The Ten Thousand Things

by Maria Dermout

  Fat gray wood pigeons, with only their feather collars gleamingly green—the nutpickers—drank there long and carefully, with gurgling sounds, and then roo-kooed, satisfied. A few glittering green parakeets sat together at the edge of the cistern; they were more lost in one another than interested in the water. And sometimes, in a whirl of shouting colors—emerald green, or scarlet, or very gaudy yellow and sky blue and green and red mixed—came a whole flock of loories, or bètès, or whatever their name might be, with hooked yellow beaks like small parrots, and beat their wings, picked fiercely at one another, bathed, drank, splashed in the water, and made an infernal racket—just for a short moment—then they were gone, and the bathing place was left still and dead between the trees.

  Then sometimes in that silence a few hummingbirds descended in an arch of color, skimmed over the surface of the water and rose again, light as feathers—they were never still for a second.

  At the edge of the wood, but under the trees, were three children’s graves next to each other in the high grass; the tombstones had broken and lost their inscriptions. The names of the children had been Elsbet, Katie and Marregie; the lady of the Small Garden knew that, although all the old papers had been lost in the bad earthquake and fire. They had been the daughters of her great-great-grandfather.

  Sometimes the three of them sat on the edge of the cistern in the wood—sh-h-h!

  Past the three graves, the path suddenly went steeply up into the hills, hills without many high trees, open and sunny, overgrown with a thick yellowish grass that smelled of herbs, and full of wild rosebushes. And from there, over the tops of the trees, over the house and the outbuildings, she could see the inner bay—like a round blue lake, with here and there light-green discolorings where the water was shallow and dark-green ones where it was very deep, around it the white ridge of the surf and all the luxuriant green of the coast.

  Behind the hills, wood again—jungle—dark blue and purple rather than green from a distance; and then the wild mountains.

  Up in the mountains the wind always blew.

  In the hills the cows of the lady of the Small Garden were tended and the deer grazed.

  Sometimes the three little girls played there in the afternoon sun, if there was no one about—“there were rose leaves lying everywhere again!” the cowherd said, “oh, let them be,” the lady of the Small Garden replied.

  And sometimes, not often, they crouched next to each other on the beach of the bay, under the planes, away from the house, to see what kinds of shells had been washed ashore. They dug into the sand (that could clearly be seen later). Those shells do hide themselves . . .

  All the people knew the three girls and watched for them. They did not want to scare them off, and as long as they looked the other way and pretended not to see them the girls went on playing peacefully—so the people said. The lady of the Small Garden had never seen the three girls, she was sorry about that.

  Was seeing necessary? As long as she could remember, she had heard about them; they belonged, they had a fixed place in her garden on the island in the Moluccas, and also in her own life.

  The lady of the Small Garden sometimes had the feeling that the island lay before her, as if on a map, to look at—complete with compass card drawn in one corner.

  It was a mountainous island—the few level stretches along the coasts were strewn with fantastically shaped rocks. Trees everywhere, even in the water; at the bay, beside the swamp covered with lilac water hyacinths, were rows of gleaming little nipa palms and somber mangrove trees on their tortured bare trunks. Sometimes there were sea snails on the branches, under convex white shells, like porcelain fruit.

  So much clear water everywhere—fresh water—rivers, wells, brooks, cascades over the rocks.

  There was a net of roads and paths and tracks and stairs hewn in the mountains, leading to large and small villages: of Christians, of Mohammedans; the old communities under the mystic numbers Nine and Five (Nine and Five do not tolerate each other at all). In between, here and there, a “garden,” a decrepit little fort, a small old church with seventeenth-century Dutch armorial shields, a gaudily painted wooden mosque beside its tall minaret, a large carved tombstone over a forgotten grave—In Everlasting Remembrance—everlasting is so long! And the one large town on the outer bay.

  She knew the island so well, up to the steepest mountain, down into the deepest jungle; she had sailed all the coasts in a proa. She knew where, here and there and everywhere, a never-seen tree or plant grew, a strange flower bloomed. She had so often leaned over the edge of her proa to look through a hollow bamboo at the sea gardens in the outer bay—the dream vision petrified in the coral, so unreally quiet, in which only a few gaily colored little fish moved as swift as arrows, or tiny brown sea horses hung perpendicularly in the water, staring earnestly at each other. Somewhere there was also a place with nothing but the rare red coral, like a field of red clover under the blue waves.

  And she had stood in the woods, high up in the mountains behind the Small Garden, where the little spring spurted which was connected with the sea—how else could the water taste so bitter in the mouth? There prayers for rain were said during great droughts, and sacrifices were made—but nobody was allowed to know of that.

  And the people!

  The lady of the Small Garden did not know all the people on the island—of course not—but she did know many: an old rajah family with a Portuguese name, and another one, and another; that priest over there, a Moslem, who knew all the stories of the “holy wars” and “the heroes of the faith” (fighting had been going on forever on the island, and he himself was a real warrior); Christian religious teachers, some of them great preachers; a poet-singer, a dance leader, a wise woman—a bibi—who could heal and make sick, lay a spell, exorcise ghosts.

