The Ten Thousand Things

by Maria Dermout

  The days on board were almost over; they had touched Bali and Lombok, Macassar and Banda—Suprapto often worked in his own cabin, doing unnecessary writing, just to escape the other’s company.

  At times the professor would put his head around the door, “take a break!” or “are you sure you’re feeling well?” and had he thought to take his quinine?

  “May I see?” he once asked, picked up the paper and held it in front of his face, looked hard with his myopic eyes—why?—it gave Suprapto the feeling that his writing was hard to decipher; couldn’t he even let him have the “neat hand”?

  The professor read all he had done, put it down, raised his red eyebrows and studied him attentively. “No, my young friend, no!” he said, “you’re wasting your time with this,” and then without transition, leaning against the bunk, he delivered a short lecture on the subject Suprapto had been toying with.

  He talked for a quarter of an hour without stopping, stuttered at times, cackled, winked—but the young Javanese sat motionless, fascinated; he was sitting in a room somewhere in a large university with many “young men of the mind” (that’s what the professor himself had said—we are of the mind). There was a deep silence, for here was the master speaking and they, they were the pupils and wanted to be; he too.

  For the first time Suprapto did not think, the clerk, the secretary, nor: the prince, but the pupil—pupil was a good word, it didn’t leave a bitter taste on the tongue.

  The last evening aboard, in the extra cabin, in easy chairs; the professor kept ringing for iced water—it was terribly hot—then he switched to Scotch whiskey, “and you, young friend? oh no, of course not, you’re not allowed to, a Mohammedan youth of good family!” and cackled loudly.

  On his knees he was holding Rumphius’s Book of Curiosities, he leafed through it, “about jellyfish,” he said, taking the pipe out of his mouth and suddenly beginning to read, clearly and softly, like a woman almost:

  “ ‘Holothuriae, the ‘mizzen’: they have many names, small galleon, Portuguese man-of-war, sea cucumber’—they have little sails, wide at the bottom, small at the top—listen to this! ‘The mizzen can lower or raise this little sail when it feels the wind and wants to sail. Under water a mass of streamers, four or five feet long, hang down from it; the color is a beautiful blue, through which however something green plays. The body is transparent, as if a crystal bottle had been filled with blue-green aqua fortis.

  “ ‘The sails are milk-white with an upper edge of purple or violet, beautiful to behold, as if the creature were a precious jewel.’

  “And this: ‘it is miraculous to see a whole fleet of them, a thousand little ships—all together!’—and when Rumphius dictated that, my young friend, he was blind, blind as a bat; his wife and daughter had been killed by a crumbling wall during an earthquake; all his work, a lifetime of work, all his drawings, were lost except a hundred pages—and after all that: ‘it is miraculous to see a whole fleet of them, a thousand little ships.’ Doesn’t it make us, you and me, seem like ungrateful dogs?”

  Suprapto stiffened; the professor knew, he should know, he had just said so, that he was a Mohammedan—and then to compare him to a dog! And always that Book of Curiosities—why didn’t he stick to his plants? That was his commission, that was why the Service had put a clerk at his disposal—not to be compared to a dog and read to about the “little mizzen.”

  He felt deeply hurt by that word “dog,” and—strangely!—also by the “little mizzen” of Mr. Rumphius.

  The island in the Moluccas, the island of the Small Garden, the town at the outer bay, the hotel on the Castle Square.

  The professor gave Suprapto the nicer and larger of the two rooms: there had to be space in it for extra tables, for now the work on the herbs book began in earnest: twelve volumes, trees, plants, flowers, prepare slides, identify, make drawings.

  The professor passed in and out, looked at what he did, gave instructions, dictated.

  On the days when they did not go into the country they walked along the bay after tea “to get acclimatized”; afterward the professor went down to the Club, sat on the verandah or went inside for a game of cards. He had a drink, sometimes one too many, laughed at all the stories, told stories himself, stuttered, cackled, looked at some officer’s pretty wife and said Hebe, cup-bearer of the gods.

