Among the Believers (52 page)

They met on the twenty-fifth of May. Barbara’s thoughts were of her return to Holland; she was going back on leave on the sixteenth of June. And that was extraordinary: because Sitor had been invited to Holland by a cultural organization and was going to Holland on the twenty-eighth of June. After two years he still remembered the dates. So, although Barbara could give him only two “appointments” in Jakarta before she left, in Holland she was able to give him many more.

It wasn’t easy for him to know what impression he was making on her. Barbara was Dutch and very cool. But he was overwhelmed by the new world she showed him, the new ideas she introduced him to. He had spent ten years in jail, shut away from books, living with old ideas; he had missed a whole decade of intellectual movement in the West.

Barbara was of the 1960s, the generation of 1968. She was full of Schumacher and people like that. And to Sitor, who had grown up in colonial times, Barbara and her friends appeared as a new breed of “missionary.” The young people Barbara took him among didn’t want to convert the natives, but wished in a more direct way to help them.

How had they been created? How had Europe thrown up this dazzling generation? During his time in Holland with Barbara he was in a state of high emotional and intellectual excitement: this tribal man of fifty-four, with the Negrito-Chinese features (and the bristling eyebrows that at times suggested a Chinese pirate), five feet three, diabetic, politically neutered, with the bright and tall Dutch girl twenty years his junior.

They lived together when they came back to Indonesia. The tribe got to know, and the tribe insisted that they get married according to tribal rites. For this, it was necessary for Barbara to be initiated into a
related but separate tribe, since Sitor’s tribe was “exogamous”—and Sitor spoke the technical anthropological word easily.

Just a few weeks before, he and Barbara had gone to the village for the ceremonies. It was wet and cool up in the rocky hills above the valleys; the photographs showed mist and cloud hanging low; the colours were soft. There was a ritual meal in one of the houses with the extravagantly shaped horn roofs. Barbara and Sitor ate with their hands; they ate pork. “Look,” Sitor said, pointing to a photograph. “That’s
me
. In
my
village. It’s real. It’s not for tourists.” He was dressed like a visitor, in rubber boots, and he was looking down at an old woman working on a village loom. “And that’s my sister. She cannot read or write.” And there was a photograph of him and Barbara standing at the door of his father’s house, the house of the great chief, which now belonged to Sitor’s brother: it was where Sitor had to take Barbara for the tribal marriage ceremony.

He was impressed by the journey he had made, and it was an immense journey. In one generation he had fitted in the experience that for other Indonesians had unfolded over the last four or five centuries. And yet he hadn’t been able to write his autobiography. He had made two attempts in the last three years and had discarded hundreds of pages. The material was too rich, too extraordinary; the changing personality of the writer, to him the essence of his experience, was something he hadn’t been able to express; he had only been able to record events.

He said, of what he had written, “There is no synthesis in the whole. It has not become an expression of growth through the prism of me as an individual. All that I’ve experienced doesn’t fall into a context, artistically, personally, politically.”

He hadn’t been able to define himself because he didn’t know who he was. He had been cut off from his past. He had gone to the Dutch school when he was six; he had been cleansed of village beliefs. For a writer, his early life had been oddly wordless: he had never had a conversation with his parents. That was why the Canadian anthropologist had been of such use to him.

She had spent five months in his village, and he had gone with her as a guide and interpreter. He showed a photograph of the anthropologist, a big and lovely young woman in a safari suit: clearly, being a Batak and Sitor had its compensations. By her skilled questioning she had
reconstructed his ancestral past for him. He couldn’t have done it himself. So now, when he tried to write the autobiography again, he would at least be able to say, “This was how my ancestors lived for eighteen generations.”

Sitor said, “I am complicated. But not confused.”

Throughout the morning various people had dropped in. One man, a German who spoke English, had come to look at the house. The other callers were for Sitor, the poet. He cherished them all. After four years of freedom it still pleased him to be sought out.

