The Ten Thousand Things

by Maria Dermout

  Not much happened on the island that the lady of the Small Garden did not hear of; and when a murder had been committed she immediately went to inquire, and wanted to know how or what? where it had happened? who had been murdered? who had done it? why? with what—but she didn’t care so much about that; it was no morbid curiosity in her, she didn’t think she had to clear up something—that was for the police. She pitied the murdered one and the relatives; she would have liked to understand what had led to it, help somehow if possible—but usually it was not possible.

  Still she could commemorate the murdered on that one day in the year. She didn’t arrange flowers or light candles for them or such fiddle-faddle; she didn’t burn incense, she had never liked incense—commemorate, only and simply commemorate.

  She had started it after the death of her son. About that she never spoke any more, as she sometimes had in the beginning; her son had been murdered, at least that was what she thought.

  Some people took it amiss: the young officers in the garrison of the town at the outer bay said that it was time someone made her understand: her son, also an officer—a comrade-in-arms—had fallen. Not fallen in open combat, true—shot down from an ambush; but shooting from an ambush is not forbidden in battle—honestly fallen! And so one shouldn’t talk about murder.

  But the lady of the Small Garden never spoke to the officers about his being murdered; and when they saw her, the young men did not say anything about honest battles.

  Some of the older people who might have heard about “certain kinds of things” whispered that perhaps she had secret powers—was that why she wanted to be completely alone?—but no one knew whether she did “certain kinds of things.” She never sent for one of those wise women to exorcise ghosts from the garden, as happened when her grandmother was still alive.

  Her grandmother! Yes, that one—that was a different story—she had certainly had secret powers, you can be sure of it! But the lady of the Small Garden did not; otherwise she would really have been able to see the three ghost girls in her own garden—every fisherman’s child has seen them.

  All these things, and still others, and with the sky added, were the island.

  TWO: AT THE INNER BAY

  THE SMALL GARDEN

  1.

  THE GIRL was born at the Small Garden and her mother wanted her to be named Felicia. The father agreed, he always agreed to everything. The grandmother did not agree at all. “Happy! You dare to call your little child Happy! How do you know in advance?”

  But the mother had insisted.

  The grandmother would never call her that way; she always said “granddaughter,” and from then on the parents were “son” and “daughter-in-law.” “Granddaughter” and “son” were friendly words, “daughter-in-law” was not.

  The child spent the first seven, almost eight years of her life on the island in the Moluccas; the family had another house in the town at the outer bay and it was there that she lived with her parents. Her mother had refused to stay at the Small Garden, and her mother always did everything she wanted and never did anything she did not want; she could because she had all the money. Her mother owned a sugar plantation on Java, something quite different from a little nothing of a spice garden on an island in the Moluccas.

  Felicia’s father often went to the Garden, almost every week; sometimes Felicia and her nurse were allowed to come along.

  It was impossible to think of anything more wonderful than a stay at the Small Garden on the inner bay.

  First, the trip there in a proa; you walked along the path behind the fort, the Castle—and there under an awning at the quay lay her grandmother’s proa, waiting to take them to the Garden.

  When they arrived at the Garden a bell was rung.

  At high tide the proa could moor at a stone embankment in the inner bay, at low tide the rowers carried them ashore one by one, in a chair; sometimes one of the rowers lifted Felicia out of the proa and onto his shoulders in one swoop, rowers are terribly strong!

  And later the fishermen from the village across the river might take her and her nurse out to sea, usually in a winged proa which could be sailed. If the wind did not rise, the fishers whistled and asked, wouldn’t Mister Wind come and loosen his long hair? They sang and laughed and talked, and teased Susanna the nurse because she had such fat arms and legs.

  At the Garden she could walk a little way into the sea—Susanna watched out for sea urchins—or look for shells on the beach under the plane trees, or bathe in the cistern in the wood. She could help pick fruit in the orchard of the lemon trees: between the small lemon bushes stood some larger ones, grapefruit, one with red pulp. “That is your tree, granddaughter,” the grandmother said, “because you like the fruit so much. You are right: the red is much sweeter than the white.” She could pick kanari nuts in the wood, or listen to the “singing trees.”

