by Nigel Barley
Kessel grinned in cheerful innocence and swerved to avoid a buffalo cart, honking after the event. For him this was all a big joke. “We sent one of our traders along with that passport to book a passage in the name of Pieter Blaamo, direct to Hong Kong, non-stop and a load of luggage with that name has been delivered to the ship. At the last minute, our man will use the ticket for one of his company employees so it’s no loss. It doesn’t have to go on anyone’s balance sheet – sorry.” He bit his tongue and took his eyes off the road to perform facial melodrama for Lauterbach who had eyes for nothing but the road. “You see? They’ve already got me thinking like some blasted bureaucrat. Anyway, with a bit of luck the Brits and the Japs’ve crammed the ship with their own men and arranged a reception offshore. They won’t be worrying about sailings from Surabaya now. They’ll be thinking how to spend the reward money. Teach them a lesson. As we say here in Java, it’s not over till someone bangs the big gong. So when you get to Surabaya our chaps will look after you. Since they’re all interned they’ve got nothing else to do but sit around polishing their navigational instruments.”
They advanced thunderously down the centre of the road in a plume of dust, most local forms of life scattering to either side. Only chickens were stupid enough to avoid a car by running down the road instead of across it. At this hour, the flow of the traffic was against them into the heart of the city, a mix of pedestrians, bicycles and lumbering carts that occasionally threatened to prevent their passage entirely. As it thickened, Kessel cursed and honked but did not slow, merely reduced the margin of safety. “Mustn’t miss that train,” he urged, as if intending to smack into it and looked at his watch.
Through the windscreen, Lauterbach saw terrified faces and leaping bodies and closed his own eyes in desperate self-protection. With a great wrench of the wheel and a squeal of brakes, Kessel brought the vehicle to a skidding stop. The engine rumbled on in the silence.
“Quick. You’ve just got time.” He reached into the back seat, threw a tiny bag at Lauterbach who stood waif-like. “Run man, run. The train’s about to leave.”
Tears in his eyes he turned and stumbled across gravel for the ticket office, slapped down money, slithered back the ticket and was pushed, blind, aboard by kind brown hands. A Javanese conductor led him to the first class compartment, indicated a reclining chair, bowed and withdrew, leaving him entirely alone in a luxury of leather, polished wood and crystal. He threw himself into it in misery.
Two beers later, he had revived a little. Of course, he suddenly realised, the chair was like those on the Emden and on his own ship before that and the attendant had packed him round with cushions as though he were a Meissen shepherdess likely to be broken in transit. One hand rested comfortably on the swollen money paunch, the other grasped the silken stem of the beer glass. Through the windows, it was suddenly a beautiful world.
The train hunched its shoulders and began the long, winding climb from the coastal heat to the cool uplands where copious rain and volcanic soils coaxed coffee, tea and other rich export crops from the slopes. It was this that had brought cold northerners here in the first place. Bananas and melons hung out over the narrow railway track like gold-embossed invitations to stay. Gorges crammed with wild forest scored the plantations, crossed, back and forth, by bridges that looked in the distance like matchstick models. Below them, on the plain, lay open fields where men and women, all slim and comely, smiled as they worked the rich grey mud and tiny children drove huge pacific buffalo that were the same size as the baleful tanks that would soon churn up the battlefields of Europe to raise a less happy crop. There is no green so intense and full of life as that of germinating rice shoots and Lauterbach let the colour wash over him like sunshine.
Soon they came to a wilder area of primeval forest and dark-stemmed bamboo where the Javanese lodged the humble gods that were important in their everyday lives. Here the villages were like islands in a green sea and the occasional felled trees lrose up like great beached vessels. Lauterbach glided effortlessly by, looking benignly down into their simple lives and moving on like some huge airborne albatross. When he raised his eyes, a range of great, conical volcanoes towered up into a blue sky, some smudged with smoke as before in Pagan, where, he imagined, the villagers were now wrestling with their Japanese grammar books. As he watched and sipped, an attendant came and knelt, polishing his soft civilian shoes, applying the polish with bare hands so that it became an act both of massage and of worship.
