by Nigel Barley
Surprisingly it was, a long cool thatched building in a leafy garden with a verandah over the sea and a quiet and competent Malay manservant, Yusuf, who tweaked away dirty clothes, provided bathwater, sarongs, Malay jackets and slippers and then tucked up proferred dollars into his waistband to slip into town and find gin while his wife composed a pungent curry that seared out all fatigue and pain. By the end of the evening, gathered in light around the oil lamp, they were human again – which meant that Diehn began to boast of his wealth, Schoenberg of his travels and Jessen of his ability to split a coconut with his bare hands.
Lauterbach rose, movements made oddly elegant by Malay dress, and sidled into the kitchen, letting himself down cross-legged beside bony-bodied Yusuf. He smiled, lay his cigarettes gently down on the black floorboards between them.
“Mari, rokok sama-sama. Let us smoke a little together.”
In half an hour he knew most of the scandal of the little town. He knew that the Mr Herman had not come to this backwater seeking either the power to make decisions nor the hard work to engage his free time. The absent District Officer detested Germans, having made the mistake of marrying one, a sour widow, whose alleged fortune had proved illusory. He would be away not for days but for weeks, enjoying a rest from her tongue. They would do well to be gone before his return. There was a comparatively reliable Chinese skipper in the harbour who planned to sail for the Kangsar river in Sumatra the next day. All these facts added together made a plan. Lauterbach bestowed more dollars, shared more cigarettes …
At dawn the next day a large junk stole out of harbour bearing six passengers in freshly-laundered clothes. Lauterbach almost expected to find four dollars in his top pocket. This time they took fruit and water with them and sarongs to wear against daytime heat and nightime cold. Yusuf waved them a warm goodbye.
“How long catchee Kangsar?”
The Chinese captain shrugged thin shoulders, spat, scratched. “Bye bye. Depend.” He shouted orders to the crew, four obvious mass murderers and two tiny, terrified lads who looked about twelve so were probably in their twenties.
“Where map?” As a navigation officer he could work it out for himself.
“No map. Me already knowee way. Ship knowee way.” He pointed vaguely at the eyes Chinese paint either side of the bow so that their vessels do not get lost. Perhaps it did know the way but not, it seemed, the tides. The vast daily surge of green water linking the two great oceans of the world was flowing against them. It was hopeless to continue until the tide changed. They put in at one of the small uninhabited islands, ducking into the bleak mangrove trees, and settled down patiently to play cards and feed the mosquitoes. The captain, a gambler like many Chinese, nodded in approval.
“Me play you for passage money,” offered Lauterbach insinuatingly. The captain tittered and waved the offer away, settled an opium pipe in his mouth and lay back to doze while the boys set lines for fish.
It was not a boring afternoon. The sea was alive with British ships, cruising aimlessly round the islands, snuffling gently in the bays and inlets. The finer points of territoriality were clearly set in abeyance in their eagerness to capture mutineers – and Lauterbach. The Germans took time off to bathe at the mouth of a stream that flowed down from the interior.
“Are there sharks?” inquired Lauterbach anxiously. He had always worried about sharks.
“No shark,” the captain yawned.
“You sure?”
“Die-die I sure”.
They swam langourously, splashed each other in a grotesque mockery of exuberance they were far from feeling, luxuriated in cool, deep water. When they were back on the boat, Lauterbach asked again.
“Why no shark?”
The captain pointed at the bank. “I tellee. Here no shark. You safe. Here plenty big crocodile, big teeth, big tail, plenty hungry, chasee shark away.”
At dusk the tide changed and the British ships grew tired and went home. As soon as the coast was clear they clapped on all sail and dashed straight for Sumatra. They awoke in a chill dawn to explosions. The British sending shots across their bows? No. The Chinese crew letting off firecrackers to chase away devils that might impede their progress up the great river and leave them fast on the bar. They had clearly arrived in Sumatra.
