The Ten Thousand Things

by Maria Dermout

  He hummed a few notes, he couldn’t get the tune out of his head, and stopped again; she always used to tell him not to hum.

  “So I’m sleeping in the beautiful room? are you sure I should? with the three girls in pink—are they still there?”

  “Yes, of course,” Felicia said.

  She had given him the front room with the two large windows; his bed was pushed in front of them. She knew exactly what he would do: open the screens and blinds wide, so that he could lie on his bed under the mosquito curtain and look out under the trees, over the inner bay—the inner bay beneath the stars, the moonlight, storm, rain; lie and listen to the small surf and the wind in the trees. Even as a child he had never liked to sleep in a closed dark room.

  When he went to bed that evening he was still whistling that song.

  It was called Watching from a distance.

  Had he been so unhappy in Europe?

  4.

  Second Lieutenant Himpies stayed at the garrison in the town at the outer bay for a year and a half (that nice major of his had arranged that). Every leave he could get, almost every Sunday, he spent in the Small Garden at the inner bay; and he brought out all his colleagues and their wives by turns.

  They were all young and nice—very nice, said Himpies; very new, Felicia thought them.

  They called her “Mother Small,” they came to sit and talk with her: about the slow promotions, and money troubles, about their babies, and sometimes about how they loved another man or woman more than their own; or that life was difficult, that they didn’t like this island in the Moluccas very much (it was so far away and only one ship a month), that they longed so much for home, for Holland.

  Afterward they bathed in the inner bay or in the cistern, had a picnic or walked in the hills all the way to the foot of the mountains. They sat around the large round table in the living room on the antique chairs and ate rijsttafel from the famille verte china with gold crests; next to the silver beside each plate lay a spoon of real Nautilus mother-of-pearl, for the strong mussel sauces, black or white. There was also a platter of roasted fish with ground kanari nuts, lemon and red peppers—very good!

  In the evening there was dancing on the new verandah, and when the lemon trees were in bloom the air was drenched with the heavy sweet scent; she played the piano, Himpies was expert in leading the quadrille. There were Chinese lanterns in the trees and it was very gay at the Small Garden.

  Between dances the couples went for walks along the beach; the young women carried fans, to cool themselves and their escorts, to whisper behind—the moon was shining.

  Then Felicia played Chopin or Schubert, never a song of the island, never The evening is too long, my love, and the road too far; never The gong is calling from afar, from afar; not even Watching from a distance.

  And there were other things which neither Felicia nor Himpies would ever talk about with these new people, no matter how nice they were: Martin the Portuguese sailor, the daughter of the Rajah, the Dancer with the Shell. Nor the man with the blue hair—he belonged to the boys Himpies and Domingoes together, like the Leviathan and the palm-wine mannikin. When their guests passed the three graves at the edge of the wood, mother and son answered any questions with “oh, three children who died here in the Garden, a long time ago.”

  And no matter how far they wandered through the woods and the hills, without Sjeba none of them would ever come upon the spring with the bitter water.

  On those weekends the keys to the curiosities cabinet, the books of Mr. Rumphius, were “mislaid.” And who would ever think of talking to these new people about the coral woman in her flowery dress who had been loved by Mr. Rumphius?

  Himpies’ best friend at that time was a young medical officer—Bear, they called him—a giant with feet like canoes, big careful hands like shovels. He swore like a trooper, but to please Mother Small he watched his language when she was near, and only interjected after every few words, God have mercy on me, or something like that.

  He was also most pronounced in his sympathies and antipathies: a woman was an angel from heaven, exquisite, or a mean shrew; a man a noble fellow or a miserable cad—there was nothing in between. Next to him Himpies sometimes seemed a bit faded, or was he? the brown eyes with the spots weren’t faded.

