Island of Demons (28 page)

“You should say something to Nyoman about his nephew,” I urged. “They go everywhere together. It is shocking. How old is that child? Thirteen? Fourteen? A scandal.”

Walter sighed. “Nyoman does not care about anything but his
gamelan
orchestras. Of those he is fiercely jealous. Anyway, Balinese do not count birthdays so they do not have an age. When a boy starts behaving as a man, he is a man. What is wrong with you Bonnetchen?
We
go everywhere together. You don't know what they actually get up to. It may be entirely innocent. You spend so much of your life disapproving of things, Bonnetchen, that I think sometimes you disapprove of yourself. Those ladies who buy your paintings in Batavia would be as outraged about us, as you are about Colin and Made. They would joyfully crucify you if they knew about your activities on the
lapangan kota
.” What did
he
know about …? “Look, either you believe such moral lines are universally the same or you admit they are not and then you cannot redraw them just for your own convenience. What is gravy for the female is also gravy for the male goose.” Gravy for the female? Ah, sauce for the goose. “You cannot disapprove of Made and Colin on the grounds that they are simply wrong and excuse yourself as simply right. I should disapprove if I thought Colin were treating him badly or making him unhappy but you do see that that is quite different? Sex is not good or bad. It is how you use it to affect other people. Once you throw away universal rules you are left simply with the pagan virtues, kindness and good manners.”

“Colin's out with Made. He'll be back soon,” explained Jane with a sour Texas twang, as she showed me over the bare, comfortless house. “You know, I've sort of done this before. My first husband was a artist, George Biddle. He lived in Tahiti, adopted some local children. Why, he even wrote a book about it. You know, someone just made the most marvellous film about Tahiti, called ‘Tabu', filmed right where he lived?” Good God – Murnau. Then –
first
husband? Jesus. How many had she had?

“Oh, Colin's only my second. We decided to get wed after I wrote a essay in anthropology at the Sorbonne. ‘Is marriage a human universal?' I guess the answer they wanted was ‘Yes but only if you let “marriage” be stretched so far it doesn't mean a thing any more'. You know, men marrying men, people marrying the dead, a girl taking up with a whole heap of brothers and so on – the way they do in different places. Colin and I were real close at the time in temperament. He was studying under Nadia Boulanger. There were problems but when you looked at all that marriage data, us two getting married didn't really seem so odd any more. So we just went ahead and did it. My analyst said it was a great step forward in my maturational phase to embrace a feminine man and so move towards dealing with my own temperamental inconsistency. I guess it is the same for you, having made the decision to live in partnership with dear Walter.”

“Walter and I do
not
live together! We are friends.”

“Oh my! Now I've embarrassed you.” She resumed her tour like the guide to a palace. “Most of the furniture we just borrowed from the manager of the Bali Hotel. He was a most obliging gentleman.” She prodded one of the beds and it responded with a groan. “You see? In Bali, even the beds are musical!” she smiled. “Colin says it's a B flat.” Oh my God. Surely that was the bed that Dion and I had played and harmonised upon. My eyes misted.
We
had got whole chords out of it.

“I just don't know why the manager was so nice,” she prattled on, “considering he's losing business on the deal. He even had his people bring it all round for us and put it in the rooms. It's just shameful, I know, but I can't help thinking it's some kind of ploy.” McPhee's cue to enter hot, sweaty-browed, crying out for lemonade.

“Boy?” he enquired eagerly. “Some kind of boy? He flopped down on a chair, looking up bright-eyed. “What kind of boy?”

Then, suddenly they were gone. Walter insisted there was no mystery to it. The McPhees' visitors' permits had simply expired and so they had to either leave or go through the lengthy and expensive procedure of becoming residents. I, myself, had found it relatively easy to regularise my position owing to my Dutch nationality and have, moreover, always been punctilious in such matters. I asked Walter how he had managed it. Surely any permission he had to remain must be long defunct? He smiled.

“Oh, no. It is still funct. I did it the Balinese way,” he said airily. “A friend of mine has a brother who knows someone whose wife's cousin works in the Resident's office. He arranged for my file to be lost. I am the Mata Hari of Gianyar, a ghost. I do not exist in this world.”

Made Tantra took their departure badly, tearfully. In farewell, he had boldly arranged for his photograph to be taken by Mr Kasimura, the photographer of Denpasar, wearing a new suit, hair brilliantined and against a painted backdrop of the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. The buttons on his jacket were retouched, by hand, in gold, before expensive framing. I had known it would all end in tears. I am seldom wrong in these matters.