They river itself was broad and powerful, the colour of cocoa, so they hugged the muddy banks to take advantage of the slack water and soon a settlement of neat white bungalows appeared through the great trees that reached out over the main stream. Diehn shouted to the captain to go ashore. The captain argued heatedly with him and looked at Lauterbach seeking support. This was not, he knew, the moment to defend his leadership so Lauterbach withdrew to peacefully admire the boys’ catch of fish and let them be, railing at each other in mutual incomprehension. Finally Diehn leapt in irritation from the boat and splashed arrogantly towards the shore. He paused for a moment, then plunged into the thick reeds by the river’s edge, crashing through with great sweeps of his arms. After a couple of minutes he reappeared on the bank, looked about with hands on hips, climbed a bit further and called out. Then he disappeared. The Chinese master settled to his pipe and laughed like a cat. Lauterbach looked at him curiously. Then suddenly Diehn reappeared, an expression of indescribable terror over his face as he flailed at the reeds and ran panic-stricken back towards the water, plunged into the mud and wallowed, panting and swallowing back to the water and the boat, shouting now for them to put out further from the bank. As he lay on deck, whimpering and looking fearfully over one shoulder, the reeds by the water parted again and a sinister head emerged, wearing the peaked hood of a Seville penitent and surveyed them through holes hacked in the fabric. Then it slowly pulled off the hood to display a face that was no face, unfleshed bone and rotted cheeks. As they stared in horror, there emerged a band of the most appallingly filthy and diseased humanity, some lacking fingers, others toes, others whole limbs. Lepers. This was a leper colony. They waved their seeping deformities cackling at the boat, beckoned them back, though whether in supplication or mockery was hard to tell. A horrible fecal stench engulfed them all. The captain threw back his head and roared with unchecked laughter. Lauterbach turned away.
“Poor souls,” he said, and smiled to himself.
A steady needling rain set in as they sailed on up a river that seemed to despair of further settlement until, at dusk, they rounded a bend and saw before them a desolate village with a tattered Dutch flag and a large, seagoing junk, a three-master, moored by a jetty.
“Perhaps we should land here,” Lauterbach suggested mildly to Diehn. No reply was necessary for a sudden squall picked them up and rammed them up hard against the ironwood stern of the junk, toppling most of the crew into the water. The master laughed again.
A figure surveyed them from the landing stage, not it appeared, a District Officer but a lowly customs official, the usual half-caste of these backwoods settlements, his golden beauty mocked by the contempt of both Dutch and Sumatrans. He greeted them with a handful of fanned-out forms in Dutch.
“Welcome to Pulu Mudra.” The smile was flawless. “Your papers?”
Diehn thrust out his chin, brushed the forms aside. “Never mind all that nonsense. We have no papers. We are German nationals and demand to be forwarded to the German consul in Padang.”
The little brown man drew on a cheroot carefully. He had built up a good three inches of ash, poised delicately to fall, and he considered it with absorption. Lauterbach knew he could make all this last as long as he liked. Grossly underpaid, like all Dutch officials, he expected remuneration either to do his job or to fail to do it as regulations required. He slipped the cheroot back between his lips and puffed truculence. “Demand is it? Without papers you are illegal immigrants, belligerants in time of war, and must return promptly to your point of entry to the Dutch East Indies to await proper procedures.” He abruptly tapped off the ash, ground it viciously underfoot and turned as if to go.
Lauterbach sighed and dug in
the cummerbund pocket and laid a hand gently on his arm. “Mynheer,” he urged softly. “My friend has perhaps not made our case entirely clear.” With both hands, he proferred old-dog-eared papers wrapped in oilskin. “My seaman’s papers. We are, you see, shipwrecked sailors, in distress, cast upon your compassion. Pray examine the details and satisfy yourself as to our status.”
The official opened the package with clumsy ill-temper and a large banknote fluttered to the floor. He bent without shame, still reading, and slipped it into his side pocket as if not looking at it made it invisible to everyone else.
“It seems to me,” he inclined his head and returned the papers, “that your case exceeds my own low powers. I have no choice, therefore, but to forward you on to Padang immediately, to competent authorities who will decide what is the appropriate action to take.” With a brisk salute he stalked away jauntily, pluming smoke, his hand in his pocket.
