Before we sailed away, we submerged our empty flasks in the brown river. Our mattresses were rolled in bast matting and taken onto the boat. Then from the deck we watched our yellow bamboo hut standing on the dark edge of the eternal forest become smaller, until at the first curve of the river, it passed entirely from sight.
*1 An obscure reference to a book about life on a tropical isle. See Laurids Bruun, Van Zanten’s Happy Days (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922).—Trans.
*2 Village.—Trans.
*3 Swiss canton.—Trans.
SOCIETY
You could call it a big kampong or small new town on one of the beautiful broad rivers of southern Sumatra. Three or four years ago, there was still war here, but now only about a hundred Dutch soldiers are left in town. Now and again they carry out an ornamental exercise in order to show any possibly rebellious locals that they are here and are paying attention. From what one sees of the indigenes, they are a mixture of original Malays and Javanese, shaded and modified by a score of less harmonious influences and hybridizations. One sees Javanese day workers mowing grass with swords, a handful every quarter of an hour, and carrying a water jar across the street is a morning’s work for a man. Most of the work is done by women, and next come the Chinese, who here as elsewhere find their way immediately to the smallest budding settlements and take on whatever has to be done in the way of pioneer work. They keep shops, they do shipping, they buy rubber, and sell rice, fish, and German beer. The few Europeans here also work. There is an ironwood enterprise run by a Swiss who is very savvy about the local conditions here. The other whites without exception are Dutch functionaries.
I went to see the governor and the inspector general and had bestowed upon me with great ceremony a large document that hitherto I had no idea I needed, which was a residence permit for Dutch East India.
Before arriving in this town, I had been rambling around in the bush, doing battle with the mosquitoes, thorns, and swamp grass. But as soon as I got here, I was invited to take part in “society.” Thus in the evening I went to the “club” at the invitation of the inspector general, who was a refined and tenderly sensitive man, of which since Multatuli* there have been many here.
The market street, which was the main street of the town, was already dark. The Malays were leaning against the fence, holding their children in their arms. The Chinese were tinkering about noiselessly in the lit-up backs of their shops. About halfway down the street was a lighted wooden house that was the club; and when I went in I found two-thirds of the local Europeans assembled there. Four of them were at the billiards table, three older men and a woman sat on rocking chairs in front of the windows that gave on the river, turning their back to society and calmly breathing and enjoying in silence the somewhat cooled-down air of the evening hours. The rest of the company were sitting in the middle of the room around a big table and playing cards. I sat down with them and was warmly greeted. After the people learned with disappointment that I did not play cards, I was invited to join in a game of dice. They were playing for a round of drinks, and everyone ordered theirs—whisky, bitters and Bols, gin and sherry, vermouth and anise—in the most adventurous combinations. The dice game was as complicated and demanding of wit as any you might find being played on ships and in lighthouses where people have plenty of time.
So we sat there, ten men and two women, in the harsh light of two light bulbs from seven till nine thirty and vigorously shot dice, always playing for a round of drinks. At one point I looked up and around in the room and saw a huge moth fluttering around the bulbs, bigger than the palm of my hand, with yellow and green patterns on a black background. I resolved to catch it later and take it home so I would end up getting something out of this evening after all, and so I was consoled and cheered up every now and then by catching a glimpse, from the midst of this circle of smokers and dice players, of this magnificent moth, which was as ill-suited to this society of smokers and drinkers as the Dutch are to the primeval forest.
The last round was lost by a poor lieutenant, whose salary could not have been more than two hundred guilders a month at the most. He was loudly laughed at, a continuation of the loud laughing and merrymaking that had never ceased over these last long hours. I got to my feet to take my leave. We all shook hands with each other, and they all expressed their great regret that I was leaving now just as the fun was getting under way.