At the hill station of Bandung, they served him lunch, a thing of many small and delicious courses on a lacquer tray, fired with chilli and softened by luscious fruit. The waiter cleared and soothed and brought fresh coffee and a single beautiful orchid before he climbed down with his boxes at the next stop to return to Bandung by road and repeat his service the following day.
Yet another attendant appeared and showed the many unsuspected tricks the chair would yet perform, like some great wooden work of origami. All afternoon Lauterbach dozed in its extended, reswivelled comfort to the tympanic rattle and sway of the train and when darkness arrived, his contented cigar echoed the glow of the distant volcanoes and the chuffing engine until they drew into a station and stopped with a final clank and an extended sigh. Here they would all disembark and spend the night as at some medieval coaching inn.
This was the point at which the train from Surabaya to Batavia also stopped for the night and all the passngers, their minds pointing in opposite directions, slept in the same mock-Germanic Valhalla of a hotel, while the trains nested nose-to-tail outside. Lauterbach bathed by hissing lamplight under great beams, throwing gouts of water over his body with a giant’s wooden ladel. What would he be tonight at dinner, Belgian, Dutch, French?
“German,” said the woman across the table with a smile. “I would have said you were German not Dutch.” At this altitude the evening was quite fresh. The Dutch often built their houses with huge baronial fireplaces, even in the torrid swamps – being perhaps mentally unable to arrange furniture in a room without a hearth – but here it was a functional item and great logs crackled companionably, pouring out heat and nostalgic forest scents. Outside, moonbeams ghosted through pine trees like pale wolves.
Lauterbach mimed astonishment over the mashed potatoes, sticking firmly to Dutch. “From my childhood perhaps. I spent many holidays there, in Germany, just across the border.” He had constructed an elaborate tale of being the representative of a Dutch printing house travelling on business, specialising in visiting cards. No alas, he had no card on him having left all in his room. To more important things. She had huge dark eyes and golden skin. After three hundred years in the islands, many of the Dutch had blood spiced with exotic infusions. It had been a while since he had touched female flesh and several glasses of wine and dramatic firelight lent enchantment.
“You are travelling alone, madam?” His expression disapproved of her loneliness. Her loneliness was an affliction he could dispel.
She nodded. “I am joining my husband in Weltevreden. He is,” she locked her gaze with his “considerably older than myself and finds it hard to manage alone. My name is Anna.” The door had opened a crack. Lauterbach thrust his foot into it.
“He is a very lucky man, Anna. I should think any man would find it hard to manage without you. You should not have to travel alone.” There. He had smacked his stake down on the table. He watched the dice roll behind her eyes.
“What a sweet thing to say.” She tossed her hair. “I must be careful. I am unused to gallantry. It might sweep me off my feet. But I hope you are not telling me what to do.”
He smirked, rounded, hot eyes openly ogling. “I think you already know what to do.”
She swilled wine, the nasty, flavourless Sumatran vintage that the waiter had thrust on them. Her glugging oesophagus was delightfully physical, showed his number had come up, she was gulping down the bait with the wine. He was in.
He smirked and simpered, cooed and oleaginated. It ended, as it mus
t, quite early in her room where, it was alleged, she had a little brandy that would help two overtired travellers to sleep. She poured, offered, sprawled back, all rustling invitation, on the bed and then suddenly, as he rose to accept that invitation, her face and eyes hardened.
“And now, if you please,” she snapped, “you will give me two hundred dollars or I shall call the manager and accuse you of forcing your way in here and attacking me. Be warned,” she swigged brandy and hardened further, “I can be very convincing. Everyone says so. With a little effort on my part, it can even become a case of rape. I could rip the dress. I don’t want to. It’s a very good dress.”