Padang was a mere four hundred miles away, the other side of the island, through a complicated and hostile geography of jungle and mountains and rivers. To go by sea involved a circuitous journey around the whole of Sumatra, some two thousand hazardous miles, during which they would be at risk of detection by the British. The only viable route was to follow the river as far as possible and then engage the long, onerous trek overland.
They set off the very next morning in two light dugout canoes that bobbed on the water like corks. Lauterbach drove them mercilessly. He knew that time was against them. In the enervating heat, they would soon have neither the willpower nor the energy to undertake such a trip. Each had within him an accumulated stock of goodness that was running down, bled by the tension and exertion, and young Thompson’s would be the first to give way. They had to be got rapidly to the point where it was easier to go forward than back or they would be stuck in this god-forsaken nest for ever.
Four cheerful Malay paddlers came with the boats, singing back and forth in four-lined pantun verses, extemporised question and answer as they went. The best, those so clever that they disrupted the paddling by an explosion of guffaws, would be remembered for use at weddings where the two sides celebrated their union by battling verbally across the marriage feast. Once they were clear of the settlement, the river tired of bravado and refined itself to a narrow rivulet over gravel, with occasional rocks standing adamant in mid-course. The trees crept down on either hand, purple and red with flowers, and lianas even reached across from side to side to serve as bridges for the troops of solemn-faced monkeys who cooed their resentment at this incursion into their domain. On the banks, the eyes of occasional crocodiles glittered with cold malice. The boatmen delighted in splashing them, whooping, to drive them – hissing and snapping – zigzagging away. Lauterbach sat very still, his gaze fixed on theirs, hanging on to the rocking boat for dear life as the laughing Malays had their fun. Later still, they surprised little bears, wild boar, even a midget rhinoceros, come down to the river to drink and the air danced with a million fireflies that flitted over the water like tiny golden flames. Thompson, already sickening, recited German poetry, wet-eyed. Diehn loudly regretted the absence of a gun. Lauterbach fell asleep and dreamed bitterly of sausage and chewy dishes cooked from thick, stringy tripe.
After five sunburnt days they reached Pulu Lawan, home to a sultan of great piety and power, who turned out to be an unassuming little man who lived in a simple thatched house much like those of his little subjects. A Lilliputian air reigned over the whole town and the Germans felt themselves to be clumsy well-natured giants who put their feet through bamboo floors, crashed into low doorways and snapped any piece of furniture they sat on. Even the svelte Malay paddlers seemed huge. By some mystery a shipment of American denim overalls, cut to fit children, had recently arrived up-river and made a sensation in the town so that all persons of fashion and quality were dressed in them.
The etiquette in the palace was long and tedious, made yet more irksome by the fact that the sultan was quite innocent of the very existence of Germany, the fact of a war or the nature of a warship so that every explanation required another ten. But his smallness and Lauterbach’s girth spoke to each other and the little man hugged him ecstatically and offered the use of the rest house, built to Dutch dimensions, for the night.
“Only you must be careful.” He wagged his finger “The last person to stay there was eaten by grandfather …”
Lauterbach laughed and dismissed the words, thinking he must have misunderstood owing to the odd local accent. Could cannibalism still be endemic in this backjungle and tolerated as a mere eccentricity in an endearing elderly relative – and all this so close to a Dutch station? Surely not. But when they arrived at the clean, decent building, escorted by most of the town, the guardian pointed out with great pride deep clawmarks shredding one end of the verandah and the hole ripped in the sidescreen through which a tiger had entered to tear apart and eat the last guest. “A local man of the lower class only. Fortunately,” he comforted. Lauterbach remembered then that the Malays often referred to the tiger with the respect name of “Grandfather.” Members of the crowd stepped forward and showed wounds they too had incurred from the tigers of the area who not only lurked in the forest but came into their homes and bore away their children. One displayed a brown back scored with pink slashes like pork crackling. But what had these people done? Had they shot the tigers? They all shook their heads and looked shocked. That would bring great bad luck. There was only one thing to do, give the tiger gifts, address it most respectfully and ask it to leave. Now Lauterbach joined Diehn in regretting the lack of a gun.
