The Last Wild Men of Borneo

by Carl Hoffman

  A statue seven feet tall caught my eye. Weathered. Old. Real-looking, its face the classic East Borneo heart shape with wide eyes. “No!” snapped Michael. “It’s been played with. The erosion isn’t right.

  “This is real,” he said, pointing to a wooden post ending in a carved head. “Look, see the water erosion? But the eyes aren’t real and the mouth has been altered.”

  I spied the end of a coffin, another beautiful piece to me. He shook his head. “I don’t know . . .”

  “It looks so good, so old,” I said, pointing out the dust, the erosion marks.

  He laughed. “It’s supposed to look like that!”

  “Yang ini”—this one—Ali said, pointing to another pair of coffin ends.

  “No, no, no,” said Michael. He moved with speed, precision, sureness. He was brazen, didn’t hem or haw, didn’t worry about offending Ali.

  We climbed a rickety stairway in the rear of the store up to the second floor, then into another room in back. “There is always a back room,” said Michael, “usually on the second floor. The first floor, that’s all for tourists, always, in every shop. The good stuff is always hidden away,” he said, eyeing a whole coffin—there were six of them—and then a statue. “Look, this is the one you want,” he said, taking out a jeweler’s loupe and peering close with the flashlight of his iPhone, “with this patina. Lama. Lama.” Old. Old.

  Ali went downstairs to make coffee. “Eighty percent of this shit is fake,” Michael said, “or just not old. He made a fortune selling shit to the expat oil workers driving up from Balikpapan. Tons and tons of stuff.”

  We went back downstairs and sat around an old wooden desk sipping strong, black, sweet coffee brought from the kitchen by Ali’s wife. They laughed, gossiped in Indonesian too fast for me to understand. “Laughter is good for the heart,” Ali said to me. Next to the desk stood a massive carved stone Buddha five feet tall, with a broken nose. It looked beautiful, identical to ones I’d seen in the National Museum of Indonesia in Jakarta. “How much you want for that?” Michael said, pointing to the Buddha.

  “That’s sixteen hundred years old,” Ali said.

  “But the nose . . .” said Michael.

  “No nose, no problem!” said Ali. “It’s primitive!”

  “How much?”

  “Ten million”—about $10,000 U.S.

  “If it had a nose it would be worth $30,000 easy. It’s from the ground. Classic.”

  We headed off to lunch, Ali holding Michael’s hand, a common Indonesian gesture of friendship and intimacy between men. “No matter if no business,” Ali said to me. “We are brothers.”

  “He would do anything for me,” Michael said, “but, yes, if I was in his shop and I went to buy a fake he’d swear up and down it was real and sell it to me. Business is business. Outside the shop is one thing, inside it another.”

  Ali smiled.

  And so it went. For the next few days a continuous stream of dealers picked us up, drove us into Samarinda’s maze, which in the back streets remained a warren of tight lanes, crumbling pavement, and open sewers, a hidden network of antiques and art. At the top level were dealers like Ali, who had brick-and-mortar shops. Below them were men who operated from their living rooms. We sat in wood-framed houses, always tidy and spotless, with plastic-paper-covered floors and threadbare furniture, sweating and drinking sweet black coffee, Michael cooling himself with a little folding fan. We entered a sprawling concrete network of rooms and levels, filled with children and women in hijabs, room after room filled with jars. People fished carved fetish boxes out of closets, brought necklaces dripping with boar and leopard teeth and strange tiny glass jars the size of thimbles filled with hair from under beds. The merchandise was dizzying—thousand-year-old jars with Aso dragons curling around their necks and deer antlers and pig sticks dark and shiny with age. Long after sunset the skies opened up and rain crashed down, a torrential downpour so thick and hard it felt like marbles dropping on my head, and we raced into a dark little house filled with men.