  But in the wood there also lived the palm-wine mannikin.

  When one of the high arèn palms was going to be tapped, they hung a little fellow in the tree to watch for thieves. He was cut from rough wood, about two feet long, dressed in old rags, with a mustache and a curly head of black palm hairs, a fiery red mouth, black-and-white gleaming eyes; and right through him they stuck a black rattan thorn, almost as long as he was himself and as thick as a finger, with the needle-sharp point sticking out in front.

  Up there in the high palm tree the little fellow couldn’t do much harm, but at times he climbed down the small rattan ladder, quick as a monkey, and pursued someone with his thorn! then you had to watch out, and hide fast.

  Susanna the nanny always watched carefully for the mannikin, but Felicia did not have much confidence in Susanna.

  Then again they might go for a walk with the cowherd—all was safe with him—through the wood and farther out into the hills; perhaps they would see a wild deer. Felicia thought that she wouldn’t be afraid of a wild deer, not even up close, but of the cows she was scared even from a distance. And alone with Susanna she went to the green, the quiet valley where it was never quiet because of the cackling of the chickens and the chatter of the ducks. She did not care much for the chickens—they ran away when someone waved his arms and cried ssst—but she detested the ducks.

  Ducks were false through and through. Not as long as they swam around in the stream and dived and chattered together —but when they waddled ashore, they changed into awkward, cruel creatures that followed and swallowed everything that couldn’t get away fast enough, especially the beautiful duck crabs.

  Susanna had put one in her hand to look at: a smooth blinking little shield, not bigger than a penny, eight bright red legs, two miniature claws, one on each side. These poor crabs immediately admitted defeat, rolled themselves into little balls, pulled in their tender red legs and claws and let themselves be swallowed—alive—by the ducks.

  “They are good little crabs,” Susanna stated. “They never do any harm, they just sit quietly in the bellies of the ducks; and when they put out a leg and tickle them, the ducks like that so much that they go and lay an egg; but watch out when the ducks swallow those dark-brown crabs, their stomachs get cut to pieces.”

  “Do the ducks die from that?” asked Felicia, who wanted nothing better.

  Of course they did!

  It seemed to Felicia that the ducks must eat only the beautiful brown-and-red crabs; there were never any fewer of them, and they were certainly very alive and healthy.

  But all this was child’s play compared with the other thing, the bad, the really bad. Over in the valley near the river there was a large white open shell from which the chickens drank their water, and in that shell the beast had lived, lived still—the Leviathan, Susanna said.

  Susanna the nanny had a disease which had made her arms and legs swell and look like tightly stuffed brown sausages to which the hands and feet were tied; yet her shapeless wrists and ankles had remained supple, and she was quick enough in her movements. The disease was not contagious, the doctor said.
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  Felicia did not know quite what to think of her: it wasn’t only those fat arms and legs—she could behave so strangely on occasion. She was always taking Felicia some place where there were no other people—she did this at home, in the town at the outer bay, and also on the Small Garden—in order to recite her psalms without being disturbed.

  She was very pious, knew her psalms and recited them in Malayan with a ringing voice, and she taught them to Felicia at the same time. Felicia was at the age when a child learns things by heart easily even without understanding their meaning.

  Susanna had one favorite psalm: the hundred and fourth. Felicia could say large parts of Psalm 104 in Malayan without stumbling. Yet it was a difficult psalm, full of the names of animals she did not know: the wild donkeys, the storks in the pine trees—a stork was the bird Lakh-lakh—the high mountains of the wild goats, the rocks for the rabbits, and the roaring young lions—a lion’s name was Singa—and then the sea with its wriggling beasts, large and small, and the ships, and the Leviathan who is too terrible!