There now came a period of calm with no visitors. Walter, through rubbing shoulders with McPhee, had rediscovered himself as a musician and spent hours pencilling transcriptions of the music of the shadow-plays, leaping from piano to piano and dragging the boys away from their work to discuss versions of the flowery elaborations to the main tune that might be added by improvising accompanists. They would crouch at the foot of the piano, dusters and saucepans discarded, shaking their heads, arguing and banging out alternatives and variations on instruments looted from the
gamelan
.

In the evenings, after dinner, they set a lamp in the middle of the floor and we all gathered round as at a camp fire, myself, Walter, Resem, Alit, occasionally Oleg and Conrad, sitting cross-legged in pairs. Walter had somehow found three identical copies of Grimm's fairy tales in Denpasar, translated ruthlessly into Malay and these were used to teach the boys to read, ourselves looking tutorially over their shoulders as they passed from a world of Germanic elves, gnomes and witches via one of Malay
poleng,jin
and
tukang sihir
to Balinese
kala, tonya
and
leyak
all with lengthy oral footnotes. Through their similarity to the Balinese Tantri tales, the stories formed a bridge to the hottest news as the Balinese understood it. Prompted by their texts, the boys chatted, wide-eyed of latest events. Last year a monkey-faced man had been captured near the Western forest and locked up but such misfortune had been visited on the captors that they had sent for a diviner who had told them it was one of the invisible people,
gamang
, revealed through some enchantment, who must be freed and returned to his home. They had loaded him with gifts and sent him off and now the harvest was fruitful as never before. Other terms caused difficulty. A gingerbread house was a challenging concept in the Indies. The translator had reached for the Malay
kue kukus
, “steamed cake”, deftly adapted by Walter to
kue kakus
, “shithouse cake”, with such facial expressions and lugubrious rolling of the tongue that the boys became hysterical. Then he started in on
aduk
, meaning “to beat a mixture” but also Balinese slang for copulation, with shameless miming of the licking of the spoon, by which point he could calm them only by driving protesting Mas from the kitchen and establish the reality of such a cake by making one on the spot. Later, Resem would lean trustingly back against my chest, chewing the hot, steamed fruit confection and resting his hand familiarly on my leg as I tapped out the awkward rhythm of a Malay sentence on his thigh. All this was, for him, totally non-sexual, since as a friend, I might touch him anywhere but his hair, which alone would be to show excessive familiarity. For me, of course, it was very far from empty of meaning. In the cold North, the slightest physical contact had brought down on my own head all the thundering interdictions of the vengeful god of the Old Testament and his prophet, Moses. Yet here, as I felt the hot firmness of his body against my flabby own, it was with a sense not of frustration but of gentle fulfilment. I suddenly realised that, since my youth, I had been having sex with people for the greater and simpler pleasure of going to bed with them and just touching the wonder of their bare and vibrant skin.

***

Elli Beinhorn came with the first small rains, after a blistering hot season, like a breath of fresh air. She came, like most, in Fatimah's car, but arriving with a great sideways skid and a loud klaxoning. Bagus climbed not from the driver's but the passenger's seat, ashen-faced and reknotting his sarong, his bottle well and truly shaken by the ride. At the wheel, sat a pert and delightful young woman in a white leather flying helmet and a yellow silk scarf. She gunned the engine, cut it and leapt out without bothering to open the door. In a man, such a gesture would have been distastefully cocky. In her it was quite charming. She pulled off the helmet, shook out her luscious blond hair and stepped forward, smiling, hand outstretched for shaking. “Elli Beinhorn!” I saw, heard and felt Conrad gawp and, unbidden, we formed a sort of instinctive line, as though for deferential presentation to Queen Wilhelmina, down which she then passed. Only Walter received the confident kiss of a recognised equal on the cheek. She was wearing trousers, still an exotic sexual perversity for a woman in those days – not even slacks – with a provokingly prominent button fly.

“Hallo darling! Can I stay for a bit?”

At that time, Elli Beinhorn was one of the most famous women in the world, Germany's leading aviatrix, a sort of feminised Amelia Earhardt, a figure of unbelievable glamour and a focus of male sexual yearning from schoolboys to septuagenarians. The boys went into fits of shy giggles whenever she was around and Conrad followed her about the house with a dogged, doggy devotion, inhaling her fragrant slipstream.