  Hugs, fist bumps, more sweet black coffee, Michael huddled next to a man about his own age in plaid shorts and a red polo shirt. “He’s a Dayak,” Michael said. “From Apo Kayan”—the deep inland plateau of East Kalimantan—“and he’s a carver.” He had baskets of deer-antler mandau handles, intricately carved into figures. “Takes him two days to do one of these,” Michael said. They looked over pictures of classic pieces on Michael’s iPad, oohing and ahhing, and finally we all climbed back into the car in the darkness and rain and inched through streets a foot deep in water, bumper-to-bumper traffic in the midst of stalled cars, soaked figures pushing motorcycles through the flooded streets. After nearly two hours we turned onto a road on which the power was out. It was pitch black, this road flooded as well, and we pulled into a large three-sided warehouse. In the light of the car’s headlamps, lashed to a fence, stood a fifteen-foot-high pole whose top five feet were a carved squatting figure. Eroded rivulets and small cracks ran its length. Tiny white patches of lichen bloomed like little spots of ringworm on a man’s skin. Its nose, though, was strange: protruding, almost bulbous.

  “Modang,” Michael said, peering at it. “It’s real and it’s old.”

  “Empat ribu juta,” the Dayak said. Four hundred million. About $40,000.

  “No,” said Michael, without a pause. “That’s only their first price, but still. What am I going to do with that thing?”

  “No. No. No.” It was Michael’s refrain and the more he said it the more people tried to sell him things, especially the lowest rung of the trade, the youngest and poorest, who came to the hotel bearing backpacks full of objects wrapped in old newspapers, a stream of men waiting in the lobby, waiting in the driveway. Michael saw them all and always said the same thing: “No.”

  “I’m getting a serious case of heartburn here. It’s all fake or it’s not old or it’s just mediocre. It’s barren. I miss not knowing where I was going or what I’d find when I got there. No one has anything good.”

  Michael didn’t want souvenirs or curios. He didn’t want fakes. Nor did he want objects that, though old and original, were so weathered and beaten up you could barely recognize them. He wanted masterpieces. The rarest of the rare, centuries-old pieces that were the best of the best even when they were carved, pieces that awed with their design and symmetry and power. He was looking for the physical manifestation of what Bruno hungered for, something that was pure, untouched by the West. Seminomadic Penan who hunted in the forest with blowpipes when they felt like it and caught a Malaysian soap opera on satellite TV in the evenings in villages didn’t cut it. But the world had changed, and our romantic yearning for the past couldn’t stop it. The longhouses were gone and the great pieces that lay tucked away in their eaves when Michael began ranging had vanished too.

  My Indonesian was okay. I could understand a lot, but not everything, especially when Michael had rapid conversations, so I was surprised when he turned to me and said, as he was chattering with a Dayak named Onah, “Okay, he has a friend who’s found a cave up in northeast Borneo. That’s cool, but the thing is there’s usually other stuff there too, carvings and beads and who knows what.” He was excited. “There’s no villages up there; that whole area has been abandoned for hundreds of years. But they’re now planting palm oil up there with a road going up to access it all.”

  We drove across the Mahakam, turned left, upriver, the minarets of Samarinda’s mosque, the second largest in Southeast Asia, reaching toward heavy gray clouds scudding across the sky. We were in the suburbs, new streets with broken curbs along two-story concrete buildings, the first floor shopfronts. We pulled into a driveway of a brand-new building, its bifolding metal door pulled tight. Onah slid the creaking door back, revealing a mostly empty shop, a glass case displaying a few boxes of cereal and telephone SIM cards across the entrance. Inside, beyond the case, lay a figure on the floor beneath a layer of blankets in the ninety-five-degree heat. A boy, young, hollow-eyed,
and grimacing, skin taut against his skull, made eerier with a white powder covering his face. Onah’s son, dying of cancer.

  We walked next door. The room was bare white, empty save for a red Honda scooter and, along one wall, five strange little wooden figures. Creatures with spidery arms and legs and skinny bodies clutching what had once been the ends of ossuaries, their faces half man, half animal, vaguely monkey or dog. Two had bright aqua beads as eyes, two eyes of cowrie shells. Oddest of all, each wore a little hat. One was an upside-down white ceramic bowl; the others appeared to be the lids of brass jars. They were roughly carved, a bit crude, some covered with white lichen. One displayed an erect penis and testicles. They were weird, haunting, otherworldly, and they unsettled me, those eyes staring lined against the white-painted concrete wall in the empty room. I felt sad they were here, sad they’d been butchered, sawed off; I wanted to see them whole, wished I could have seen the cave itself, and my mind wandered to the people who had carved them, the magic and imaginations from which their images had been drawn and what that time and place had been like, a people who’d lived out there, up there, deep in forests full of hornbills and leopards and rhinoceros and wild boar, wholly in their universe.