  Then there was in the town at the outer bay a young woman who never came to the Small Garden with the others —Felicia had never seen her, and she never would, but she had heard the others talk about her. The woman was also an officer’s wife and she had a little daughter. Her husband was away on an expedition to New Guinea; that always took a long time. In the meanwhile she was preparing her departure. It was a bad marriage, the husband did not want to give her a divorce but had finally agreed to her going to live with her mother and taking the child along—her mother was Irish and lived somewhere in an Irish village in the middle of nowhere. There was very little money. The young woman wasn’t hurrying to leave.

  Bear in particular always talked about her: Toinette, that was her name, was everything at once: an angel from heaven, and exquisite too, with black hair and green eyes (you know, that’s because of her Irish mother)—the little daughter Nettie even sweeter, even prettier, if such were possible, a very nervous child, Doctor Bear said worriedly, small wonder after all the unhappiness with the husband and father—that miserable cad! He went on and on about it; “and when he finds out that there’s someone else he’ll certainly take the child away from her—” and here he suddenly fell silent, startled by his own words.

  One Sunday evening before going to bed Felicia and her son were alone together in the living room; they were standing near the curiosities cabinet. Himpies opened the top drawer, he had a habit of doing that occasionally; he asked whether an acquaintance of his, a lady he knew—an officer’s wife—could come and stay for some time at the Garden with her daughter: the child had just been ill—and he looked into his mother’s eyes. She could never resist that, “yes, all right,” she agreed curtly.

  “Perhaps the child—her name is Nettie—” he smiled—“will like the shells, the story of Cinderella, will you tell it to her?” and he looked in the red drawer with the pretty shells.

  “Himpies,” said Felicia with her hard voice, “don’t start a perkara with a married woman: it only brings sadness, for everybody.”

  She used the Malayan word perkara—a belittling word: “a little affair.”

  Himpies did not say anything at first, he stood near the red cabinet, tall and slim in his white uniform; he bent over the drawer, put in his hand, took out one of the shells, not the double Venus-heart but the Amoret Harp, held it against his ear—but the shell was so small, too small to carry the murmur of the sea, the murmur of the green, green sea; then he put the shell back among the others and closed the drawer.

  “Well, yes, certainly, Mrs. Small Garden,” he said, nothing more, and he did not smile and did not look at her. Then he went to his bedroom.

  When Felicia was lying in bed she thought, now he is lying there, so near, and he looks out through the window over the inner bay and is sad.

  And in her bed in the town at the outer bay lies the young woman with the black hair and the green eyes, and she is sad; she will have taken the child into bed with her, holding it close; perhaps the child is sad too.

  Somewhere on New Guinea in the jungle lies Bear’s “miserable cad” on an army cot—is he sad, or are miserable cads never sad?

  And I’m lying here in my bed and am sad; I don’t want to be, I’ve had enough sadness, I’m too old for it—and now they’ll come here too!

  But they did not come: that Thursday was the day when the one boat of the month sailed for Java and wherever you wanted to go from there, and with the boat the young woman Toinette and the child Nettie left, completely unexpectedly.

  Bear came to tell her, he was almost in tears: “Toinette gone like that, run away, and she knew that we were all . . . all behind her, and not a word, not a note!”

  Oh,
Felicia thought, a note—

  “I don’t like running away either,” she said, “but what else could she have done? You said yourself that the man would take the child away if he heard that there was someone else.”

  Bear looked up at her.

  “She must have told Himpies that she was leaving,” Felicia asked.

  “By God, I don’t know,” Bear answered, “Himpies isn’t saying anything.”

  Then Felicia asked, “how long has this been going on? Have they lived together all this time, do you think?”

  Bear became angry, “why do you ask me, Mother Small, you must ask Himpies if you want to know that. And anyway, do you think that would have been so wrong?”

  “I didn’t ask because I think it so wrong,” Felicia said.

  They were both silent and then Bear said, “there’s one consolation, it was such a short time.”

  Felicia did not answer, stared ahead—poor Bear! As if “short” or “long” made much difference.