The giant moth had flown into the bulb a number of times and had burnt itself. I looked for it for a while and found it, apparently not very damaged, dead on the floor. As I picked it up, I saw that its body was already half gone and swarming with those tiny gray dwarf ants that one finds out here in the sugar, in one’s shoes and socks, in one’s cigar case, and in one’s bed, and over whose savage greed for booty one learns to patiently shrug one’s shoulders, as one does over the cruelty of the Chinese, the deceit of the Japanese, the stealing of the Malays, and the other greater and lesser evils of the East.
* Eduard Douwes Dekker (March 2, 1820–February 19, 1887), better known by his pen name Multatuli (from Latin multa tuli, “I have carried much”), was a Dutch writer famous for his satirical novel Max Havelaar (1860), which denounced the abuses of colonialism in the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia).—Trans.
NIGHT ON DECK
The second evening of a trip on a small Chinese paddle steamer up the Batang Hari River. A handsome young Javanese, a master tailor, who for a half day had been clattering away at his Singer sewing machine, was my neighbor on deck. He packed up his machine and unpacked his mattress, slowly and thoroughly performed all the rites of his Mohammedan evening prayer, and lay down. He took a devotional book printed in Arabic out of his waistband, read in it, chanted a few pages out of it to himself in a low voice, and went to sleep. Even as he was dozing off, he carefully returned the little book to his belt for safekeeping. Behind him, under the smoking lantern, three Chinese were playing cards, and near them a Malay woman lay on her bast mat with her four sleeping children. One of the children lay in faint red light, a very beautiful young girl with long hair, nine or ten years old. As yet she wore no earrings, but she had thick silver bangles on her lovely ankles and wrists, and on the second toe of each foot she wore a gold ring. As for the rest, everyone was sleeping or half asleep, nestled against the deck in the soft, cozy, animal-like, elastic manner of the nature folk; one was also sleeping in sitting or squatting position (on the soles of both feet); and among them a group of men was chatting softly. Back behind the stern, the great wheel murmured like a mill wheel, and out there was thick, black darkness, through which, from time to time, a short-lived rain of sparks flew out of the oven of the wood-burning engine, which made the darkness seem even darker.
I stayed awake for another hour, trying to read my notes by the faint light and to keep myself isolated mentally from the stink that surrounded me. The coconut and citronella oil with which the natives cook and which unfortunately they also rub into their bodies, has a disgusting, murky, viscous odor, and during my entire sojourn in the East, this odor represented the only point at which my humanity turned away in earnest aversion from the humanity of the natives.
I laid out my mattress on the deck, brushed my teeth with soda water, pulled out my pocket watch, took my daily dose of quinine, and hid my key and purse under my pillow. Then I put two chairs on either side of the head end of my mattress so as not to get my nose walked on during the night, unhurriedly undressed, slipped into my nightshirt, and lay down. Now the Chinese also gave over playing cards and hung a linen jacket over the lantern, and we all took our rest to the monotonous sound of the ship’s engine, in a darkness that was nearly as thick and impenetrable and heavy as the thick, horrid smell of coconut oil. From time to time, sailors passed noisily among us; sometimes, in the middle of the pitch-black wilderness they blew hefty blasts on the harsh-sounding steam whistle. Since after two hours I had not yet found sleep, I got up and made my way t
o the forward deck where in total darkness the steersman stood and with mysterious certainty steered us farther into the night, which was equally black and impenetrable in every direction. He must have had the night vision of a tiger, and it was fairly eerie watching him turn the wheel, knowing that we were moving through the narrow navigable channel of a river running with a hundred fickle curves through the primeval forest, and where I, making every possible effort, could see not a glimmer or a shadow from the shore. The captain was squatting nearby, asleep.