At midday Barbara came back. She looked after her birds, one by one. Sitor and I went to the pavilion. The pavilion, at the end of a long garden at the side of the main house, was decorated with the crafts Barbara had come out to Indonesia to serve: reed mats, rattan chairs, baskets from Timor. Barbara knew her subject; she had a good, chaste eye.

The servants (Barbara and Sitor had two) had prepared a lunch of fried fish and rice, with pickled cucumbers afterwards. Sitor, with his diabetes, ate very little.

I asked Barbara, “Are you going back to Europe soon?”

“I hope not.” She bit decisively on a piece of pickled cucumber.

Sitor said, “I would like to go again. I would like to be invited for a long time. There are too many things here that hurt me.”

Barbara’s lunch hour was quickly over; she went back to her handicrafts. I had another slice of fried fish; Sitor watched me eat. On one wall of the small room was a surrealist painting of two nudes seen from the back, one male and brown, one female and dark-red, with birds everywhere. A painter friend had called on a day when one of Barbara’s birds had died; the picture was the gift he had been moved to make. Elsewhere were violent pen drawings of nudes that Sitor himself had done.

The glamour of Indonesia and Sitor, the poet, for Barbara; for Sitor, the glamour and security of Barbara and Europe. Barbara could take Europe for granted. Sitor, at the end of his own journey, couldn’t. He now possessed his ancestral village, the valleys, the lake, the stone walls, the fairy-tale houses. But he could no longer go back there; he couldn’t pretend to be what he had ceased to be. Without Europe (and that mean Holland) and its cultural invitations, its interest in his “complication,” he had only Indonesia, for him a land of hurt and failure,
where he could get no job now, and where he could be snuffed out, without anyone or anything to appeal to.

And it was not until many hours later that I saw what had been left out of our long talk: the twenty years from 1945 to 1965. I hadn’t asked Sitor about them: his beginnings and his present had interested me more. In those twenty years, the first of Indonesian independence, Sitor had written his poems and become famous. He had later become a politician and a man of power. To some people then, especially those who towards the end of the Sukarno time could be described as “counterrevolutionaries,” he had become a figure of threat. And, as I discovered later, there were people who felt that their careers had been damaged by Sitor. Some, even after all this time, had not forgiven him.

But the man who told me this said almost at once, “I will not talk against him, though. He has suffered more than any of us.”

  3
Deschooling

A
di Sasono, whom I met at Sitor’s the first evening, told me I would understand Indonesian Muslims better if I went out to the countryside and had a look at the traditional Islamic village schools. These schools were known as
pesantren
s. Adi had a business associate who took an especial interest in
pesantren
s
;
and it was this man, as devout or concerned a Muslim as Adi, who planned my journey. He thought I should see a modern
pesantren
—there was a famous one near Yogyakarta and Borobudur; and I should also have a look at a very old one—there was one near Surabaya.

These village
pesantren
s preserved the harmony between community and school, village life and education. In this they were different from the Western-style schools, which, set down in the Asian countryside, were psychologically disruptive. Adi’s friend told me that the
famous educationist Ivan Illich had come to Indonesia to look at
pesantren
s. I hadn’t read Ivan Illich’s books, and of his theory of “de-schooling” I really knew only the word. But I knew that he had a high reputation, and I thought that it would be interesting to go where (to my surprise, I must confess) he had gone.

I went with Prasojo, a nineteen-year-old college student, and I could not have had a better companion. Prasojo had been to Arizona for a year on a scholarship given by the American Field Service. He spoke English well, with an American accent. He had greatly enjoyed his time in Arizona, had learned much, and remained so grateful to the American Field Service that he intended to give them part of the fee he was going to get from me.

I also felt that Prasojo wanted to give back to me, a stranger, some of the kindness he had received in the United States. For our trip he wore jeans with the AFS label stitched on the hip pocket. He was just above medium height and of Chinese appearance. That appearance was the subject of a family joke. Prasojo’s father, a bulky man, undeniably Indonesian, would say, “But, eh—how did I get this Chinese son?”