  After a while Himpies came back to the Garden, without saying anything; Felicia did not say anything either.

  She had bought a large sailing proa for him, a seaworthy one; it was moored at a village on the other side of the isthmus, at the ocean beach—they could always get a crew there. Himpies and Bear began going on long cruises to the other islands; sometimes Felicia came along, but not often.

  She knew that a bay and rocks and trees bending over the surf cannot relieve sadness—can sadness be relieved, or can one only pass it by, very slowly?

  A day in the radiant sunlight and the sky’s blue, in the shadow of a proud dark sail, over rustling waves, along new coastlines, wouldn’t that help to get past sadness?—for a while, for that one day at least.

  Bear was transferred.

  And then Himpies was sent on an expedition, taking the place of a fellow officer who had fallen ill—just a small expedition, on Ceram, quite near: a show of strength for the Mountain Alfuras who had become a nuisance and who were going on too many head-hunts.

  5.

  Felicia was on her way back from the town in the empty milk proa—there was mail, a letter from Himpies. He wrote seldom and then suddenly a very long letter about anything and everything; sometimes he numbered the paragraphs as if to keep things straight for himself.

  First: who do you think is here! I found Domingoes again, after almost twenty years (well, Mr. Himpies, it isn’t quite that long); sometimes, to everyone’s delight, he says tuan Himpies instead of tuan Lieutenant, but never without the tuan; why not?

  He is now our universally respected sergeant!

  You don’t know how nice he is. As a matter of fact, I don’t think he has changed at all, he is rather serious, reserved—but I always remembered him that way. Does a splendid job, popular with the men and yet severe. “Listen!” he says, “the beginning of it all is to listen!” Isn’t that funny—think of it. Domingoes!

  On Sundays he preaches in the church for the native troops; I went once. He preaches well, a bit gloomily, like a prophet, I’d say, or is it just the solemnity of the Malayan? His text was from Isaiah, about “the islands”: Keep silence before me, oh islands; the isles saw it and feared; the ends of the earth were afraid, drew near, and came.

  Do you know it? Isn’t it beautiful? That “islands” bound us all together.

  Second: a word about the others here, the C.O.: a captain, not so very nice, a bit standoffish, hasn’t even sniffed the islands yet, thinks that the lieutenant shouldn’t be too chummy with the sergeant because “familiarity breeds contempt,” that’s how it looks to him.

  The doctor (nice) does try to get a whiff of the islands; he is always fishing, collects shells and coral and is interested in “magic.” He does not approve of this expedition at all: head-hunting means the collecting of “soul material” for the community, the young men who are coming of age. What business is it of ours to poke our blunt Western noses into that?

  The good doctor cooled off a bit the other day when we brought back a bunch of freshly cut heads from a mountain village, left behind in haste by the Alfuras who had gone still higher into the mountains.

  Poor heads, not only of grownups, but also of children, some rather small children I think: going out to play in the fields, away from the village—and then the warriors of the other village, from behind the trees—

  These warriors are beautiful, the doctor says (he has it from a book), in their ritual trappings, naked, with a belt of milk-white tree bark around their loins, their hair bound high over a coco shell or a piece of wood, with feathers from a bird of paradise, and on top of it all a crown of white shells—gleaming white porcelana shells, as big as eggshells. And a string of them around the neck, some large yellow rings through the ears, green plumes made of leaves on arms and legs.

  I’m quite ready to believe that they are beautiful; I would like to meet one, but with me in war trappings too. And I do think they should be cured of their habit of hunting heads, magic or no magic.

  Third: to get back to the barracks, I can’t even begin to tell you about our men and about the chain gang, except for one fellow who, for heaven knows what reason, has developed a tender affection for your son Himpies.

  He is a mass-murderer. A complicated story: he got some half-witted woman to put arsenic in the coffee at a wedding party because he wanted to revenge himself on one of the guests. A considerable number of the guests turned up their toes, and it came out that the arsenic was his; he would have had to be hanged so many times that they somehow decided to put him away for life instead. He is a shriveled old man now, but very strong, I think, especially his hands—although he didn’t do it with them. When I look at him sometimes he makes me shiver.