Lauterbach was poleaxed. He sank back on his chair, mouth gaping, puffing air. Like all men, it had occasionally happened to him in the past that some women were immune to his charm. He could live with that. Not everyone had good taste. But this was a matter where, for the first time, something important was really impugned. There were many paths to shame and fortune but this one she had chosen was just not nice. The world, it seemed, was a worse place than even he had imagined. He was genuinely shocked. Bitterness flooded his simple heart. Like most habitual liars, he expected other people to be honest.
“Tell me,” he said deadpan, “If I pay you the money do I still get what I came here for?”
She threw back her head and laughed, a nice laugh, a little girl laugh. “My dear, you put it so sweetly. You are a man who keeps his eye on the ball. I think I might manage that. We shall see.”
“The husband,” he was stalling for time, trying to think, “in Weltevreden, all that was a lie?”
“Oh he’s real enough.” She turned and looked at him with the blatant self-confidence of a dog looking at a bone. “Now where’s the money?”
“The money,” he articulated carefully, “Is in my room. Would you like me to go and get it?”
She laughed again but this time it had a little more grit stirred into it and she did not bother to have a facial expression. “Like hell. We’ll go together. You’re not getting out of my sight till I get paid. I deserve it for those corny lines you made me listen to all evening. Jesus.”
They set off, he leading, she staying close as a wart, down the long, creaking corridor, lined with anonymous doors. This should have been a stirring place, dark, full of flickering shadows from the oil lamps, redolent of hot, adulterous, nocturnal paddings and pantings. Now he felt like a five year old being marched to school by a grim-faced mother. In the sudden silence, his unruly digestion gurgled and throbbed like steam in an old boiler.
“My God!” She poked him in the ribs. “Is that you? You should get that seen to.”
He would try to lure her into one of the communal rooms where she could not make a scene, sit down with the men, wait her out. He could not afford to do anything that would attract attention to himself. If the worst came to the worst he would have to pay.
“Oh no you don’t. Try to slip away and I scream the place down right now. I have a very loud scream. Everyone says so.”
There was a loud click and one of the doors was flung wide, casting a great square of light on the floor, framing the huge black shadow of a superman. The shape moved slowly out into the corridor and turned so that the light fell on its face.
“Potter!”
“Lauterbach!”
Potter strode forward, hand extended. “What are you doing here? Everyone said you were in Hong Kong.” He peered. “Ah. I see you’ve met Anna. Virtually a fixture on the Surabaya line. She has her own summer timetable, our Anna. Don’t worry she doesn’t speak English.”
“What? Who?” Lauterbach stood becalmed, eyes popping.
Potter seized Anna by both shoulders and pecked her familiarly on the cheek, turned her round in avuncular fashion and smacked her bottom in fluent Dutch. “Off you go my dear. There’s lots more in the bar just waiting for you. Big, rich planters.”
She pouted, hissed something that was a curse maybe in low Javanese but left with a little regretful flutter of the fingers and, as she turned the corner, was laughing.
“Hope I didn’t spoil anything. I take it you didn’t … weren’t going to …? Thought not. She doesn’t usually deliver. That’s not her style. Everyone knows Anna. Been at it for years, the dear old thing. She’s getting a little heavy in the thigh these days but can still pull the less discriminating punter. Sometimes …” he leaned forward confidingly, “she pulls the old Indian rape trick, you know, screams the place down, but only when she’s met a real stinker.”
“But Potter what are you doing here?” Lauterbach, bridling, whimpering, gushed boyish gratitude and looked more closely. This was a Potter reborn, not supine and downtrodden as in Batavia but energetic and confident, taking command, a man who still hoped for something from the world. Come to think of it, allowing for the pallid light, he wasn’t even pale any more. In fact, he was as brown as a berry.