  The others laughed a bit at the old man and the Hebes laughed too: not much, though, and not loudly.

  In the beginning the professor had taken his Javanese assistant along but after a few times Suprapto did not want to go any more and looked for excuses; to be ridiculous is humiliating for a man, an attack on his dignity—if the other didn’t realize that—anyway, he did not want to enter the place any longer.

  They met other people in the town at the outer bay; they met the lady of the Small Garden.

  Suprapto thought her a little plump woman, a bit too forward—she invited them both to the Garden at the inner bay; she also had the books of Rumphius, she also liked to talk about Rumphius all the time, and she herself had once seen a “little mizzen.”

  And their expeditions: first, on the peninsula of the town itself; later they would have to go farther and proas would be needed. The professor didn’t like proas.

  They set out early, in the cool of the morning, always the same procession: the tall red-haired white man in a wrinkled suit, a topee with a fluttering tail of cloth, the large vasculum on a strap, walking under his big green-lined parasol; next to him the small slender Javanese, neat and correct, all brown and beige, with the gleam of really good batik work on his kerchief and sarong.

  Everywhere they were besieged by children with flowers and plants torn from the hedges and ditches. The professor stood amidst them, had Suprapto hold his parasol, distributed coins (those first times he gave away pennies only), sometimes he brought out his watch and made it chime for them; he drew pictures in the sand, nodded and shook his head vehemently, laughed at them, patted them on the back. Suprapto did not have to say much. The more clever ones soon understood that they shouldn’t pick the plants themselves but only point out where strange ones were growing, that the professor and his assistant wanted to dig them up themselves. After that, dimes and quarters were produced too, but the professor wasn’t too liberal with his polished dimes and quarters.

  Most of these trips Suprapto would forget, but one he would not.

  It was one of the earliest: from the town at the outer bay to the farthest point of the peninsula where one of the three rajahs with Portuguese names lived, a helpful man and himself an amateur botanist.

  A path along the outer bay with a surface of coral and shells which crunched under their feet, very dusty, open at first. In spite of hat and parasol the professor was suffering from the heat and whenever they passed some trees he paused, wiped his face, tried to fan himself with his handkerchief, looked up at the greenness and said, “I like trees, I like shade, young friend.”

  A long silent road of hours without people, without children.

  Halfway there they came upon a steep stretch, where foothills of the mountains reached to the outer bay. There it was still untouched jungle; a little river rushed downward in a bed of red rock and loose stones. They had to cross a bridge, recently repaired with wood that was still green, under a roofing of newly cut palm leaves.

  Across the bridge the mountain slope on their left was burned off, from the edge of the path to the top of the slope. Charred pieces of tree trunk lay between little plots of groundnuts and maize; there were some poor and shabby huts standing nearby. One of the huts was lower down than the others, almost at the road; it was better constructed and much larger.

  Not a soul was in sight, neither in the field nor on the road, nor on the other side of the road where a short wide path led along the river to the beach.

  Some ramshackle winged proas were lying there: large ships, moored by long rattan cables tied around mountain stones.

  The surf of the outer bay rolled in
up to the roots of the trees, a cool breeze moved the foliage, some pieces of colored bunting bound to the masts fluttered soundlessly—nothing else moved, all was still.

  Yet this was a settlement! Had they been seen, had the people fled from them into the wood? What kind of people? Suprapto understood, these weren’t people from the island, they were Binongkos, “the sea tramps,” many of whom came from the island Buton; they built those large seaworthy proas and wandered over the water in small groups, landed here or there, burned off the jungle, built some huts, raised a crop, caught fish from a bay, and vanished again, leaving nothing behind but the charred earth. They were a strange shy kind of people, speaking a language no one understood; and no one wanted to have anything to do with them.

  When the professor and Suprapto had rested in the shade of the roofing and marched on, they passed the large hut and Suprapto saw that there were people there after all.