  Whenever we’re in the field he takes care of me in a touching way, he would like to clear the whole jungle, look behind every tree, smooth all the paths for me, and they are quite some paths. Doesn’t that put your mind at ease about me?

  Fourth: I left so hastily, and there are always things we would have liked to say but somehow didn’t.

  Of course I should not have become an officer. I’m especially sorry for you, because you didn’t like it at all, I realize that. And for myself? Well, I’m still young, perhaps you’ll help me once more. It is the same with Toinette; as long as the child is so small she has to stay with her, of course, but she is still young too, perhaps there’s time, perhaps there are still possibilities for us. I could get out of the army, go to an agricultural college, learn to plant palms, and then we’ll come and live at the Garden together.

  But it’s all far off and I cannot make it come very much closer.

  And then there’s this, to use an expression Domingoes has for it: “I’ll say I’m content.” That’s what we all feel here, for the time being at least: contentment with our community, this community of men without women, fighters in our way.

  Including me! Content with Domingoes in the first place, with the soldiers, even with the captain and the doctor, and the faithful mass-murderer, content also with this island, again an island and a beautiful one, but so different; even the surf from the open sea is different from our little hop-scotch surf in the inner bay, with its steadily repeating equally heavy beats when the tide is coming in. I am still not used to it, but it is nice to fall asleep to.

  Domingoes and I had a talk about you some days ago: he has the greatest admiration for you (does he really remember, or do people talk so much about you?), the way the lady of the Small Garden cooks, even better than her grandmother, your kanari cake, your mussel sauces, how efficient you are, ready to handle anything: what are the facts? do this or that; no fussing, somebody to count upon.

  That’s how you are. I’m not like that; mother, am I a weakling? Everything is so relative in my mind. Of course, I see good and bad, and try to stick to the good in my own way, but I think that making judgments is very difficult. And what befalls us, life itself, I’d say, everything, long or short, nice or miserable, shouldn’t we accept i
t as it falls without too much examination?

  At times I think of great-grandma, who said: learn to be proud—if we only remain proud people. You thought that when she said “proud” she meant “courageous.” Yes and no, perhaps she really meant “proud”? there is something in that word “proud.” And also in that she did not let us use the word “happy,” and in the sentinels of the drawer; was it wise to throw them away, the sentinels of good fortune? Oh, there are so many things I think of, but I’m stopping.

  Take good care of yourself, I’m being taken care of by many here, your loving son H.

  Then there was several postscripts: thank you for all the good things, the sauces, and all else; I share them with Domingoes.

  You never told me about the three girls in pink, why not? Give them my greetings, and also to Mother Sjeba and all who in my thoughts belong together in the blessed Small Garden.

  Felicia was sitting with the letter in her hands.

  The sun was still shining but the mountains and hills and woods along the shore, seen from the proa here, were dark and still and drawn out into the distance, and so the inner bay seemed wider and more open than usual.

  She had read the letter and was happy with it, and sad—pleased with his praise, sad that he was so far away.

  She was thinking about him as so often: in one way he was far beyond his age, as if he were already prepared to give to the incomplete in his life its value and its place—to an unhappy love, for instance, the wrong profession, the things missed, lost, failed, and not only to Happiness, Success, Completion. But wasn’t that for an older man, one who has been tried, who has learned his lessons?

  And then suddenly his childish: “I’ll say I’m content”—was that childish?

  Domingoes, sergeant and preacher, the stiff captain, the doctor with his interest in magic, the mass-murderer, the soldiers, a Mountain Alfura resplendent in his snowy white shell string, the poor hunted heads, the surf, the Garden, his youth, the woman Toinette, a bottle of mussel sauce, the islands of Isaiah—was that, all added together, not a complete life?