by Nigel Barley
He wasn’t having that. “You know nothing of theology or of burning souls, of … of …” He was turning crimson. “Down, down on your knees now, bow your head and pray with me for guidance.”
I turned on my heel. “If I were you, father, I’d get out of the habit of kneeling down, head bowed, when there are Japanese about.”
After that, we saw little of each other in the camp. Father Scruple was finally killed in the last of the regular Allied airraids, one Sunday morning – regular since the camp was always mistaken for a Japanese barracks – so he never got to deliver his sermon, on the unpredictability of divine grace, that day either. They moved us inland, upland and our last few months were the worst – the cold, the rain, all the animals dying from standing around knee-deep in water. Then, one day, we got up to find Yoshida and his men had driven off and we were completely alone, abandoned orphans in the storm. We had won the war. It seemed that – to our great surprise and doubtless his own – H.E. the G.G., Jonkeer Alidius Warmoldus Lambertus Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer, had told us nothing but the truth. It wasn’t safe any more, with the Pemuda wandering around and making probing raids to work up their courage, so we drifted down to the city of Makassar, mostly on foot, walking through redemptive green fields beside the swirling waves of the South China Sea.
No one can imagine the confusion and mental dislocation of those times. The Japanese had notionally surrendered and were, theoretically, acting under Allied orders, until they could be disarmed and replaced. Some supported the Pemuda, giving them weapons, others fought them in the streets. Crucially, Soekarno had been allowed to read out a formal declaration of independence under Japanese tutelage, while the Dutch intended to blandly resume government just as before the war with no concessions to changed realities. In Surabaya, the British Indian Army was fighting a pitched battle against an emerging Indonesian force, with terrible loss of life and everywhere were young men, inflamed by the highest political rhetoric, committing the most terrible atrocities against civilians that would soon be repaid in kind by the Dutch. The heady smell of freedom was already tainted with the stench of blood and corruption. In a bar, Hofker and I found some sort of Dutch welfare officer, who lent us thirty florins a month to live on, and settled in a room in an old abandoned bungalow. It wasn’t much but was more than the Indonesians had, yet the improvidence of unsecured loans troubled me. In the evenings, we sat in the dark and listened to the news on a looted wireless whose glowing tuning dial was our only illumination. Seeded among the Dutch broadcasts, were strident new voices, some in Indonesian and English, mostly ranting of injustice. One particularly struck me. It was clearly ultimately English, female, and saying the most offensive things possible about the Allies and rapidly became known as that of “Surabaya Sue”, a sort of lesser sister of “Tokyo Rose”. But there could be no mistaking those intonations. It was Manxi busily still surviving. It was at this point, roaming the hot and devastated city, that I discovered the Japanese teahouse.
The Grand Hotel reared up, like a beached whale, in the more gracious area of the city, overshaded by dusty palm and eucalyptus, a great white colonial structure of approximately Palladian pretensions. The houses on either side lay shattered as though it had vastly shrugged but, in the hotel, only the gardens had suffered. It had served as the social and cultural centre of the Japanese occupation and behind, in the grounds, stood a new addition, a classic Japanese teahouse of grained wood, tatami mats and formally exuberant rooftiles. It had the most curious effect on me. After years of the temporary, the requisitioned, the grimed, worn down and abraided, it sparkled with crisp freshness, cool rational control, mastery over matter, precision of purpose and I looked at it and felt a lump in my throat for all that had been lost. The door consisted of two sliding sections leading off a passage of pure dove-grey granite and gave onto a series of sere galleries divided by panels of wood and heavy, oiled paper panels. In the main room, these had been painted in a delightful eighteenth-century style with pictures of kimono-clad ladies and gentlemen of the floating world. They strolled, gossiped, posed, took tea and – oh my God was there no escape – bared breasts, geishaed variously and played musical instruments. The artist had begun one of the ceiling panels, a scene of a bucolic pleasure- garden with little red hump-backed bridges, lakes, peach trees in blossom. Half a lady floated, free of the ground, like a Balinese leyak. He had left before her legs could be finished. His paints lay in a heap on the floor, his brush discarded beside them. It was like finding the ancient imprint of a hand on a rock wall, as I once had in Italy. It is impossible not to lay your own hand over it. I knew at once what I would do. I would set my hand where his hand had been, let his anima flow into me as he had let that of the Edo period enter him. I would finish those legs. I would finish the ceiling. I sought out the manager, a bewildered Armenian whose neutrality status was so complicated that the Japanese had never finally decided whether he was friend or foe, and brooked no contradiction. At first he was suspicious, hesitant of local reaction. He had been thinking of organising the burning of the tea-house as a social event. Sell a few tickets. Throw in a beer or two. I argued, not on grounds of aesthetics, but utility. The port was awash with the Allied soldiery – British, Dutch, Australian, American – their pockets stuffed with unconvertible military scrip. Of course, no one but the Japanese would ever want to eat filthy Japanese food but this would make the finest Chinese restaurant. It was agreed that the ceiling would be painted. I should even be paid.
