by Nigel Barley
– C. Wurtzburg, Raffles of the Eastern Isles
* * *
Halfway between Solo and Yogya is the town of Klaten. It is sprawling and dusty, a junction on the railway line, a place devoid of charm apart from the emerald greenness of the surrounding ricefields. It is home to many small businesses. A hundred Javanese skills flourish here. There are carvers and brass-casters, iron is worked in a small way. Beds, cupboards, mirrors, lamps and brass knick-knacks flow to the market of Yogya. Raffles set up a fort here, but it is striking nowadays for being the source of antique English furniture.
The wood comes from the mahogany trees planted along the roads by the Dutch. Every traffic accident brings a windfall to woodworkers and police, for the principal victims are the ancient trees – otherwise protected by law. Even bicycle accidents seem to knock down trees. It is like that fine tradition of the British Navy whereby every first shot received in warfare inevitably strikes the drink locker and disables further accounting.
The designs come from Chippendale pattern-books: chairs, tables, bureaux, tea-caddies. Inside an irrelevant modern factory, Javanese carvers sit crosslegged on the floor, carving freehand, as in their village – chatting amicably, eating, smoking. They produce perfect, alien furniture of stunning beauty with shrugging indifference. They would not give it house room. The finished pieces may be shipped to America via England to acquire a more acceptable provenance. Indonesians can make anything. The offcuts, too good to waste, are made into funerary urns for the ashes of American Christians, decorated with praying hands and round-eyed Western angels.
‘We spent the night at Klatten. In the small hours, finding myself unable to sleep, I left my stuffy room and walked to the gate of the fort, where I met a sergeant of the 14th who had likewise sallied forth in search of a little fresh air … For a few minutes we stood in silence side by side, looking out over the still palmtops to where, in the distance, Mount Merapi stood like a pyramid of jet against the silver moonshine, a flag of smoke from his lofty summit trailing right across the firmament.
“Rum country, this, ain’t it, sir?” the sergeant suggested pleasantly.
“How so exactly?” I queried.
“Well, sir, take that mountain there for a start, smoking away like ’ell, if you’ll excuse the expression. I suppose one o’ these days it’ll just spit out a few thousand tons of assorted muck and bury the ’ole countryside, and then go one smoking as calmly as if it ’adn’t done a mortal thing, same as you or me might go on smoking a cheroot after stamping on a beetle.”
“It’s done that several times in the past,” I told him.
“You know, sir,” he continued after another short silence, “that crowd of ’eathens at Jocya reminded me a bit o’ this ’ere mountain. There they was, as quiet as quiet, and yet you felt they was all on fire inside of ’em, and for two pins there’d be a blessed eruption … By God, sir, I give the salute to the Governor for the way ’e stood up to that little lot! I never seen a civilian before with that much guts, never in my mortal life.”
“Oh, there’s nothing soft about Mr Raffles,” I agreed heartily.
“In spite of his shyness and gentle ways, he’ll stand no nonsense.”’
– H. Banner, The Clean Wind: An Historical Novel of Romance and Adventure
* * *
I already knew where I would find Lukas, on the corner of the alun-alun, the big square that stands before the palace. As usual, he was drinking a potent drink of his own devising, beer mixed with strong, red wine. The square was shut off for the big festival of Mohammed’s birthday, sekaten. Inside was a fair and a circus. I had to pay to get in.
‘What’s this?’ I asked Lukas. ‘Now you charge people to come and see you, like the Sultan?’
He let out a roar and grabbed me. Small as he was, it was no problem to lift me off my feet. He was in his late twenties, very dark and oddly simian. We ran through the familiar litany. All was well. He had another son. His wife had gone back to her village to show it to her mother. He still worked at the palace as a guard. It had been a good year for the seduction of easy tourist women. The rains would come soon. He could not complain.
We sat and drank his potent emetic. Friends dropped by, a schoolteacher, a becak-driver. Some started playing chess. He was concerned that I should know he had finished work for the day. He would never drink before going on duty. The palace and its works were taken very seriously.