“Butterflies, old man.” His eyes shone with passion. “Don’t you know? Really? I should have thought … This is the best spot in the whole of Java for butterflies. I’ve been out chasing them for days. There was a report that the Rafflesia had been sighted so naturally I just dropped everything, grabbed my net and ran. Terribly rare. Very exciting. As we speak butterfly buffs from all over Java are converging on this spot. By the end of the week, there won’t be a room to be had even for ready money. They’ll be pitching tents and Anna will be working her sweet little tush off.”
They adjourned to the bar. Potter introduced some skinny fellow lepidopterists who drank till late, recounting former butterflying triumphs and disappointments all over the archipelago, argued on the finer points of butterfly anatomy and grew tearful over sketches of the Rafflesia executed on beermats. Lauterbach pulled Potter aside and shouted confidentially above the barroom roar.
“Listen here, Potter. Can I ask a favour? Please don’t tell anyone you saw me here. It’s very important.”
Potter winked back knowingly, tapped the side of his blob of a nose, squinted still more. “Ah, like that is it? Don’t worry old man. I wouldn’t dream of it. Married man myself. I shan’t say a dicky bird about Anna and all, though I think there’s perhaps more to it than that.”
“You would do this for me though I am German?”
Potter considered him impassively, whisky clenched in his fist. “You’re also a member of my club,” he said firmly, like a man adopting the steep and rocky path of a difficult morality. He brightened and hitched up his trousers. “Anyway, if we see the Rafflesia who on earth would remember you?”
“Got you!” A heavy hand fell on Lauterbach’s shoulder and he jumped like a scalded cat. He turned, heart thumping, and looked into a face with deep blue eyes, cropped blond hair and a skin lined and cracked with laughter lines.
“Engelhardt!”
“Lauter— Oops. Sorry. Mustn’t say that word. Good to see you old friend.” They both laughed as they hugged. “Come on. Let’s get you off this railway station sharpish and under cover. We’ll cut through to the harbour and get straight out to the ship.
It was getting dark, the hour where in Europe people would be heading for hearth and home and the world closing down. But in Java that simply meant the night shift was getting into its stride. Barrows were being wheeled into position for the dispensing of chicken and soup and ice chips and crackers and stalls laid out for sarongs and shirts and hats and knickers, along every street in town. People were pumping up hissing lamps and firing charcoal and impaling meat onto skewers. In the teeming throng, no one heeded the two white men threading their way down to the water’s edge and the little skiff tied up to the muddy pole of a house. As they climbed aboard Engelhardt looked at his watch.
“Six twenty-eight,” He announced, holding up his finger. “Listen.” Lauterbach was not sure what he was to listen to – the birds, the waves, the distant sounds of the market or the plaintive call to prayer from a dozen mosques – and then suddenly the background rasping of a million crickets switched into prominenc
e as it was turned off, as though by a single mighty hand. Engelhardt smirked.
“Every evening. Regular as clockwork. Beats me how they do it. You might want to call that the hand of God.”
Captain Engelhardt had been in Dutch waters when war was declared and opted for internment in Surabaya rather than fall foul of the British navy lurking offshore. Making the best of a bad job, he had settled in on his ship the Widukind and imported his dumpling of a wife to add a pleasing dash of domesticity. Washing and potted plants dotted and shaded the searing foredeck and a strict regime that was wifely rather than nautical kept the old ship spotless amidst the filth and garbage of the reedy backwater to which she had been shifted, linked to the shore by a thin gangplank that was ceremonially lifted at sunset as the German flag was lowered. Since the cabins were too hot for human habitation at this season, Frau Engelhardt had caused a large rectangular tent to sprout on the main deck that caught every waft of breeze and they lived an airy windblown existence behind ghostly sheets of muslin. Meanwhile Engelhardt himself grew orchids, read books, smoked his pipe. He made a small but steady income letting out the cabins to merchants for the secure storage of material too fragile and precious for the normal local godowns.
“When my retirement comes,” he quipped, secateurs and watering can in hand, “I shall have to work much harder.”