The next six weeks were spent working with an energy I had never known, though I moved, only stiffly at first, back into the pathways of my former craft. Birds twittered and blossoms flowered from my brush, slowly and then in gathering spate. The opening – a grand affair to which the mayor came and made a clumsy speech about the beating of swords into ploughshares and – ha! ha! – paintbrushes. I was surrounded by high-ranking Canadian officers, though of what service I could not divine. There is no reticence in uniforms. A detailed biography of military violence ran through the badges punctuating their sleeves and the ribbons swarming over their chests but this was a language I could not read. At one stage, one of them passed me his military handbook and stabbed a finger at page four. A bold title read, “Women” and underneath the single sentence, “Always remember the Japs were here before you.”
“The lapangan kota,” I said wearily. “The town field. Over behind the fort.” My own fieldwork days, I was almost sure, were over. Then at some stage, over red-eyed coffee and cigarettes, the mayor asked me to do something with the townhall, its interior freshly replastered after the hacking away of Nippon military insignia. The great powers were like little boys, running round the world scribbling on each others’ walls.
The honorarium paid for a passage aboard one of those high-nosed Buginese ships, a voyage of six days shared with rough but cheery lads, sunburned skin like sandpaper, all inveterate gigglers, who lived simply on rice and fish and prayed every day and invited me into the fishy communal bed where we all slept, chastely entangled, in restfully non-co-varrubious propinquity. And then we were in Buleleng. Hugs, waves, a packet of rice and fish and a fervent prayer for the journey – for seamen, any journey on land was full of danger. I stepped onto the same beach as so many years before – finally back in Bali. I was home. Black sand stuck to my feet and tears pricked at my eyes.
***
The rain came down, as Walter always said “not in sheets but in eiderdowns”. I had thought to walk into the house and just find him there, sprawled on the sofa, cigarette spiralling into smoke, a book or an animal or some ancient artifact on his lap. But it was clear no one had lived here since Dr Nasiputi, who would not be getting his tenant’s deposit back. The goats, who now claimed the sitting room as their own, had refused to be chased back out into the rain and glared satanically. One munched on a Japanese newspaper and farted, another was finding the final chapter of Walter’s book on dance rather hard going. Everything had been systematically looted, exc
ept for the books which were of interest to no one – all the contents, some of the beams, the doors carved by Lempad. Rain was streaming down the walls, where ferns nested in with the insolence of all life, through the eroded thatch. Soon the cement would start to crumble. I could still see Walter, in my head, as he once sat there over the river, Vicki snipping away at his hair and the birds swooping down to carry it away for their nests. Where Sobrat’s first painting had hung, was a square of paler plaster like untanned flesh under discarded shorts. The house was returning to the earth, like water swirling down a drain, taking with it the joy and life of which it had once been the centre. Only silence remained. I had gone to the palace – looking depressed and down at heel – both it and me – and asked for Cokorda Agung. A cook whispered that he was in the prison in Denpasar, detained for the expression of views skeptical of Dutch rule and denounced by members of his own family. The kaleidoscope had been given another twist. And Tuan Walter? He shrugged. Who could tell? I knew what I must do.
