of religious conversion. He seemed, then, to my relief, to have settled in, found his feet.

  “Did you know that some 250 men have been arrested in this affair?” Not – I almost added in shame – myself.

  “But of course, Bonnetchen! What do you think? Most of them are here. I saw Goris yesterday. The governor is a decent man and lets us all exercise together. I never realised there were so many of the faith, but – as I kept pointing out vainly at my trial – I am not an accountant. Why does no one ever listen to me? Can you imagine? Over two hundred homosexual men locked up together, packed four to a cell with nothing to do but lie in their beds and sweat – all in an effort to make them change their ways? It is like shutting up hundreds of alcoholickers together in a brewery, without water, so they will repent. The governor, poor man, is beside himself, fearing the happenings will get out in the newspapers and he will be transferred to a penal colony. I understand now why they call those places penal colonies.” He made it sound rather jolly as if, in thirty years’ time they would be holding camp little reunion dinners – from which I should, quite naturally, be excluded. Even in the world of aberrance, I was a deviant. I glared into his grin and looked around jealously.

  “Do you share this cell with anyone?” It was a very nice cell, clean, dry, airy, absolutely five-star. Only one narrow bed.

  “Good lord no. The chief warder is a friend of a friend and allows himself to be persuaded that I need space for my paintings. I have, of course, promised him one.” The far end was an impromptu studio, an overstated film set of wild artistic disorder, several completed canvases, another in progress, paint left lying about, brushes sluttishly unwashed. My own studio was monastic and uncluttered, an aid to visual clarity. Normally, I deplored such hysterical mess in artists but, at last, he had found the solution to his disgusting sloth and I resisted an urge to tidy up. I walked over and gazed down on the work, eagerly. I had never been allowed in his studio before. I was appalled.

  “Yes,” he said. He came up behind me and I could feel his breath on my neck, smell his tobacco smoke. “Completely new! I have cleared out all the old rubbish and been reborn! You know how they put on bottles, ‘Shake before use’? Well I have been well and truly shaken – out of my old complacency, my way of looking at things. I am finally ready for use. This is the first painting of my new life!”

  It was huge and glowed with colours torn from the carapaces of iridescent beetles, metallic reds, blues, greens, a blue-black sky, harsh yellow light and orange ground. It showed cavorting creatures, half dog, half cow, all with the same staring human face, atop a wavering neck, ripped, as if by powerful searchlights – Pita Maha – from the darkest shades of nightmare. There was a suggestion of undersea currents, of the carrion monsters that feed on the bleached bodies of the drowned, a contrapuntal ordering that sneered at order itself, a diseased mentality. It was like a child playing with its own excrement.

  “It came to me while I was ill. I had perhaps taken too much of Collis-Browne’s opium and I saw with a wonderful clarity that painting and music can – must – be ultimately the same, that their rhythms and harmonies, ornamentations and dissonances are all in the same idiom. Reality and mood, I have flung away. The painting speaks only to itself. Its time is internal as in music. Its image
s exist only as variations of other images it contains. It is its own reality, trapped within the prison of the frame so that I retain distance from it. For the first time, I feel that it painted itself through me, that all I had to do was listen and look, just as the Balinese live their lives as an expression of a greater holiness. It is art, complete, almost an abstract formula, not art as a sweet to be sucked to compensate for the bitterness of life, but life itself. I call it Scherzo fuer Blechinstrumente, ‘Scherzo für Tin Instruments’. It’s promised to Stokowski.” He seemed to expect me to say something.

  “Brass,” I corrected. “In English they call it brass when it’s a musical instrument, tin when it’s a cheap toy.” Red’ kein Blech’, I thought. “Don’t talk rubbish” – what Greg would call “tommyrot”. “Extraordinary,” I enthused, laying it aside. “It needs to be thought about, I can see that. Er … What else have you got?”