We took the Garuda air shuttle to Surabaya, on the northern coast of East Java. Mud tainted the coastline. The rivers were muddy wriggles in the green, overworked, overpopulated land. The land around Surabaya was a land of rice, the rice fields in long thin strips, easier that way to irrigate, but suggesting from the air an immense petty diligence.

The houses—as we saw later, driving inland from Surabaya—matched the rice strips. They were very narrow and went back a long way. The houses stood a little distance from the road, and the front yards were scraped clean, but shady. Banana trees grew out of the bare earth, and coconut trees, mango trees, sugar cane, and frangipani. The rice fields began directly at the back of the houses. During that drive we seemed to be going through one long village: Java here an unending smallness, hard to associate with famous old kingdoms and empires, a land that seemed only to be a land of people of petty diligence, the
wong chilik
, the little people, cursed by their own fertility, four million in Java at the beginning of the last century, eighty million today.

It was Prasojo who gave me that word,
wong chilik
, telling me at the same time that the word (though beautifully appropriate in sound) was both insulting and old-fashioned. It still mattered to some people, though, who were not of the peasantry, to have their distinction acknowledged.
Such people called themselves “nobles,”
raden
, and used the letter R. before their names. They also built houses with a special hat-shaped roof, a distinction I would have missed if Prasojo had not pointed it out to me, so squashed and repetitive and cozy it had all seemed: the red tile roofs, the walls of woven bamboo for the poor, concrete for the not-so-poor, the yards full of shade and fruit and flowers.

Windows were an innovation, Prasojo said. In the traditional Javanese house there were none; and, with walls of woven bamboo that shut out glare and heat but permitted ventilation, windows were not necessary. In the traditional house, light came through gaps in the roof. But concrete walls required windows; and I could see that glass louvres were fashionable among the not-so-poor.

Each little yard had its gateposts but no gate. The posts were of a curious design, with slabbed or stepped pyramids or diamond shapes at the top, the pyramids or diamonds sometimes bisected: concrete, but concrete clearly imitating brick. These posts, which at first suggested a single ownership of land and people, perhaps by some vast plantation, were in fact the remnant of the architectural style of the last Hindu kingdom of Java, the kingdom of Majapahit, which disintegrated at the end of the fifteenth century.

This was how the pre-Islamic past survived: as tradition, as mystery.
Indrapura
, “Indra’s City,” was painted on the bus in front of us; and
Indra Vijaya
, “The Victory of Indra,” was on many shops. But this Indra was no longer the Aryan god of the Hindu pantheon. To Prasojo, as well as to the driver of our car, this Indra was only a figure from the Javanese puppet drama. Prasojo began telling me a local Muslim legend of the five Pandava brothers, who represented the five principles of Islam. And I don’t believe Prasojo had an idea of the true wonder of the legend: the story he was telling me came from the ancient Hindu epic of the
Mahabharata
, which had lived in Java for fourteen hundred years, had taken Javanese roots, and had then been adapted to Islam. Prasojo, a Javanese and a Muslim, lived with beautiful mysteries. Scholarship, applied to his past, would have undermined what had become his faith, his staff.

And so we came in the late afternoon to the town of Jombang. It was where the famous old
pesantren
was. But Jombang, once we turned off the highway, seemed to be full of schools. There were scattered
groups of chattering Muslim schoolgirls on the road at the end of the school day: little nunlike figures, with covered heads, blouses, sarongs. Where was our
pesantren
, and in what way was it different from these other academies? We raced back and forth, the driver behaving as though he was still on the highway; we penetrated murky rural alleys. And then we found out that we had passed it many times: it was so ordinary-looking, even with a signboard, and not at all the sylvan retreat, the mixture of village and school, that I (and Prasojo as well) had been expecting.