  Against its outer wall, on a plank laid on two stones, some young men were sitting. They were in rags, almost naked, sitting motionless against the dark bamboo wall with which they did not contrast—they were so dark themselves, the small squat bodies, the immobile faces like brown clay, the black, stupid eyes staring ahead.

  All four of them held machetes on their knees, which reflected the sunlight in sharp little sparks—these seemed to be the only part of them that was alive.

  Suprapto felt a choking fear in his throat as he passed them and his knees trembled, he clutched his little cane—what was he doing with a little cane?—the professor walked unconcerned at his side under the parasol.

  They had passed—Suprapto had to look back, stealthily: the men were sitting there as motionless as before but all of them must have turned their heads, for the staring black eyes had followed them, looked at their backs, their unprotected backs—if the professor would only keep moving, if in the name of Allah he wouldn’t take it into his head to stand still.

  The professor stood still, “look there, young friend,” he said.

  Down the burned-off slope a child came running, jumping —it was a girl, a sad dirty creature, scarcely dressed in a torn piece of cloth bound up like a sarong, her hair knotted together with grass stalks. In both hands she held a bunch of wild orchids with long, rudely broken-off stems.

  Was it because of the burned-off jungle, the ashes perhaps, the sunlight? Nowhere ever bloomed such orchids: clusters and clusters of enormous flowers, not of one color only, lilac and pink and purple and yellow and brown together; even the leaves of one flower were sometimes of different colors, or striped or spotted. The flowers bobbed up and down, and it seemed as if the girl came running with a cluster of gaudy fluttering butterflies in her hands.

  She stopped, stood immobile as a rock in front of the professor, and breathlessly handed him the bouquet.

  “Young friend, give me a hand!” The professor closed his parasol and gave it to Suprapto, took the flowers from the girl and looked at her, “thank you, thank you, sweet girl!” he said slowly and clearly, as if she would understand that way, and to Suprapto, “but look, look! If Kitty and Ursel could see this!”

  He pulled his large botanical case forward, opened it, carefully put the flowers in—they filled it completely—closed it and pushed it back to his side. The girl watched every movement with big eyes.

  Then the professor made her open one hand, produced a polished quarter and closed her fingers over it; then the other hand. “You can’t stand on one leg, girl,” he said and laughed. The child looked at him and laughed too, she held her fists stiffly closed around the coins. Suddenly a shock went through her—one of the four young men had called out to her, something short and threatening.

  With feverish movements and as fast as lightning the girl brought her fists together and put the two coins in one hand, then grabbed them with the other, shouted something back—her face distorted with fury and fear—then put both quarters in her mouth to have her hands free, and clambered back up the hillside on hands and feet. She vanished into the wood like a little hunted animal.

  Suprapto pushed the parasol into the professor’s hand.

  “Quick!” he said in a curt commanding voice, “quick, you can’t stand here, please walk on with me!” because in a brief glimpse he had seen how the four young men had come to their feet and were holding their machetes in their hands.

  When they were out of sight, Suprapto said, “This won’t do, professor, you can’t go into the jungle unarmed!”

  The professor answered with his little jokes, “can you see me with a pistol? they always go off by themselves!” and “unarmed? I still have my sharp plant knife, young friend. And who would want to harm us? Oh, you mean those four obscure fellows on that bench” (so he had seen them after all), “you think they—? But why would they?”

  Suprapto said in an even voice, “perhaps they like polished dimes and quarters too.”

  “Do you really think so?” asked the professor, “well, in that case they can have some on the way back, eh, young friend, a quarter each?”

  They had not passed them on the way back, they had taken another road, a bypass through the mountains.

  The professor was to mention the little mizzens once again. It happened during their afternoon stroll through the town, first around the Castle and then up a wooden staircase to the fortress; they sat on a bench on the earthen wall of the fort and watched the sun set in the outer bay.