The Neuhauses’ old house stood across the street from Sanur beach. From here, you could see the spot where we had carried Conrad’s torn body ashore. Here, the invading Dutch forces had landed, followed by the Japanese, followed and preceded indifferently by the annual plagues from Nusa Penida. The beach itself was deserted, dominated by the sound of waves throwing themselves against the coral reef, the lashing of the wind in the palm fronds, sand powdering against the fleshy plants that only Walter knew the names of. The akvarioom had the desolate, moss-blackened appearance of all down-at-heel seaside attractions out of season. I walked up to the warped steps of the porch, ducked under the sagging bougainvillea and knocked on the door. Inside, tired net curtains twitched. A lot of flies had decided to crawl between the net and the glass to die there. I knocked again. Hans Neuhaus opened the door a crack and stared resentfully through the gap.
“What do you want?”
“It’s me.” Of course it was me. Whoever I was it would still be me. “Rudolf Bonnet.”
The door opened a little wider. He was unshaven, unwashed, clothes bleached and worn, a hairy belly pulsating between the flaps of a too-tight shirt and talking through a cigarette. There was a bottle of beer gripped in one paw though it was only ten in the morning. Hans had run to fat – no, not run – collapsed into fat. After the camp, I was just bones, one of those Torajan walking skeletons.
“What do you want?” he said again and sidled out on bare feet, holding the door close behind him as you do when you have someone in there you don’t want seen. A whiff of something like despair seeped out. He closed it against the resistance of a sticking frame.
“Where’s your brother?” I had always dealt with Rolf in my limited and unfortunate contacts with the Neuhaus brothers. There were two old chairs in a corner of the porch. He kicked one over and sat down. I took that as an invitation and sat in the other. I hoped he might offer me a beer so I could refuse it.
“You don’t know? No, of course, you weren’t here. You were on the other side.” He looked at his great ugly feet, a shock after Balinese feet. Hairy, gnarled. There was a bunion coming there. “He’s dead.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” I was not particularly sorry. I had never got on with them. Social niceties were a nuisance. “When? How?”
He swigged. “Three years ago now. It was supposed to be the Japanese. We were sitting right here one day and they had troops searching the woods back there.” He jerked a thumb over one shoulder. “They were chasing some guerrillas, Pemuda, who the hell knows what they were. There was shooting. The story is Rolf was hit by a stray bullet, right in the middle of the chest.” He jabbed himself in illustration and flinched. “I got a written apology from the army. The bullet was Japanese. Of course it was Japanese. All the bullets flying around, in those days were Japanese. You want a beer?”
“Yes please.” He shuffled off. I heard voices inside. He came back with one, foaming at the neck and another for himself. I felt sorry for him, a lost twin. Wait. They were not twins.
“They say it was the Japanese but I think it was that little bastard Sampih.”
“Sampih? But how? Why?”
He stretched out his legs to settle into the subject. “You know he’s big in the nationalist youth round here. You Dutch have been after him. There was a patrol round the other day asking questions. He and Rolf had this big fight at the opening of the aquarium. Rolf made some joke about him and Colin and he just blew up, stalked off cursing. He said one day he’d come back and kill Rolf.”
“He said that about lots of people. He said it about his own father. He probably said it about me.”
He leered and belched. “Did you know his father was dead?” He nodded. “Yup. Killed one dark night as he walked through the woods. No one knows who or why. It couldn’t be robbery. He hadn’t got a penny. No Balinese would have gone there, in the dark, alone. They found him with his throat cut.” He gestured throat-cutting with a nasty wet noise in his mouth and laughed bitterly. “Does Sampih know where you live?” I refused to entertain the notion. I had not been through so much to have my throat cut over nothing, now there was finally peace. I felt a sudden weary rage against the world. I had reined myself in long enough.
“Walter,” I burst out. “What happened to Walter? The last time I saw him in Ngawi, you were in the same camp and I think you went to Kutacane with him.”