She had numerous adventures under her belt, had flown across Africa and Asia, thrilled and terrified crowds with aerobatics in her little Klemm aircraft and disappeared, presumed dead, in several savage places. The papers had made much of her recent return from beyond the grave in Persia, having been forced to ditch in the desert in a sandstorm and charm the fiercely uxorious tribesmen into transporting her back to civilisation by camel. She had been part of the first expedition to photograph Mount Everest from above, the honour finally going to a more powerfully engined and mustachioed American air ace, their names romantically linked, who had been nearly killed when the photographer – innocent of the laws of aerodynamics – had stood up in the plane to get his shot and sent it into a near-fatal spin.

“My plane is in Batavia,” she explained huskily over dinner, “having floats fitted in the locomotive workshops for the flight down the islands to Australia. It's a complicated business. You have to find the centre of gravity of the whole machine by suspending it on cables and attach the floats at exactly the right angle, otherwise you stick to the water like glue when you try for takeoff. Last time I had it done they dropped the plane so, this time, I couldn't bear to watch and decided to see Bali instead.” She leaned forward sensually over the cruet. “So, darling, what do I see?”

What she saw was a special ceremony at Besakih, the mother temple of the whole island, built on the slopes of Gunung Agung, volcanic home of the gods. From there, she had a lofty aviatrix's view of the world as the Balinese knew it and wallowed in the sensuous music, flags, flowers and stacked ceremonial offerings as Walter probed and nitpicked and etymologised inside. He and Stutterheim had an ongoing academic war over the distant history of Bali. The broad sequence was clear enough, a primordial Bali with archaic religion of sun and moon, stone megaliths, buffalo sacrifice and simple accompanying social structure such as they still had amongst the caste-free Bali Aga and the hill peoples. Of course, the fewer the facts, the thicker and firmer are the arrows of influence and migration that archaeologists can draw on their maps. He and Stutterheim had together paced the island, measuring, recording, photographing and become jointly lacrimose over the discovery of primordial pyramids. Then had come Hinduism from India and Java, intensified by the flight of nobles, artists, craftsmen from the Majapahit kingdom of Java when it fell to Islam in the fifteenth century. But where did Buddhism fit into all this and how many people were involved in the migration of an idea? Its traces were clear enough in a division of the priesthood into those of Siva and those of Bodda but this could not be easily equated with differences of doctrine or function and both would be performing, side by side, at Besakih. Oddly, Walter was always prepared to fight his way through hours of shrugging mystical obfuscation to engage such Balinese issues, exactly the sorts of doctrinal distinctions he treated with contempt in his own life.

I had known better than to accompany them on such an arid quest, especially since the sky was growling and coiling with bilious clouds the colour of gangrene, announcing the imminent downpour. If it split now and unleashed the real monsoon rains on them, the trip through the mountains would be a slithering nightmare. Instead, I busied myself with my chicks and a visiting painter from Klungkung, pinnacle of Balinese nobility and freshly returned from punitive exile, who was a master muralist and had promised to show me the techniques he was employing in the illuminated cloth panels for the ceiling of his rajah's palace of justice. He had just embarked on a depiction of the torments of the ungodly in hell and, I confess, I was a little curious to discover whether I and my kind had our place there and – if so – how we were kept occupied.

They returned late, delayed not by rain but by the local
pedanda
priest to whom Walter had offered a lift. Being of high Brahmana caste, it was a lifelong concern that his head should not be below the heads of others. This had naturally been accommodated through the provision of a deep cushion on which he might sit. Unfortunately, the Dutch administration had recently embarked on a major programme of road-building, with the creation of cuttings in which the roads might be sunk, whilst the footpaths remained along the tops of the embankments. This was an immediate threat to the priest's ritual purity and dignity so that, each time these were encountered, he had to disembark, scramble up the bank and use the high path until it rejoined the road and he the car. He was also troubled by overhead irrigation pipes. He must pass over, not under these and so the journey was wearily prolonged by several hours. Walter, to his credit, remained supremely calm and offered the priest refreshment at the house before sending him off, with Conrad as driver, to his own compound. The old man sat there in complete self-satisfaction, sipping his pink fruit crush, as Elli bustled off to bathe and change and return all smiles. “This woman,” he said with slow authority, “is much prettier than that other one we had with us in the car today.” Offered a tour of the gardens, he demurred, noting that the kitchen would thus be above his own head height and observed with outrage that Walter's roofs were higher than those of the old royal temple on the other bank.