I lay down again. It was very hot, and on my side of the ship there was no movement in the air. Time and again, I threw off the travel blanket with which I had been protecting my bare feet, and time and again the bites of the mosquitoes forced me to cover them up again. Then finally, around midnight, I did fall asleep, and I had the feeling I had been asleep for a long time when the repeated howling of the ship’s whistle woke me up. But it was only one thirty. Here and there frightened sleepers were staggering to their feet, but most of them immediately sank back down and remained quiet; others got up and took the cloth off the lantern, the light of which revealed heaps of sleepers all around. The whistle shrieked again, the engine stopped, the ship turned. Going to the railing, I suddenly saw land, a raft, and reed hut right next to us. With a slight bump we docked. We were out of fuel and had to take on wood.
In the dim light, down the “royal stairway” from the high bank climbed two dark men with smoking torches. Their torches were made from twisted dry leaves soaked in tree resin. On the raft were heaped big piles of cut wood, and now began the loading of the wood, which I watched and especially listened to for two hours. By the light of the torches the sailors and the wood coolies stood in two lines, and one piece of wood after the other went from hand to hand, in total several thousand, and piece by piece were counted in a loud chant by the supplier. With his soft, slow, beautiful Malay voice, he chanted in free, wonderfully solemn melodies with ceaseless variations, keeping up the count of the pieces of wood amid the darkness of the night and the flowing of the river: ampat—lima! lima—anam! anam—tujoh! Thus he worked and chanted in an even cadence and with the same tone for two hours, and with each new hundred he gave a melodic shout of joy. Then he chanted further, sometimes sleepy and lamenting, sometimes hopeful and consoling, always the same basic melody with small, capricious inflections and variations to suit the mood. This is the way that the workers and countryfolk here all sing when they are underway in a small dugout and night falls; then they become fearful and infinitely in need of comforting, then they fear the crocodile and the ghosts of the dead who are abroad over the river at night; and then you hear them sing with devotion and ardor, with pain and hope, unconsciously, the way the bamboo sings in the night wind.
I lay quiet and dozed as the engine began to turn over again. Now it was raining and occasionally a dozen lukewarm drops sprayed in over me. I wanted to pull my blanket back up over my knees but I was just too tired, and now I fell asleep.
When I next opened my eyes, it was to a bleak, cool, misty morning. My nightshirt was soaked through, and I was freezing. Sleepily I reached for the damp travel blanket and pulled it over me. As in doing that I turned my head, I saw someone was standing over me. I looked up to see standing there with her small, brown, ring-adorned feet next to my head, the lovely long-haired Malay child. She held her hands behind her back and observed me attentively with her beautiful, calm eyes and matter-of-fact interest, as though in my sleep she might somehow be able to figure out what kind of an animal the white man really is. At that moment I had exactly the same feeling as when during a mountain journey, one wakes up in the hay and sees the curious eyes of a goat or a calf upon one. The girl gazed at me for a while directly in the eyes; when I got up, she walked off back to her mother.
There was already life on deck; only a few people were still sleeping, one of whom had curled himself up into a ball like a dog in a cold night. The others were rolling up their bast mats, pulling their sarongs up around their waists, tying on their headcloths or turbans, and gazing, clueless and sober, into the wet morning.
NIGHT IN THE FOREST
Just before sunset, we had come back from an excursion in a small boat, tired from the wet heat and the hours of splattering about on the broad brown river with the eternal forest on both sides. We had encountered the small Chinese steamer that sails up the Batang Hari every week and that was on its way home back to Jambi. We had shot a few pigeons and hornbills, photographed a bamboo hut that stood alone in a clearing as a vestige of the previous year’s rice planting, in which an old Malay with his wife lived unconcerned by the siege of the returning jungle. We had caught a couple of large green butterflies and in the end had to hurry up in order to get back by nightfall.
As we docked and clambered stiff from long, cramped sitting over the little landing raft in front of our hut, the hazy sun was setting over the forest, the river reflected it murkily back, and the shore was already dark, giving the impression that the forest was crashing in on both sides with the desire to overwhelm that narrow lane of light.