‘How is the batik, this year?’ I asked. He grinned. When Lukas grinned, his face nearly fell in half. His family had a small shop near the water-palace where they sold batik paintings. In his descriptions to tourist ladies, he was always careful to call it ‘an exhibition’ and speak of the young artists who desperately needed encouragement through their patronage.
‘This year was good! We have a new idea for paintings. Come, I show you.’ He took me by the hand and we set off towards the kraton, picking his way through the stalls, pausing to shout greetings and jokes to friends in the crowd. A newspaper seller hawked his wares. ‘Good news! An accident. Many killed!’
We sidled through the palace gates and crunched across the outer court, strewn – I recalled – with sand from the sea-bed, home of the Sultan’s mystical wife, Loro Kidul, goddess of the South Sea. The tinkle of gamelans announced that the palace dancers were practising their stealthy art in one of the inner courtyards behind the high stone walls. A palace guide, one of the intercultural pimps, was spieling to tourists.
‘This cage you see is not for the animal. Is for the baby. A Javanese child must not touch the ground for eight months. We put in a little money, a pencil, flowers. If the child touches the money, it will be rich. Flowers make a girl a good mother, a boy handsome. Does it work? Look at me, haha!’
Ramrod-straight guards nodded graciously to Lukas and obliged tourists to remove their hats with peremptory gestures. But, who knows, perhaps behind the motionless facade there was wiry Javanese anarchy barely kept in check by rigid etiquette.
We passed the museum, crammed with a huge accumulation of Western junk – hideous lamps, statues, humidors.
Another guide intoned, ‘The late Sultan died in Washington DC. – the place of his death more important than the fact.
The art gallery. The young Sultan in blank youthful beauty and the dignity of old age, accepting the surrender of the Dutch. He sits impassive. The Dutch bow and fawn. Curiously, I had seen the original photograph of the scene. This was no victor’s adjustment of the facts. It really was like that.
‘Why have you come back?’ Lukas scanned my face. I told him about Raffles.
He dropped my hand like a hot potato.
‘Raff-lesh?’ he said, shocked, as if I had mentioned something unseemly. ‘Raff-lesh was here. He was a bad man, a very bad man. He attacked the palace, killed many Yogya people, looted the royal treasures. Ooh, he was such a bad man!’
* * *
Raffles did not expect the treaty with Yogya to hold. The small force he had was already mostly committed to dethroning the Sultan of Palembang, one of the major sultans of Sumatra, who had petulantly repudiated British claims to his loyalty and massacred the Dutch inhabitants of his town. He did not know he was being an archetypal Oriental despot. Gillespie was dispatched and rapidly ‘reduced’ the town. The wily Sultan kept the letters he had received from Raffles. Later, drawing on another demonology, he would be able to convince the Dutch it was that English devil that had put him up to it.
Raffles used the disagreement to annex the tin-rich island of Bangka. We see him, for the first time, greedy to seize an asset. He was desperate to find an export commodity for Java and to construct a defensive position in case Java were returned to the Dutch. When the tin proved unsaleable, with typically deft footwork he used it to issue a tin coinage. Bangka had been ceded to the British government. If Java were returned to the Dutch, Bangka would remain British. In a neat genuflection towards his patron, he renamed its largest town of Montok: it was now Minto.
&n
bsp; * * *
We walked through the aromatic back lanes of the palace. Forty thousand people are said to live there in a tumble of whitewashed houses loud with bougainvillaea, reminiscent of the Mediterranean. We approached the water-palace, proof that Disneyland had always had a place in Indonesia. It was an improbable structure, a ruined European mansion seeming to float on the water, with underground tunnels, a mosque. It was variously explained as the place where the Sultan received the goddess of the South Sea, where he dallied with concubines, where he asserted his Oriental mastery over water and ritual purity.
I knew it was a favourite prop in Lukas’s hobby of seducing Western women. He pointed at it.
‘Raffles destroyed the water-palace,’ he declared unctuously.
‘No he didn’t. It was already in ruins when he arrived. There’s even a drawing of it at the time.’
‘All right, maybe it was the Dutch. They bombed it again in 1948.’
If they had, I rather suspected the planes had been British. But Lukas couldn’t keep up post-colonial resentment for long. It was just a hat he popped on from time to time to see how it looked. He laughed.