  That was the same Leviathan who lived—here—in the shell under the trees, in the green valley of the Small Garden.

  It was a gigantically large shell, more than three feet in diameter, covered with a rough chalky growth on the outside, deeply carved, the edge crenated, the inside a smooth ivory white—and that was only half of it. No one knew where the other half had gone.

  Once there had been two equal shells which fitted exactly onto each other, unbreakably linked at one place: only the beast that lived inside was strong enough to open and close those two lead-heavy shells just as it pleased.

  Susanna showed her how it had been: her heavy wrists carefully pressed against each other, she held her fat brown hands as if they were shells, the fingertips closed together; and with a jerk she opened, closed, opened the two shells. She had so much strength in her hands that her fingers made a thud when they came together.

  “Like this!” she said. “Like this!”

  And then she began the description of the beast that had grown inside the shell. It was gruesome to behold: thick and shapeless like a big full bag, a leathery skin, spotted and striped like a snake—but different again: white with brown and black and also dark blue; and it was blind!

  “No eyes,” Susanna whispered, and squeezed her own eyes.

  Felicia did not know why, but that was the most horrid part of it all.

  A mouth it did have, and it could eat, or at least suck.

  The shells had not been lying on the ground, clearly visible; no, under water, on the bottom of the bay where it was not too deep, hidden between the coral, and overgrown with algae and seaweed.

  First the beast opened the two shells—carefully—just a crack, and then a little bit more, and still a bit more, and it waited motionlessly, Susanna said, until someone came—a coral diver or a fisher—and then Felicia had to put a hand or a foot in the shell, whether she wanted to or not.

  “Like this!” said Susanna, and like lightning the edge of her hand came down on Felicia’s arm or leg where it rested on that crenated edge of the shell, “like this! clear off! and look at all the blood!”

  The child stood petrified—the two shells were closed, and her hand was cut off and lying inside and the beast was starting to eat it. It hurt terribly, and she didn’t know where to go with the bleeding stump.

  “He sucks on it, he likes it,” Susanna stated; but when it became too much for Felicia, who started to sniffle, she tried to console her, “don’t cry, he doesn’t always eat hands or feet, oh no, fish too, he catches them in his shell, and he has a friend, a shrimp, only as big as a finger—a finger of yours—who lives with him in the shell. The shrimp shares in the food but he has to help with the catch: he tells the beast when to open the shell wider and when to close it; the beast can’t see, you know that, no eyes!”

  Susanna paused for Felicia to ask, does he have ears? Can the shrimp talk with him? But after the first time she refused to ask that—Susanna had to tell it herself, that the Leviathan could not hear because he had no ears, “no eyes, you know that, and no ears,” but the shrimp had a little claw and pinched the beast with it in his leathery skin: then he knew what to do, open the shells or close them.

  Susanna made a sharp shrimp’s claw with her fat index finger and thumb, the nails against each other, and pinched Felicia in her arm, a piece of skin between the nails.

  “Like this,” Susanna said.

  Felicia screamed: it hurt much more than the snapping off of a hand or foot! She would have liked to slap the maid; she had at times but it never worked out well, what with those strong heavy hands of Susanna’s. She swallowed and tried hard not to cry; her grandmother always saw it afterward when she had cried, and wanted to know why, and then said: “You must learn to be a proud girl, granddaughter, upright, and not to cry about small things.”

  She did not like to hear that—she didn’t cry about small things, but obviously she couldn’t tell her grandmother about the Leviathan.

  The grandmother was a skinny little woman with a dark complexion, dark hair and dark eyes. She herself always walked very upright in her neat clothes: usually a bright silk sarong from Timor or one of the other islands, a jacket of thin white batiste with broad lace, a single jewel—a golden pin in her hair knot—around each wrist a bracelet of black coral like a bent twig—against rheumatism—on one hand two wedding rings, her own and that of her husband who had died so young. Her slippers were of velvet embroidered with gold thread and spangles; she embroidered the velvet herself and the Chinese shoemaker in the town at the outer bay had to make slippers out of it.