Before the arrival of night and the crocodiles, there was still time to pour a few buckets of river water over our heads, put on a fresh shirt, and have a seat on our large veranda, where the fat, benevolent Chinese already had our evening meal ready. I looked up. It had already grown dark, and our hut, with its faintly lit veranda, stood beautiful and broad between the primeval forest and the steep riverbank, with its soft palm-leaf roof barely outlined against the dark sky. Only in the tropics can one know what night is—how beautiful and alien and menacing it is with its deep, saturated darkness, its heavy black curtain, all the more unfathomable and sinister because the tropical midday is so much more bright and flamboyant than our northern one.
We sat around the large, unbudgeable oaken table, ate little fish in oil and zwieback, and drank, choosing from among the good, hefty, undiscovered drinks of Dutch Indochina. We had little to say to each other. The three of us had been together for days and days, and we were tired, and despite our baths, already hot and sweaty. Out in the darkness around us the hundred thousand large-winged insects gave voice, their sounds glassy and shrill, or deep and darkly humming, louder than a string orchestra. We helped the Chinese clear the table, leaving only the bottles. The weak lamps cast a dull light on the woven wall and out into the open night. The rifles leaned against the entrance, with the butterfly nets next to them. One of us lay down in the reclining chair under the hanging lamp and tried to read a book from Tauschnitz;* another began to polish the rifles, and I folded little cones out of newspaper to hold the butterflies.
Fairly early, it was only ten o’clock, we said goodnight to each other and went inside. I threw off my clothes and in the dark quickly slipped under the high mosquito net, stretched out on my good, soft mattress, and sank into the blurry, weary state of half sleep that is the way I have been spending my nights for a long time now. It was not necessary to shut my eyes—only with great effort and willpower was I able to make out the rectangle of the open window hole. Outside, it was hardly a shade lighter than it was between the bamboo walls and bast mats, but one could feel wild nature fermenting and cooking out there in its relentless prurient ardor of creation. One heard a hundred animals and breathed the herbaceous odor of opulent growth. Here life is worth little; nature does not coddle and has no need to save. But we whites are safely beyond the reach of all that—we have our bamboo hut and pretty much our own little kampong with nearly a hundred Malays, who are obliged to help us bleed the eternal primeval forest—and here for the last short while, for the first time since world began, through the thick growth the sound is heard of axe blows and the hustle and bustle of work. Three years ago here, in savage, vile campaigns, the aborigines were shot down—the shy, dark Kubu could not hold out as long as the sly, cruel Achi of the north. The souls of the murdered peoples hover at night over the river, but they are only feared by their brothers, and we whites stri
de in calm and lordly fashion through the wilderness and give out cold orders in our broken Malay and watch the dark primevally ancient ironwood trees fall without emotion. We need them to build our shipyards.
Amid dull half-thoughts, I dozed off and hung suspended between dream and reality for weary, muggy hours. I was a child and I was crying, and a mother rocked me and hummed, but she was singing in Malay, and when I opened my leaden eyes and tried to see her, the face turned out to be the millennially ancient countenance of the primeval forest that hung over me and whispered to me. Yes, here I was in the heart of nature; here the world was no whit different than it had been a hundred thousand years ago. We have been able to nail wire lines onto the slopes of Gaurishankar and spoil the Eskimo’s fish hunt with motorboats, but it will be a long time before we prevail against the primeval forest. There malaria consumes our people, rust consumes our nails and guns; there peoples were rotted out and disappeared, and out of the depths of the carrion heap new ethnic mixtures quickly arose, lusty and not to be killed off.
A powerful shock suddenly awoke me. Straight out of my sleep I leapt up and fell back down. I stood up again, now awake. The mosquito net was in pieces. A wild, white, frighteningly harsh light struck me with blinding effect, and only after a few moments did I realize that it was light from many lightning flashes following one another without pause. The thunder resounded afterward in a rhythmic panting. The air was strangely in motion and full of electricity, which I could feel vibrating in my fingertips.
Singapore Dream and Other Adventures Page 5