  In the town the Dutch, bustling around, busily coming and going. Only a few who stayed; a few who were buried and so stayed forever.

  And travelers from all over the world came to the Moluccas, travelers who, immediately off the boat—quickly, quickly, quickly—wanted to buy shells, coral, pearls which weren’t there, butterflies, old china, orchids, birds; in the end they were content with a little basket of nutmeg branches with flowers and leaves made of parakeet feathers—poor creatures—and there they were, back at the ship’s railing, forgetting to wave. Strange people!

  Everywhere there are strange people; on the island too. They had shown her an empty hut at the bay, where not so long ago had lived a man and a boy who in reality were a shark and a little shark; those two had never laughed, so as not to show their pointed teeth. Now they had gone! Where? They were certainly swimming together in the bay.

  And if she were only patient she might yet see the old woman, the mother of the Pox. In houses with children there was always a branch with thorns tied against the front door, to keep her out; she couldn’t do much harm from a distance. She had not often been seen in recent years.

  But the lady frequently met the man who was called “the man with the blue hair.” He was just a simple fisher from the village next to the Small Garden, a man who regularly dyed his gray curly head a clear blue with indigo. He had to do it: his only son was a soldier somewhere far away, a hero! In the moonlight the young men of the villages sang songs about him; named his battles, the fortifications he had stormed, his victories, his wounds—and such a hero would have for a father a toothless old man with white hair? Impossible!

  Sometimes the lady of the Small Garden listened to the island: how the bays rustled, the inner bay differently from the outer bay, and the open sea beyond still different again. That was the land wind sighing, and that the sea wind, and that the howl of the storm wind which is called Baratdaja.

  Thus sounded the drums, giving the proa rowers their rhythm; that was the light, clattering sound of the strings of empty mussel shells bound to the mast or the bow to lure the wind which liked to come and play with them; and that was the short reverberating thud with which a proa went a
bout, from one wing onto the other.

  Those who were musical remembered the melodies of all songs, all dances; here they still used the small copper cymbals of Ceram, the “land at the other side”; there they blew on the Triton shells, which are shining orange inside; and once she had made a long trip to hear someone sing the “song of the dying fishes” as only that man could sing it.

  And the familiar sounds: the voices of people and children and animals; music, songs of every day from the village across the river, from the garden.

  Someone sang a love song in the moonlight: “the evening is too long, beloved, and the road too far”—others clapped their hands with it—a single bamboo flute, languishing.

  A lullaby for a child, or a story sung to it, battle songs of the wild Alfuras, head-hunters of Ceram. And sometimes, very rarely, the old heathen lament (careful, don’t let the schoolteacher hear it) for one who has just died. “The hundred things” was the name of the lament—the hundred things of which the dead one is reminded, which are asked him, told him.

  Not only the people in his life: this girl, this woman and that one, that child, your father, your mother, a brother or sister, the grandparents, a grandchild, a friend, a comrade-in-arms; or his possessions: your beautiful house, your china dishes hidden in the attic, the swift proa, your sharp knife, the little inlaid shield from long ago, the two silver rings on your right hand, on index finger and thumb, the tamed pigeon; but also: hear, how the wind blows!—how white-crested the waves come running from the high sea!—the fishes jump out of the water and play with each other—look how the shells gleam on the beach—remember the coral gardens under water, and how they are colored—and the bay!—the bay!—please never forget the bay! And then they said: oh soul of so-and-so, and ended with a long-held melancholy ee-ee-ee? ee-ee-ee? over the water.

  Or she listened with the others to the hammering from just across the bay, from the place where formerly the Portuguese wharf had stood (the beautiful galleons with all the woodwork were once calked there, and occasionally a gibbet must have been built there too)—now there were only trees; and the knocking of a wooden hammer on a wooden beam, heard clearly over the water—could that be a bird?

  And whenever a proa came or went, the old slave bell in the Small Garden was rung—if someone were there to do it.

  These were many things, but not all, and not enough. There remained the imagined things, figures as they were depicted in dances and in songs and stories; inventions—nothing more—how could she name them all?

  At the inner bay only:

  Right at the corner, where the bay is narrowest and at its deepest from the suction of the tide, every now and again a sailor walked on the cliff, a young Portuguese who had drowned there; he had wanted to go home, he had heard his name called far away, Martin was his name.

  Or Martha, the young daughter of the rajah of a village which no longer existed, who tried to cross the water on her little horse in the moonlit night—to her lover, a poor fisherman who had no proa, and her father had ordered all the proas of the village bound up high on the shore. She always reached the other side—she never reached the other side . . .

  Under the cliff, in a hollow in the rocks, the octopus was waiting, not a little one like so many which swim in the bay but the gigantic Octopus—the One—with all its eight terrible wriggling grasping arms full of sucking cups, glaring out of two black bulging little eyes. It saw everything, because it could see in the light and it could see in the dark; but no one could see the Octopus. Every fisher, every rower knew about it, every helmsman watched carefully at that corner.

  Farther down the great purple swamp, and an isthmus from which often came the labored singing of men hauling their proas across it.

