by Nigel Barley
The myth of origin of Freemasonry deals with the murder of Hiram Abiff, the master architect of Solomon’s temple. Becoming a master Mason, as Raffles did, involves identification with Hiram to the point of undergoing ritual death and resurrection through a Masonic handshake. The builders of ancient temples, whether Anglo-Saxons, ancient Egyptians or Jews, are all attracted into the sphere of honorary, Masonic ancestry. Within their structures is held to be embodied a secret, symbolic knowledge so that buildings may be ‘read’.
They become a riddle to be solved, like the Sphinx. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining Raffles’ unusual enthusiasm for Borobodur and his need for precise surveys. Its builders had, after all, been fellow Masons.
The discovery of ancient temples had a rather less than salutary effect on the Indian troops. This massive proof of former Hindu-Javanese alliance encouraged them to consider throwing their lot in with the local rulers and massacring their British officers. The plot was discovered. Raffles intervened personally, re-established good relations with the sultans and revived the trust of the troops. Critics carped sourly that not enough people got hanged.
* * *
Lukas drove with a good deal of panache. He would creep up behind buses, engine growling like a tiger, and suddenly flail out, swooping, screaming alongside long enough to ensure a large truck was coming the other way. At the last moment he would execute a manoeuvre, not with the handlebars but more by a deft whiplash of the buttocks so that we ended up precisely one inch in front of the bus.
‘Prambanan?’ he suggested – the ancient Hindu temple. ‘I like the elephants.’
‘Anywhere.’
We approached through a mass of stalls selling Borobodur T-shirts, carvings of Ganesha, Garuda birds, Coca-Cola. There were, as yet, no Rambos. Barbed-wire entanglements surrounded the temple itself, increasing the sense of ruin. It was still being patiently reassembled from a scattering of carved remains. In the shrines was a smell of fetid Western armpits, exposed in their hundreds, as cameras were raised to snap. Some workmen were scrubbing at masonry with toothbrushes as though being punished in the mindless fashion of the army. Touching fingers had left a high-tide mark on the legs of the figures, so that they seemed at first sight to be wearing Wellington boots. The workmen were removing the Wellington boots.
* * *
Raffles saw himself as a man of reason, a man of business – also a man of vision. He liked to think ahead. His enemies would call him a dreamer. He was always very careful to distinguish between the territories and rights acquired on behalf of the British authorities and those he held in lieu of the Dutch. One day, the Dutch might take Java away from him again. But they would only get back what they had given. The rest would stay British.
In the meantime, he was eager to unlock as many of the doors the Dutch had closed against him as possible. There was an idea niggling at the back of his head, as it turned out a very silly idea – Japan. He would gain access to the trade of Japan by sending the Emperor a white Siamese elephant, a Batavian almanac, 92 plants, 20 sheep, 10 birds, a carpet, a magnet, a table watch, cloths various, some Persian leather, 4 civet cats, a day-and-night spy-glass, 10 decanters and several pounds of ground Egyptian mummy – trusted panacea.
Even before he gained control of Java, he had plotted to send Leyden on a mission to the Shogun. Japan at that time was totally closed to outside trade except through a small, closely watched Dutch factory near Nagasaki. The Japanese knew the dangers of foreign trade. They knew it led to foreign domination and colonization, and they were particularly hostile to the British. Raffles thought the Japanese might not know about the change of government in Java and that a daring imposture might deliver Japanese trade into British hands and so provide an outlet for Bangka tin and British woollens. He would recruit the Dutch at the Nagasaki factory to pretend nothing had altered. The captains of his ships would be nominally Dutch. English sailors would give themselves out as Americans. The Japanese would not even know they were trading with England. After many delays, two ships sailed with a cargo of tin, lead, sugar, pepper, cloves, nutmegs, woollens and cottons.
There was much prevarication in Japan. The Dutch in charge of the factory were uncertain whether to hand it over to Raffles’ men. The Japanese were not sure whether they even wanted to know what was going on or not.