‘It’s prettier as a ruin, anyway. Here’s the house.’
The family lived in a small structure nearby. It was clear from its form that in Dutch times it had been a stable. The walls blazed with batik paintings in glaring chemical colours. Light ricocheted off the intense reds and blues. A little boy, with the angelic face of all sleeping children, was stretched out on the floor, a thin mattress under him. Lukas bent down and grinned a Lukas grin, giving the child an Oriental kiss, a gentle rubbing of his nose from cheek to ear while inhaling. He held the limp form up for me to see. The child frowned and batted in sleep with one hand.
‘Wah! My son! You remember him?’
‘Yes, but last time he was just a worm.’
He stared at the boy, entranced, incredulous at the magic of his own engendering, then folded him gently down.
‘This is the new thing.’ He pointed at the wall. Most of the paintings were typical tourist nonsense, dancing girls, peasants labouring in the ricefields, Borobodur temple at night, one curiously of pyramids. But there in the middle was, indeed, something new. It was Rambo, or rather a cross between Che Guevara and Rambo. The gun blazed. The moronic mouth snarled with perfect dentition. The hair raged in some imaginary wind. The eyes gleamed an insane blue.
‘We sell dozens.’ He took my hand again and led me to the next room, pausing to turn one light off and another on. In Indonesia, electricity is expensive. In front of us was another face. It was based on the famous official photograph that had hung in millions of Indonesian homes. In immaculate uniform, medals and songkok hat, it was Bung Karno.
We stared at it in silence.
‘That’s for the domestic tourists. Foreigners won’t touch it. I grew up looking at that. Bung Karno too was here – in Yogya.’ He slipped an arm kindly around my shoulders. ‘Send me a photograph of your Raff-lesh and maybe I will do him in batik – if there’s a demand. But I think the Dutch would not buy it and neither would Yogya people.’
* * *
The Sultan of Yogya had been misbehaving. He had strangled a number of the principal chiefs of the country and intrigued with the Sultan of Solo. Now he was building up his defences and refusing to keep the terms of the treaty. It all meant trouble.
Raffles decided he must act to prevent the whole island rising. Most of the army was still absent in Sumatra. Nevertheless, he set off, pausing only to throw a ball to celebrate the King’s birthday. Luckily, Gillespie returned in time to rendezvous with Raffles, bringing a small force with him. They had less than 1,500 troops against an estimated 11,000 within the kraton and the whole army of the Sultan of Solo without. They were surrounded.
‘“The City of Pilgrimage”, as Jogja became known, numbered 170,000 inhabitants. In the next few weeks [of 1946], the entire government moved inland and the population swelled to 600,000 … We operated more like a band of thieves than a government … We also had no money … The only way to get what we desperately needed was to smuggle. And everybody smuggled for the Republic. My current Ambassador to Japan ran sugar. My former Ambassador to America ran opium … The one commodity we had was raw materials. Our Minister of Economics arranged to export goods to Britain, and Britain guaranteed the shipments’ safety from Dutch buccaneering on the high seas … The Sultan of Jogja was a major liaison between the Dutch-held capital of Djakarta and the Republican-held capital of Jogjakarta … At one point the total capital of the Republic of Indonesia was transferred into gold bricks, stuffed in shoe boxes and soap dishes and hidden in the back room of the Sultan’s office … In December 1948, the Dutch dropped a package of Christmas cheer down my chimney. At 5.30 in the morning of Sunday the 19th, they bombed Jogjakarta … One hour of heavy bombing interlaced with rocket-firing P–51’s and the Dutch had captured the airport. Low-flying Spitfires strafed the streets lengthwise and crosswise. The heavens were black with airplanes. One thousand paratroopers took the post office and radio station, and set fire to the automobiles … By noon Jogja was surrounded.’
– C. Adams, Soekarno: An Autobiography
* * *
‘We will go to the Social Ministry,’ said Lukas, surveying the swimming pool. It was a very small pool, little better than a birdbath but, for once, it was not full of Chinese. This time it was crammed with raucous Australian children. ‘White goats,’ Lukas called them. But the Chinese were not to be spared.