  Still farther down that way was the village next to the Small Garden, and there lived “the man with the blue hair” and also the woman who led “the dance of the Shell.” One time, it was already long ago, the lady of the Small Garden had seen it—strictly speaking it wasn’t allowed. Nowadays that dance was not danced any more, neither in the village across the river nor anywhere else.

  Next to the village, in the Small Garden, those three little girls who had all died on the same day—that must have been with the bad earthquake and the fire? No! It was not with the earthquake and the fire.

  And the coral woman.

  She would certainly not forget the coral woman; as a matter of fact one could read all about her in Mr. Rumphius’s books: just beyond the garden there had been a small colony of Javanese, not more than one large family. When the proa in which they had first come anchored, a young woman had bent over its edge to look into the water at the coral plants of the depth—perhaps she was looking for the Tree, the Coco Palm of the Sea, which is of course also of coral.

  She bent over too far and fell with her head forward into the water, and did not come back up—until, much later, the coral fishers found a large block of coral there in the shape of a woman. It was she, the Javanese! No mistake possible. Her head was embedded in the coral, and when they loosened her she groaned—the coral fishers said.

  After that she stood for years in the garden of Mr. Rumphius, who had bought her for five rix-dollars. He put some leaf mold in the little holes in the coral, and seeds of dwarf climbers, and in due time the coral woman had a nice flowery dress to cover her nudity.

  Did he ever walk up to her and look at her with his almost blind eyes, in the evening when all has become quiet, dark and light under the stars, and did he ask her—whether?

  For Mr. Rumphius also believed in the Coco Palm of the Sea: the coconuts which are washed ashore now here, then there, have to come from somewhere, don’t they? So different from an ordinary coconut, almost twice as large, not round but oblong; polished by waves and surf, almost black, hard as stone.

  Not on this island, on none of the “thousand islands,” nor on the large islands far away, nor on the continents either, grew a coco palm with such fruits. What he had been able to find out about it he had written down: there were those who said the palm obviously did not grow on land but in the sea, in a whirlpool in the “navel of the seas”—he could not believe that. More likely in a quiet, secluded spot—but in deep water, he thought, in a bay, a bay like the inner bay, for instance.

  The palm would have a black trunk and black branches (the small coral trees had those too); black ribbon-shaped leaves like an ordinary coco palm? Of that he wasn’t sure—as a matter of fact, under the water black isn’t always black, sometimes it is between purple and violet, sometimes lilac. There were moreover a Crab and a Bird who belonged with the palm; coral fishers had seen them, but they had never been able to get close to them.

  Did Mr. Rumphius ask the coral woman whether she—perhaps—while she was down there—?

  He wanted so desperately much to see the Coco Palm of the Sea—black, or purple, or red as a rose (with the Crab and the Bird)—just once before he would be totally blind; that couldn’t be far off any more.

  What did the coral woman, what did her closed coral mouth answer him?

  The lady of the Small Garden liked her so much because she liked Mr. Rumphius so much. Both his works had always been in the house at the Small Garden: with her grandmother she had looked up plants and medicinal herbs in one of the many volumes of the Book of Herbs, and in his Book of Curiosities the names of “shells and horns and snails and jellyfish and other such little fellows.”

  She herself belonged to the island too—here, in her garden at the inner bay, in front of the guest pavilion, under the planes, the little waves of the surf at her feet.

  Everyone knew how she looked: small and bent, in her sarong and simple white cotton jacket with the smallest of lace edges or no lace at all and no beautiful brooch, just held together with safety pins; in bare feet on strong leather sandals, full of freckles, always bareheaded, with springy graying hair.

  They had seen her or they had heard about her. Everywhere on the island they talked about her, whispered
sometimes—as before about her grandmother, and before that about the grandmother of her grandmother (there was not much to talk or to whisper about the men in the family).

  They didn’t speak evil of her; why should they?

  They liked her. Now at least, once they had not; she was a terribly bossy woman who always wanted to know everything very precisely but who was prepared to help when help was needed, or sympathy.

  She herself had been grievously tried in life: her grandmother dead, to whom she owed everything; both her parents—they had never cared much about her; brothers and sisters she did not have; her husband—nobody knew the real story of that husband: “A big man,” they said, but no one knew him, he had never been on the island, he must have died years and years ago; and now not so long ago her son too, her only child.

  So she had no one left.

  But there was one matter in which she went too far.

  One day, one night in the year, on the day her son had died, she wanted to be alone—that was acceptable, but she went to such lengths that she even sent away all the servants with their families, to the town at the outer bay. She would not receive visitors on that day either; when people came all the same—absolutely not from curiosity but to cheer her up—she asked them to postpone their visit to some other time, and quietly let them go back the whole way again, no matter who they were.

  One day, one night a year dedicated to the dead? Is even that too much?

  But it wasn’t like that! She did not dedicate that day and that night to the dead, but only to those who had been murdered, murdered on the island.

  Not every year was there a murder, luckily not! Years could pass without one. It was a peaceful island, and yet, it could happen . . .

  As in that certain year when there had been four. Four? Or was it three? But three certainly; in one case it wasn’t clear whether the man had been murdered or not, but drowned in the bay he surely was.