Eventually, a return cargo of copper and camphor was sent back to Batavia, but the bickering between Java, Bengal and the Dutch in Japan lasted for years, until Holland was able to resume the trade itself. The voyage was eminently suitable to fuel a dispute about Raffles’ wisdom or folly, since it could be made to show a reasonable profit or a loss, depending on how the accounts were done. Accountancy was even then flexible. For years it had been important that the Company be able to dissimulate how much money it was losing, since it was technically bankrupt.
The saddest part was the elephant. It was returned to Java, where it disappears below the surface of history. Not that it was unappreciated. Japanese artists flocked to the harbour to view the exotic beast and portray it in their art. Its presence was regarded by the politically acute as a wonderful omen. But for once, Raffles was short of exactly the sort of nuts-and-bolts information that he always prided himself on obtaining from local informants. He did not know that there was no dock in Japan and that cargo had to be unloaded into boats. There was no boat large enough to take an elephant. Elephants, he might have argued, can swim. But what they cannot do is dive.
It was not a total loss for Raffles. At heart he was, after all, a true scholar, with the scholar’s ability to turn a dead end into a learned article. So he wrote up the Japanese in a paper and delivered it at the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences.
* * *
The Buddhist temple at Borobodur is one of the few wonders of the world that does not disappoint on closer acquaintance. A whole, massive hill is encased in stone, arranged in tiers, carved and engraved. It has a quality of inevitability, of obsessiveness. Each part echoes the shape of the whole. It is impossible not to want to climb it.
At the summit sit the Buddha figures in poses of mantric significance. Many have a line around the neck like a choker. Thieves find it convenient to smash through the necks and sell the heads to the art-lovers of the West. The village stone-carvers are constantly in work making good the depredations of the headhunters.
Raffles may have felt reverential about the temple, but many visitors do not. At the bottom of the hill an American was arguing bitterly about having to pay 200 rupiahs (6p) to enter. At the top, a group of Jakartans were climbing the stonework like a rockface.
A little old Javanese lady accosted me, poking imperiously with her umbrella. It was a batik umbrella, carefully chosen to match her dress.
‘You,’ she said. ‘Give us a hand here.’ She indicated one of the Buddhas encased in a cage of stone latticework. ‘I can’t reach the hand of the Buddha through there to get his sakti, his divine force. You’ve got long arms. Reach in there for me and touch his palm while I hold your other hand. Sakti is like electricity. It will flow through you to me.’
‘No,’ amended an elderly man, probably her husband. ‘Sakti flows downhill. You must stand lower than him, even though you are older. He uses his right hand. You hold his left.’
We arranged ourselves in a line, like children crossing the road. Lukas joined, laughing, on the end, holding the husband’s hand. I touched the palm but felt no confirmatory tingle, no flash of divine sakti.
‘Thank you,’ she said in ringing tones, then leaned forward to whisper. ‘It’s really for him, my husband. It’s good for his asthma.’
* * *
‘Parangtritis,’ said Lukas. ‘You will wish to go there. It is by the seaside, only 25 kilometres away. We shall be there in a few minutes.’
Raffles went there in 1813. But in 1813, the traffic was less terrifying. We stopped at a cafe on the foreshore. I staggered off to offer silent prayer for our safe arrival. Lukas disappeared to repair the rava
ges of the journey, comb out his hair and pay someone to guard his motorbike. The town seemed deserted.
‘It is a place for the weekend,’ said Lukas. ‘When I was at school, I almost lived here with my friends. It is a place for lovers. You will see them on the beach.’ He sighed nostalgically. ‘Nowadays, I am too busy for such things.’
‘Also,’ I pointed out, ‘you are married.’
‘Yes. That too wastes a lot of time.’
We set off for the beach. It was largely empty apart from pony carts, offering rides to the non-existent lovers. A wind roared in our ears as on a British beach in high summer, kicking sand contemptuously in our faces. The whole beach was somehow messy and tired-looking, a building site waiting for the cement to arrive. The sea boiled and hissed over rocks, smashed against the cliffs. Two old ladies waded into the spume up to their hanks and began throwing flowers and emptying bottles into the waves while holding one hand each over their headscarves. One fell over in the undertow and laughed as she was dragged towards the deep on her buttocks.