  She also sewed the fine jackets herself; and she made amber balls and scents and medicines. She began by weighing herbs and roots on a little scale, or by cutting off pieces of them—as long as a finger, as long as the nail of her forefinger —scraped them clean and ground them to a powder in a wooden or china mortar—never, never in a metal one—sometimes they were cooked and then strained through a cloth; sometimes brewed like tea—always with rain water, remember that!

  Felicia felt a holy awe for her grandmother’s medicines; luckily most of them were not meant for children and she was never ill; but there was a draught of a brightly orange root—for the purification of the blood after the change of the monsoon—no one, old or young, escaped that. It was as bitter as bile. And of course once a month castor oil, if she had not already taken it at home—with coffee extract or anisette, she could take her pick.

  The grandmother also cooked well and made preserves: pickles, jams, mussel sauce (black or white), kanari cakes. She did everything herself and at home, with two old servants who had been there a long time.

  Everything in the house had been “a long time”; also the things in the “special drawer” of her cabinet.

  It was an antique cabinet full of cracks and crevices, on a base with bent legs, the front ones ending in claws; both its doors had to be opened before the drawer could be pulled out.

  On the shelves above it were little stacks of clothes, sarongs, jackets, underwear, and then neat piles of boxes and baskets with herbs and roots and scents—there was such a strong smell of all of them mixed, but the smell of incense dominated. Every now and again the grandmother brought an iron pot from the kitchen holding pieces of glowing charcoal, put it in the opened drawer and sprinkled some grains of incense into it. It was real Arabian incense, yellow like rosin, and transparent, “congealed tears of Mohammed the prophet, look!” she said. Felicia looked, she didn’t know exactly who Mohammed was.

  A thin cloud of smoke trailed upward; and the sweetish intoxicating smell was never quite blown out of the room, not even with all the doors opened and the cool wind from the inner bay going through it all day. The cabinet, and the “special drawer,” were saturated with it.

  The bottom of the drawer was neatly covered with sheets of rice paper and against the back was propped a piece of old colored Palembang silk such as they wear in the court
of the Sultan, which is a cure for sore throat—a little strip around the neck is sufficient.

  On one side of the drawer, a pretty fan of real tortoise, worked in open patterns, with real gold inlay, “from when we were young,” grandma said, “each of us five had a fan when we went to a dance in the town or at one of the gardens.”

  There had been five sisters, no brothers, nothing but girls! “We had tiffs, but then we made peace again. It was very gay at the Small Garden, granddaughter. We had dances behind the house, on the spice platform, with Chinese lanterns in the trees. It did not take each of us very long to find a beau, a beau is a little boy friend,” she said, “oh, we were all five nice and pretty girls (if I say so myself) and married and gone in a jiffy.”

  She had moved to Java with her husband; he had a job with the Customs; and soon she had become a widow and had returned with her little son Willem (one of his grandfather’s names had been Willem)—she had returned and stayed—“yes, granddaughter, that is the way things sometimes work out.” Her son Willem was Felicia’s father.

  The other sisters had never come back, none of them: three were dead now, one lived far away in North America.

  At the other end of the drawer stood a basket from Macassar, woven from orchid roots; in it grandma kept her “jewels.” She didn’t own many; there were the gold pins she wore, and then some brooches, a pendant on a chain, a beautiful shell with a silver edge, an amethyst, a little cat’s-eye for dreams, and a gold apple, carved out in fretwork, with a ball of amber inside which she had made herself. She unscrewed the fruit and rolled the ball in her hand to warm it, “sniff, how lovely it smells!” Felicia didn’t think it was so lovely, but she didn’t dare say so; the ball was put back in the fruit, the basket was closed and put away: it was pretty but it was not the treasure.

  The treasure was lying in the middle of the drawer and it consisted of three things: a plate, and two little boxes made of chips of white wood.