  15

  “Perhaps I should have mentioned it before but it didn’t really seem necessary. Anyway, at the time you had plenty of other things to worry about. I did what I could. It was all no good.” He walked to the balcony and looked down on the river, drawing, perhaps, some comfort from its Heraclitean continuities. “It wasn’t,” I urged, “the Balinese. You know that. Behind it all was Smit. Dutch, not Balinese, ingratitude.” He had been expelled from the Pita Maha by a vote of the committee. I had been the only dissenting voice. The others had been leaned on, very heavily. I had written a memorandum of protest. He turned back into the room.

  “It doesn’t matter. It was a foolish thing. Administration, committees, not my thing at all. Still … our own children have a special power to wound us.” He looked up at the wall. It was Sobrat’s first painting in the new style. How many years ago now? One of his chicks. Now mine.

  “That,” I said, pointing out the point pointlessly, “is why he did it.” God, I was turning into my mother. “He is basking in your unhappiness. Anyway, that is not why you are in a bad mood. It is the review.” In the midst of all the gushing, ecstatic reception of the dance book he had produced with Beryl, in an obscure Dutch journal, was a single review that was critical. “It is not even about you, doubtless an old enemy of hers paying her back. You know how bitchy academics are.”

  Oleg shuffled in and served coffee. Oleg because little Resem had gone. It had been inevitable. Otherwise, a way would have been found to make him suffer, to bring him to grief. He was getting married. Someone had bought him a ricefield. He was happy. New staff were now quizzed about their age. It cast a shadow of mistrust over the house, a whiff of premeditation amongst the carefree scent of the dangling orchids.

  “It is of no importance. After that prison, it is simply so good to spread my legs and stretch my wings.” He sat and started painting again at the forest-giant table, exquisite filligreed studies of dragonflies, stretched and spread, viewed through a magnifying lens and the glare of the Enlightenment vision, correct to the last hair and mandible, exquisite in their clarity. The opposite of his avowed mission as stated in the Surabaya cell. “Painting,” he now announced, “is inseparable from science. It is simplicity with nothing unrealised or clouded by passion.” This had all been triggered by a visit to the Botanical Gardens in misty Bogor, the flattering attention of Director Lieftinck.

  “But what about art and music, Scherzo für Blechinstrumente?”

  He turned, tiny brush in hand and looked at me in exasperation. “Because various things come out of one head does not mean they have to be all same. That is the mistake that Margaret makes. You remember her telling us of places where it was normally expected that a man would take on several completely different sexual identities in the course of a single life? Well, why not the same but simultaneously? And not just with sex but also art. Margaret is obsessed with sex.”

  There was a timid knocking, more of a scratching really, at the door. Someone said, “Yes please?” and a head appeared to peer at us. Walter rose.

  “Mr Kasimura? How unexpected. Please come in.” Kasimura, the Japanese photographer from Denpasar. One forgets how many Japanese there were around, in the Indies, in those days. Most of the technicians, dentists, photographers were Japanese. Kaaimura was a thin, embittered man, locked in warfare with the Chinese merchant, Lee King, who held a monopoly in Western canned goods and had organised some sort of a boycott against him for what his kinsmen were suffering in Manchuria under the poking bayonets of Kasimura’s fellow countrymen. Lee King had even set up a nephew in rivalrous business, with all the latest painted backdrops, including a sensational version of a transatlantic liner with real electric chandelier. Red-faced and panting, Kasimura was gripping the handlebars of a heavy iron bicycle that he appeared to want to bring in with him.

  “Perhaps the bicycle would be better outside. It will be quite safe.” Kasimura bowed and hissed and complied, shuffling off cracked shoes to enter in bare feet. “Please sit down. Some coffee? But I see you are hot. Perhaps some water first? We have a whole river.” Oleg was called, came, disposed all smoothly. There were various ways of dealing with the subject of Walter’s recent imprisonment. Some ignored it. Others stammered out something about not believing a word of it, while blushing furiously. Kasimura combined both in a silent reddening to the roots of his hair, sitting on the edge of the sofa, bent forward, hands in lap, his lack of ease a form of politeness.