‘Loro Kidul,’ grinned Lukas. ‘They are offering to the goddess of the South Sea. This is her place. She has a palace out there, under the waves, all made of gold and gems. She changes with the moon. She is a young girl at the start of the month but at the end she is old, really old. She has a court of women – all women, no men. The court dances, the heirlooms of the palace, all come from her. When there was the fire at Solo, they brought lots of damaged heirlooms here to be given back to the sea. Every year, the Sultan of Yogya comes here to give her his nail-clippings and clothes. When the Sultan gives a formal audience, his wife sits behind him. There is always an empty chair beside him reserved for Loro Kidul.’
I thought of Raffles’ wrangling over the chairs and wondered if he knew.
Lukas sighed wistfully. ‘If young men round here wear green, her colour, she comes and takes them for her lovers. Parangtritis is a place of love.’
‘It must be a problem for the army in their green uniforms. But isn’t it her servant, Nyi Blorong, who does that?’
There is a busy Indonesian soft-porn industry drawing on the goddess of the South Sea. She embodies predatory, aggressive female sexuality, something Indonesian men find simultaneously titillating and terrifying. The films are unsubtle and usually consist of her coming ashore and tearing men’s trousers off. Often, however, it is not the goddess herself who dips into male undergarments, but her earthier servant Nyi Blorong. The goddess, after all, is still a political figure in Java, being simultaneously wife, mistress and daughter to the various powerful ruling houses.
He shrugged. ‘Nyi Blorong, Loro Kidul. It is the same thing. Every year young men are drowned swimming or fishing here. The young men she takes are never marked. The sharks and crabs do not eat them. Their bodies are returned perfect from the sea, washed and still. That is how you can tell.’
In the cliff was a cave for meditation. Lukas pulled me inside. It smelt strongly of paraffin. A man was asleep on a mat. He looked up, rubbed his eyes and grinned.
‘He is only the guardian, not a meditator.’ He looked around, eyes growing soft with nostalgia. ‘When I was young, I came here one night to think of Loro Kidul but all I saw was a girl in my class. Wah! She was pretty. I forget her name.’
‘Perhaps it was Tunjong Segara, “Lily of the Sea”.’ I don’t know why the name popped into my head. Many years later Raffles would have a daughter, born, like himself, at sea. A Javanese nobleman who accompanied him on his travels gave her the name Tunjong Segara.
‘The name is wrong. It is Tanjung Segara, like Tanjung Priok. It is a place, near here.’
‘A place? Can we go there?’
He shrugged. ‘Of course.’
We walked back to the motorbike. Lukas tried unsuccessfully to start it. We checked the petrol. He played experimentally with the plugs. There was a garage across the road.
A cheerful mechanic came out, looked at it from afar and said, ‘Your plug lead’s broken.’ We bent down, examined, yanked on it. It looked fine. He pushed us apart with his hands like man doing the breast stroke, whipped out a spanner and began to dismantle the entire machine. The lights came off, the saddle, the tank. He reached inside with an expert twist of the finger and tweaked out a broken copper lead. ‘There!’ I-told-you-so was in his eyes. He spliced it back in place, reassembled the motorbike. It started first time.
‘How much?’
He batted the suggestion away. ‘Nothing. That was easy.’
Lukas sucked on his lip. ‘It must be the people where we left the bike. They expected us to eat there. We didn’t, so they did this. So, nowadays you must pay people to break your bike. That is something new.’
We drove off into the warm air. After the buffeting of the seashore, if felt like a gentle bath. We turned off the main road and through a countryside that embodied tropic exuberance. No wonder the British could never quite get beyond the idea that agriculture here required no work. You knocked a fencepost into the ground and it grew leaves.
The roads became smaller and smaller, finally they were only dirt tracks. Lukas stopped to ask the way. He stopped several times and became more and more confused.
‘It is near here. Only I cannot quite …’ We emerged onto a beach of black volcanic sand like coal dust, parked and walked over to look at the sea. Parangtritis could be seen in the distance – the sea in between. It snarled and sloshed as if trying to get at us, a nasty, livid green, like chemical waste, lots of froth on top and swirling currents that told you how deep it was. It was horribly cold despite the sun. We both shuddered and looked at each other, surprised.