“Lauterbach. Lauterbach.” He was being carried around on the shoulders of a pack of Indians. Very black skin. Very white teeth. The teeth became long and sprouted pointed incisors and the faces bunched and whorled into those of striped tigers and roared at him. He woke with a start, sweat flowing down his chest. There was something rattling at the door.
“Lauterbach. Lauterbach.”
If it spoke it could not be a tiger. The voice came from out there in the moonlight, where the tigers lived. It was still dark. His internal clock said it was about two in the morning and no time for social calls. He rose, wrapped his sarong tighter and peered out through the shutters. A glittering eye peered back at him.
“Oberleutnant Lauterbach? I am Distict Officer Filet. My man at Pulu Mudra sent word that you were an escaped German officer and travelling in this direction. Although Holland is neutral I have always had many German friends and I should like to help you.”
The barricades of furniture, erected against tigers, were dragged away from the doorway. Sleeping forms were slapped back to wakefulness. Schoenberg stood terrified in a corner and dithered as Lauterbach flung wide the door and grandly beckoned Filet into what was, after all, his own house. He entered, looked around at the soldierly disorder and smiled, hooked a foot round a chair and dragged it forward to sit and look down on the men still on the floor. As he sat, he let out a long sigh.
“I always wondered why my parents sighed when they sat down,” he smiled. “Now I am old enough to know.” He rubbed sore legs. Filet was a dapper little man in his early fifties, blond moustache, cropped hair, wearing a travel-stained colonial uniform. The sun had dried and creased his skin as though from too much squinting into a bright light but his movements were spare and tight so that he exuded a cool sense of control. “I have chased you all the way from Pulu Mudra in my launch. Thing is, you can carry on the way you are but frankly you’ll find it pretty tough going. Not a regular route you see. What I suggest is you all come back to PM with me and we can try to get you the steamer connection to Padang. If not, I invent some emergency that takes me up to Siak by boat and from there you can save a good ten days’ trekking time over the mountains to Padang. Much easier going too. What do you think? Got any gin there?”
A glass was pressed into his hand that he sank in one swallow, followed by a belch. Perhaps he used to wonder why his parents did that too. Diehn was already there fussing, sti
cking his chin out and his nose into things that did not concern him.
“Impossible!” he snorted. “Why go back? We have come too far to go back now. There is the question of morale amongst the men. To turn back would prove fatal.”
It was true. It had been Lauterbach’s intention to get them quickly beyond the point of no return and he thought he had done it. Young Thompson was lying there, spent, in a fever. He had eaten nothing all day. But then there was also the awkward matter of man-eating tigers already licking their chops at the thought of Lauterbach and there was the chance of cutting ten days off that damned trek if they went back with Filet. He could not see himself hauling his bulk up sheer rockfaces by his fingernails in this stinking climate. With the District Officer on their side, they should have no more annoying local problems. He would make their ways smooth, a doddle.
“I absolutely agree,” he nodded gravely. “We must at all costs press on. But … there is poor young Thompson there to consider. I can neither commit him to such a course nor abandon him to fend for himself. An officer’s first duty is to his men. I shall return to PM with him and take my chances. It is a matter of honour. The rest of you must of course go on.”
They collapsed into argument. No, no he could not make such a sacrifice. This was not the moment for solitary heroics. But Lauterbach was immovable in his virtue and finally it was agreed that Schoenberg would accompany them so that he should not entirely lack for adult company. As they strode off towards the river the darkness reverberated with the roar of a hungry tiger, away up there in the hills. Bold Lauterbach pushed his way to the front and led down the path, apparently heedless of danger, leaving Thompson to bring up the rear. After many years in the East, he knew as a sure and certain fact that tigers lying in ambush always went for the last in a line of men.