  Michael knelt down. Pulled out his loupe. Examined them, turned them over. “He’s got real stuff, but it’s not the right stuff,” he said. “Too crude and rough.”

  Just then a young man walked in. Maybe twenty years old, tall and handsome with perfect almond eyes, his hair thick and black, his body muscled—the Dayak who had found them, or at least who’d brought them downriver to Samarinda. Michael clapped him on the shoulder, and they talked in rapid-fire Indonesian. We climbed a set of concrete stairs to a second floor: another empty room with three ossuaries lying on the floor. Whole ones. One was small, almost white, the other a bit larger, both with the spidery monkey-man creatures on their ends. The third was much bigger, with a lovely convex lid, the whole thing painted, instead of carved, with black swirling lines, the tree-of-life motif. Again Michael knelt, examined. He liked the pale little ossuary with the creatures on the ends. “The lichen is really good on this,” he said. “This is a nice piece. It’s ironwood and the patina is fantastic. But it’s stock. You’ll hold on to it for years before finding a buyer. Who wants a coffin in their living room? I know a guy who bought one and his wife made him return it. And you’re really not supposed to trade in these.”

  Michael bought nothing. Onah drove us back to the hotel and in the morning we flew to Pontianak on the west coast of Kalimantan. The morning mists thinned and for the last twenty minutes the new reality of Borneo lay revealed below: mile after mile of perfect squares cut out of the jungle. Palm oil plantations, massive, endless monocultures of palm trees stretching to the horizon in every direction.

  The scene in Samarinda repeated itself. Men streamed into the hotel with backpacks full of questionable objects; cars picked us up and took us to shops, where Michael was hugged and fawned over. “He inspired me!” said Haji Masri, holding Michael’s hand over cigarettes and coffee in Masri’s tidy, sprawling shop filled with jars and beaded Dayak tunics and statues. “We were young when we met and I said if he can do it, I can do it too, and I started going into the villages.”

  Late that afternoon we met with Raslan, the son of a dealer Michael had known for decades, on the rooftop terrace of our hotel. His father had just died, and Raslan was trying to further the business. As we sipped frigid Bintang beer, the day’s stultifying heat subsiding, the Kapuas River cutting through Pontianak’s checkerboard of rusty-red corrugated roofs below, Raslan complained about the palm oil. “Even up in Putussibau”—a town hundreds of miles inland and an area with a strong Iban presence—“it is nothing but palm oil now. A lot of money. The forest is gone. The monkeys are gone. The longhouses are gone.”

  We all shook our heads. Sipped our beers and stared out over the urban sprawl.

  “But there is a national park near there,” Raslan said, “Danau Sentarum National Park, with no palm oil and many longhouses still.”

  Michael and I looked up. “Old ones?” he said.

  “Asli,” he said. Original. Old. Big. The lake was ringed with them. Michael said he’d been to Putussibau many times, but not for years, decades maybe, and never the lake. Putussibau was also near the Sarawak border and the border city of Badau where, Michael said, many Ibans came to trade.

  “Let’s go,” Michael said. “Hard to believe there’s anything there, but worth taking a look. And from there we can cross the border into Sarawak.”