  “You haven’t cycled all the way from Denpasar, surely, Kasimura-san?”

  He tittered and ran his hand through his hair. Unlined, in his fifies, he still had a good thick head of black hair, damp now, as the water transformed itself into sweat.

  “No, Walter-san. I came with the bus. The bicycle is from my friend at the waterworks down the road.”

  “Is this a purely social visit, Mr Kasimura, or can I help you in some way?”

  Japanese are the most businesslike of orientals, no need here to approach the topic like a lion stalking deer. Kasimura lay down his glass and picked up his coffee cup. He sighed, perhaps savouring occidental directness.

  “Walter-san, I am travelling on behalf of a friend in Tokyo, a man who is in the sporting goods business. He wishes the Balinese to learn to play football, so that he may sell them equipment of Asian size at advantageous prices, and he has asked me to find an area of flat land, in the centre of several towns, where a football pitch might be established and to send him pictures. It seemed to me that Ubud is a good place to take pictures, very strategic.” He wrestled with the knotty consonantal cluster. Football? I recalled it bleakly from icy Amsterdam winters, myself the blue-nosed-snivelling boy hanging by his own goal as the games master stamped and raged “Run up, Bonnet! Run up!” Then cold showers, the humiliation of naked exposure, finally seeping chilblains. Walter frowned. All this did not make a great deal of sense.

  “But the locals have no interest whatever in football, Kasimura-san, except – I suppose – the few who play on the lapangan kota but they are mainly Javanese. Not much business there. They don’t even wear boots. They don’t wear much of anything.” He smirked at me. Kasimura looked depressed. “And how is business?”

  He sighed again and looked down at his pale, bony feet, unsuited to the playing of football. “Not so good since Mr Greg left.”

  “Ah.” Greg had initially put a lot of work Kasimura’s way: endless films, bought, developed, mounted on cards – that is until he and Margaret realised how extensive their photographic activity was to become. Then they had imported film directly in bulk and Greg had taken over the laborious winding onto rolls and the developing himself. Kasimura put his hand to his mouth.

  “Oh, I am sorry, for I should not talk of Mr Greg since he became your enemy.”

  Walter looked puzzled. “You are wrong there, Mr Kasimura. He is not my enemy. He is a good friend. He stood by me in my time of trouble.”

  Kasimura shook his head. “No, Mr Walter. It is you who are wrong, yes please. You have, I see, no wireless. Perhaps you have not heard the news? Britain and France have decl
ared war on Germany. London and Berlin are both in flames. Thousands, perhaps millions, have been killed by bombs. It is, I think, the end of the West and the beginning of the recognition of Japan’s proper place in the world. This is very nice coffee.” That last two sentences said with equal satisfaction. Every cloud, he seemed to imply cheerfully, a silver lining. Walter gaped. I gaped. He found his tongue first.

  “A war? Jesus! So it’s really happened. But what can a war in Europe possibly have to do with Japan? And you mean the next time Greg and I meet we shall be on different sides and required to shoot each other? But that is absurd.” Walter sat down heavily, trying to come to terms with the news, lit a cigarette with fierce concentration. Secure in Dutch neutrality, I soothed.

  “I don’t think you should take a European war personally, Walter. If Greg has any sense, he’s tucked away as safely in America as you are here.” I would learn later that Greg, already in British uniform, spent much of the next few years paddling in the lugubrious headwaters of the Irrwaddy, plotting to turn the river sudden red in Rangoon and thus dismay the Japanese by the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy. Walter was genuinely, headshakingly bewildered. He must be worried about his family. I knew he had siblings prominent in the ballet and opera of Berlin, a mother somewhere in Germany. Unlike my own family, the Spieses did not tread lightly on the earth, leaving no tracks. He brushed the hair back from his eyes and shook his head free of confusion.