‘This guest-house is owned by Chinese,’ he declared irritably. He paused to run an eye over an Australian air-hostess type. ‘I have,’ he confessed, ‘been drinking too much milk lately. It is bad for my health. It is time to drink a little chocolate.’
‘What?’
He gave me a pitying look. ‘Indonesian girls – chocolate.’ He held out his arm and pinched the brown skin. ‘Chocolate.’ He pinched mine. ‘Milk.’
‘Oh, I see. But what has that got to do with the Social Ministry?’
A boy came out from the woodshop next door, sat down at our feet and began varnishing the headboard of a bed, humming to himself as he worked.
‘There is a brothel there. You pay 500 rupiahs to get in, and if you see a girl you like you come to terms. It is very clean; they are inspected. I will take you on my motorbike. That, too, is very clean.’
‘Mmm. I can’t. I’m seeing a librarian from the palace. Anyway, this is work. I could only go to your brothel if Raff-lesh had been there.’
Lukas grinned. ‘But of course he did. In those days there was no television. What else could he do? Of course your Raff-lesh went there.’
Raffles joyfully rogering away, a cheroot clenched casually in his teeth? Or Raffles smoothly efficient in his adultery, sex as an aperitif, a substitute for the sherry inadvertently left behind in Bogor? I couldn’t see it. That was more Gillespie. Raffles had been so … unbendingly upright, despite the crooked back.
‘I bet he didn’t. I bet he worked every night, believing he was making life better for people just like you. But,’ I recalled irrelevantly, ‘when Bung Karno founded the PNI he recruited 670 whores from Bandung. He said they were the best spies and always had them greet Dutch officials by name when they were out walking with their wives – psychological warfare.’
We idly watched the boy sloshing on the varnish. Suddenly, I realized what he had on his fingers.
‘Excuse me. On your fingers – aren’t those … condoms?’ He looked puzzled and stared at his hand openmouthed, as babies do.
‘Yes, yes.’ Lukas jumped up delightedly. ‘Condoms. You’re wearing condoms!’
The boy blushed. ‘The boss gives them to us. He’s Chinese and doesn’t waste money. Rubber gloves cost money, but he gets these free from the government. What are they?’
Lukas jigged up and down on the spot, laughing. ‘Condoms,’ he roared. ‘You put them on your dick so girls don’t get pregnant. I only wear them with my wife. I don’t want he
r getting pregnant.’
The boy pushed his hair back out of his eyes. ‘Oh. Well, no wonder I don’t know. I’ve never had sex.’
Lukas’s laughter died on his lips. The air went out of him like a popped balloon. We had laughed at a man slipping on a banana skin only to find he was really hurt. Lukas looked aghast, a man whose whole philosophy had been called into question.
‘How old are you? Eighteen, nineteen? Never? Why not? What’s the problem?’
The boy sloshed on. ‘Do you know what they pay me? Two thousand rupiahs a day [60p]. Girls won’t look at you unless you’ve got money.’
Lukas was enraged. ‘But that’s crazy. You’re a handsome boy. They’ll do it for nothing. You can always have a tourist woman. Anyone can have them. They will pay you. But perhaps you do not speak English? This is dreadful.’
He turned to me, fired with moral fervour. ‘We must take him to the Ministry.’ It sounded very proper. He began to dig wildly through his pockets, throwing money on the ground – totting as he went.
‘They will want two thousand from me because they know I like to play for an hour or more. But they have good hearts. A young boy like that. They will know he is excited. Two strokes and whoosh – all over! Perhaps they will do him for fifteen hundred. There is not enough money.’ He looked at me pointedly.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not going and I’m certainly not paying for a total stranger to go to the Ministry. You must be crazy. Anyway,’ I offered a little desperately, ‘perhaps he isn’t after sex but love.’
The boy looked up. His legs were trembling. ‘No,’ he said hoarsely, ‘I want sex.’
Lukas was now very, very serious. He was whispering, angry almost. ‘I have never asked you for anything.’ It was true. ‘You are a friend. But this is keamalan, an act of charity. He is a fellow human being. He suffers. We must help him. It is a moral duty.’
‘But …’
He bit his lip. ‘Yes, yes. You are right. It is wrong to seek money and give nothing in return.’