  We jumped on a small plane to Putussibau the next morning, arriving to a little town of concrete houses and crowing roosters and searing heat. Geographically it was out there, deep in the mythic heart of Borneo, but it felt like any small town in Indonesia and you could now drive there on paved roads. The bus station stood next door to the hotel; buses left daily for Badau via Lanjak, the jumping-off point for reaching the lake and its longhouses, and by 8 a.m. we were rolling toward it. I had traveled on some of the worst buses in the world and this wasn’t one of them. There were twenty seats, but many were empty, and Michael had bought two seats for his own comfort. Syrupy Indonesian love songs mixed with American standards—“We had joy / we had fun / we had seasons in the sun . . .”—blared over speakers, the passengers a mix of women in green and pink hijabs and others uncovered, everyone in blue jeans. A hot wind washed over us as we rolled past little shops and food stalls, past walls of palm oil plantations, and modern longhouses two stories high made from concrete, with Toyota SUVs parked out front and satellite antennas lined up like some NASA facility. After an hour, the scenery reduced to walls of green secondary forest, but the road was perfect, freshly paved, new concrete bridges rising at every river crossing. We passed another longhouse, this one wood, but modern, an old woman standing by the road topless. “I bet thirty years [ago],” Michael said, leaning across the aisle, “these were all someplace else, by rivers up in the mountains, and they moved here because of the road.”

  We entered small mountains and climbed in first gear. Up, up, up. We crested a hill and shimmering water spread out far below, the lake of Sentarum. Descended and pulled into a ramshackle village of buildings along the road. Lanjak. The bus drove away. We were in the middle of nowhere, the sun burning. Dust. A few dilapidated, open-fronted warungs. People stared. But it was one thing to be in a place like this when you didn’t speak the language, quite another to be with Michael. Within moments he was high-fiving and fist-bumping, and a man led us across the street and up a rickety flight of stairs to a low, narrow hallway fronted with tiny doors—a hotel of sorts. It was just after noon, the heat and humidity inside unbearable. Five men in their early twenties were crashing into each other, barking and grabbing us, stumbling drunk, alcohol seeping from their pores. The rooms were barely eight feet square, windowless and stifling, containing only wooden planks topped with thin mattresses.

  “I can’t stay here!” Michael said. “This is terrible! We’re outta here!”

  We recrossed the road, settled onto a wooden bench in one of the warungs as the sky opened up, rain crashing down, and fell into conversation with a man next to us. He worked for the World Wildlife Fund, he said. Yes, there were some longhouses on the lake. Yes, he knew a guide, an Iban, who could take us. He made a call—cell service worked even here—and five minutes later Tamin appeared. He was short, with jet black hair, a scar running from his right eye to his lips, and black hipster glasses. “Come,” he said, and a few minutes later we were in a quiet little guesthouse of three simple rooms overlooking a commercial fishpond up the road. Raslan’s description of ten old longhouses on the lake was hyperbole. There were, Tamin said, two longhouses on the lake, both Iban, but only one was old, he said. He had a boat and he could take us. We negotiated a price, agreed to leave the next morning.

  Tamin appeared just after dawn and drove us in two shifts on his scooter to a rutted dirt road that ended at the edge of seeping black water. Sentarum
is less a lake than a giant floodplain, a netherworld of water and trees fed by the Kapuas River. It was now so high that half of Lanjak was flooded. We waded in, walking in knee-high water past submerged steps and flooded front porches of wood-framed houses on stilts, boats tied to their railings. I plodded along silently; Michael waved to everyone, shouted good mornings, posed for photos with strangers at every other house. As the water deepened, we came to a bright orange fiberglass speedboat with a fifteen-horsepower Johnson outboard. Michael took up almost the whole boat; Tamin and I squeezed in with him and we motored slowly through flooded, tree-lined streets. The houses ended and Tamin throttled up, and we roared over water jet black with tannin and on a wide lake, tendrils of mist snaking down low surrounding mountains.

  We crossed the lake and entered a river with no banks—a world of flooded treetops and shrubs, a green landless tangle. Brown-and-white proboscis monkeys with Karl Malden–like noses and long tails brachiated and crashed through the treetops. Flocks of white egrets covered the green tangles like Christmas ornaments. Blue kingfishers swept and hovered and darted. One minute we were hammering full power and the next we were gliding slowly through dangling vines and branches brushing against us and the boat, snaking passageways in which I would have been lost in moments. Then the green would open again and we’d be flying, banking and twisting, before entering the floating jungle again. Under a lowering sky we passed floating villages of Malayu, native ethnic Muslim Malays who had for centuries been living in Kalimantan, broad-shouldered eagles perched on fish traps and the gunwales of wooden boats. A pair of hornbills beat across the water, all body and giant beaks, an auspicious sign.