  Suprapto hadn’t felt well the past days, he was withdrawn, more silent than ever. The professor seemed a little off-key too, restless, not making his usual jokes. He kept putting his hand to his head, complained about his memory—“do you think I’m coming down with malaria?”—and then Suprapto must describe the first symptoms to him; he would know.

  Suprapto sat next to him on the bench—oh, that eternal bay, that green coast, that little surf, always the sun setting and rising once more, eternally the professor complaining about his imagined ailments—at times a large ship lay anchored in the bay, a man could stare at it and become melancholy—the eternal departing, the eternal saying goodbye . . .

  “You know, I’ve been taking quinine for some time now,” the professor said, “do you think that’s it, or is it the heat, or is it my eyes after all?” He squinted behind his heavy glasses, “but I don’t only sleep badly, as soon as I lie down I get dizzy. When you had that attack of malaria before we went on this expedition, did you have dizzy spells when you lay down, and ringing in your ears?”

  He did not talk on, nor did he wait for an answer.

  Only after some time did he continue, but no longer in that plaintive, old-woman’s voice—it was as if something in his being had shifted place, changed.

  He spoke quietly, hardly addressing the other, no “young friend,” no stuttering, no cackling. His eyes, wide open, light blue, stared—“and several times already, between waking and sleeping, I was on the sea, in the sea—I can’t quite explain; there is a sea and I’m there, there is also a high shore with trees, and the wind blows, and then comes—you remember—” he smiled—“the fleet of a thousand little ships, all together, the ‘mizzens’ with their sails of glass, of crystal, transparent, with violet edges, and large—you don’t know how large!—and I’m there too, and then all those sails come from every side and go past me and behind and in front of me and through and over me.

  “It does not hurt but there is an indescribable sound as from a harp string drawn too tight, only a thousand times louder—it is as if my eardrums will burst—”

  He stopped, squinted, “it is glorious,” he said then, and, turning to the other, went on in his normal voice, “I wish you could see it. And you can believe me or not, young friend! It reconciles me with my sailor’s grave, if it has to be that way.”

  Suprapto did not answer. Why tell a thing like that? One shouldn’t tell a thing like that—what was he supposed to say? He glanced at the professor, tried to see his eyes behind the glasses, the light-blue, somewhat empty eyes.

  W
as the professor turning blind? He had bad eyes, obviously; and day after day the glare, the sun on the waves of the bays, on the white surfaces of the roads? His dizzy spells? Ringing in the ears, sounds like a tight harp string? He had heard of that—but no, it wasn’t acceptable, he didn’t want it.

  He thought, this man is too good to turn blind; and at the same time: if he goes blind, would I have to stay with him, like the son of Rumphius who stayed with his blind father and did everything for him, wrote everything down, drew it all anew? (he could write and draw well too)—no, he didn’t want that, he didn’t have to, they weren’t father and son.

  Between them was no bond, not a single one, neither a bond of love nor of hatred.

  For he didn’t hate the professor, why should he, what harm had the man done him? Oh, he knew—he felt it somewhere, not even consciously—how those awkward fingers were loosening up something in him, things which were too tight, too cold, which were destroying him: his youth, the fears and bitterness of a youth, his life, the world, a world filled with lovelessness—and taking the place of those were the professor’s silly little things: his jokes and stories—beautiful flowers—look there, young friend! and “we of the mind”—and shouldn’t Ursel be able to get him a scholarship— “the other prince”—the quinine he pursued him with (why not castor oil!)—the good word “pupil”—the crystal sails of the “little mizzen” jellyfish—but he didn’t want this!

  He did not want a bond between them, not of one kind nor of the other—he did not want to stay with him.

  That afternoon for the first time he gave the professor his hand to help him down the stairs of the fortress; later, walking beside him in the dusk on their way back to the hotel, Radèn Mas Suprapto took a firm decision: he was going to leave, he would not stay any longer—not even until the end of the expedition. He would write his director so that he could send another clerk; that would take some time. It would cost him his job, that couldn’t be helped, he’d go back—oh well, back . . .