‘This is a bad place,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ We headed back for the bike. Lukas did a comic looking-through-pockets routine, playing with our anxiety to be gone. I smiled, not wanting to seem bad-tempered.
‘I don’t know why you’re laughing,’ he said, annoyed. ‘The key’s gone.’
He turned out all his pockets. I turned out mine – God knows why, perhaps to show participation in his loss. We walked back to the beach, staring at the ground. No key.
‘This is not possible.’ I knew what he was thinking. This was in some way tied up with Loro Kidul.
‘Have you got any key on you?’ I offered the guest-house key. He put it in the lock. It worked. We stared at each other in brief disbelief, then leapt on the machine and tore off.
* * *
Another becak-driver. This time in Yogya. He looked at the address I had written down. What was the problem? It could not be that he did not read. Illiteracy seems more common among the young in England than Indonesia.
‘This is in the palace.’
‘That’s right. But becaks can go in there. I’ve seen them.’
‘That is not the nature of the problem. You are a bule, a white man, so you can speak Indonesian. They will expect me to speak the Javanese of the palace out of respect, but I do not know how. I am from a village.’
‘Are you from Tanjung Segara?’ It was a wild stab in the dark, but the tide of serendipity seemed to be running so strong it was worth a try.
‘Where is that? No. I am from near Jakarta.’
‘Ah. Well. You take me there and I’ll do the talking.’
He nodded and put the address carefully in his pocket. To throw it away would be disrespectful. It reminded me of the way Indonesians – even the most casual acquaintances – would always ask for your address on parting and treasure it up without the least intention of ever sending a letter. It was polite. It was – as they said – ‘a memory’.
There was no need for any talk at all. We crunched on to the gravel by the south gate and saw the little house at once. The becak-driver got off and looked hopeful.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘please wait – but I may be some time.’ He thought that was funny.
‘I don’t have anything else to do. This is my job.’ He would tell his family that one, later tonight, and make them laugh too.
I knocke
d at the door and asked for Pak Suyono, an expert on the palace manuscripts. I was shown into a small room, immaculately clean but with an academic’s scurf of papers on every flat surface. Through an open door I could see a very pretty girl in her teens reading a right-wing newspaper while sucking a lollipop.
Pak Suyono shuffled in, helped by his wife. She placed his cigarettes and lighter gently in his hand. It was clear he was blind. I looked questioningly at his wife.
‘Please,’ she said, ‘it is good for him to talk, to use his knowledge.’
He told the story of his blindness, a silly accident, a blow from a window incautiously opened. He smiled as he spoke of the stupidity of an expert on manuscripts who could not read. He smiled and smiled in that Javanese way as he told of the pointlessness of a skill so slowly acquired in the absence of young people who wanted to learn it. The Americans call it the ‘shit-eating grin’. You see a lot of it in Java.
I explained about Raffles. He nodded. ‘To write a book,’ he warned, ‘is an arrogant thing. It is terrible to sum up the life of another man. But Raffles is hardly remembered here.’ A hand groped over the tablecloth and fed a cigarette to sucking lips. I guided the lighter. ‘Thank you. We remember Daendels, who was before him, because he killed so many of our people. You know Daendels, the Dutch Napoleon?’ I knew him all right.
‘The Javanese only remember the “bad guys”. Raffles turns up in a couple of the manuscripts, but perhaps you should go to the other palace.’
‘The other palace?’
‘Yes, the Paku Alam, the title given by Raffles. The Paku Alam wanted to work with Raffles. The Sultan only wanted to fight him, so Raffles set up the Paku Alam as a royal house.’
Paku Alam, ‘The nail of nature’. No, better, ‘The pivot of the Universe’.
‘The Paku Alam is now the Governor of Yogya, isn’t he?’
‘Yes. Impossible to see him, of course. Too busy. We were rewarded for our loyalty to the Revolution by being made a “Special Area”, where the old families still have power. But you know, I used to play English games when I was a child here. They still had them in the palace, remembered from that time … You know your royal family was here the other year?’