He looked at me in horror. “Oh Christ! Didn’t anyone tell you?” He looked shifty. “Everything was chaotic at the end. The Dutch were falling apart, the whole fucking world was falling apart.” He swigged. I clutched my bottle and glugged at it the way a child does, seeking comfort. It was bitter, unpleasant. Whatever was coming, I knew, was bad. “The Japanese were supposed to be just down the road. The guards shoved us all in trucks and took us to Palembang where they had three old rustbuckets waiting. The idea was that we would be shipped off to Ceylon where the British would put us in their camps. They crammed us in, men on the open decks in the sun, they didn’t care. Rolf and I nearly died from the heat and lack of water. Walter was lucky. He got a cabin, well … part of a cabin. We set sail. It was an incredibly calm, clear day and we had just got abreast of Nias when a single Japanese plane spotted us. It circled, saw we were civilian, no escort, and came in to attack with machine guns, strafing the decks. Cowardly bastard! Dozens were killed. It climbed up and headed for Java, then, it was as if it changed its mind and came back again. I could see this dot getting bigger and bigger, coming straight at us and then it pulled up again. We were just sighing with relief when the first torpedo struck, then another and the ship was going down. It was everyone for himself. The other ships, with the real Nazis on board, did nothing, just kept going. Our crew’s only concern was to save themselves and they just pulled away in the lifeboats. Before we knew it, Rolf and I were in the water with hundreds of others. You could see Nias far off and there was nothing else to do but try to get there. We were lucky I suppose. The current must have been with us. We trod water and let it carry us along. Lots of the others made the mistake of trying to swim and exhausted themselves and drowned. Then, later in the day, the sharks started coming in.” He shuddered. Involuntarily, I looked at the beach. “You could hear the terrible screams of the men as they were taken, one by one.” I could hear them too or rather Conrad’s as he lay just there, his young blood pumping into the beach and our pathetic concern not to get sand in the wound as if he were a picnic sandwich. “Anyway, we were lucky. We made it. It took us weeks to get off the island and then the Japanese sent us back here.” There was silence. My mind swirled with watery confusion. I had to know. I had to make him say it.
“Walter?” I croaked.
“He must have been locked in the cabin with the others. They shouted and banged on the doors but the crew didn’t even try to save them, just jumped in the boats and rowed away. The Japanese got them, of course, put them in some hellhole of a camp. I’m sure lots died.” Said with unseemly satisfaction. No comfort to me. His voice f
ell to a whisper. “The worst part was that endless black night, with the sharks, the sea like ink, the deepest sea in the world, miles of it cold below you. At the start, there was this moon and then a shadow came over it and there was just this slice of it left. I thought it was the end of the world. Then it got bright again and by the morning we were being cut to pieces on the coral round Nias with these huge waves throwing us about. He pointed to his leg and ran one finger down a long, deep scar like a furrow. “At first, I thought it was a shark and I was a gonner but it was just coral slashing at me. Rolf got me to shore, saved my life.”
My knee was shaking, knocking against the chair. “What? What was that you said about the moon?”
He shrugged. “Nothing much. Just some sort of an eclipse. Not even a total eclipse, just like someone had taken a big bite out of the moon.” He wiped his hand over his face and then sat up foursquare like Abraham Lincoln in his monument, the voice defiant. “I tell you. Since then, I may sit here and look at it but, since that night, I have never set foot in that sea again and I never will.” There was the sound of a door shutting softly at the back. After two minutes, a bicycle came, as if coincidentally, round the corner of the house, what was clearly a young fisherman pedalling languidly, sarong hitched up to show fine calves. He and Hans exchanged grins.
“Good morning, Tuan,” he called too loudly and winked.
17
James Grits was talking in crossword puzzles again but my mind was distracted by my nose, a waft of scents, a very Balinese mixture of roasting meat, incense and frangipani blossom from the tree over by the gate. In Malay – now Indonesian – they called it “dead Chinaman flower” from its being found amongst the tombs of Chinese cemeteries, which detracted not one whit from its prettiness. It was favoured, these days, to aromatise lavatory air-fresheners, which rather did.
