Island of Demons (58 page)

I feel the time coming when I, too, shall be free. All I think about is Bali. The people here are not as graceful as those in Bali, the trees are less tall, the water less fresh, the sky not as high. Once I get back, I swear I shall never leave again and I
shall
get back even if I have to crawl all the way from this camp.

My own camp had really not been all that bad. Naturally, Hofker had blandly assumed that his wife would be receiving gentler treatment in the women's camp in Java but, at that time, we knew nothing of the vicious atrocities and deliberate starvation imposed by Imamura and the Japanese 16th army. Our own guards were easy-going, middleaged men, headed by cylindrical Sergeant Yoshida, cynical conscripts not stiff-legged professionals, who – like us – mainly just wanted to survive and knew that this involved our co-operation. There were five of them to guard 650 of us. The private property of the inmates was respected and many had brought large sums with them that could be used to buy food or medicines – Pare Pare was literally a hotbed of malaria. In return, the guards appropriated all the allowances intended for our maintenance and installed themselves in a sort of cosy Japanese
kampung
where Yoshida could be seen having his white hairs daily plucked by a giggling local woman. Fields of good black earth were allocated to us to grow food. We traded in goats and cattle. We were allowed to fish from the beach. Life was hard but not impossibly harsh, monastically challenging rather than lethal. Our numbers were augmented, in the early months, by dribs and drabs of new arrivals seeping down from Java and, on one such day, a familiar figure clambered from the back of the truck. He was no longer in clerical garb of immaculate conception but worn
khaki mufti
into which he was sweating

“Father Scruple!” He turned furtively and eyed me with caution. “Don't you remember? We met in Denpasar. Then Ngawi. I was visiting my friend, Walter.”

He frowned. “No I don't believe … Which Walter would that be then?”

“Yes. Yes. You must remember. Walter Spies. You played chess with him every day and argued about his Balinese dictionary. A painter. A musician.”

He sighed. “My son. In my line of business, one meets so many people”. He turned to go but, of course, did not know where to go and dithered.

“Look,” I said. “I don't know what it is you're up to but I don't believe you don't remember him. Think! He played the piano. There can't have been that many piano-playing Walters at Ngawi.”

“Well, now. Perhaps I vaguely recall someone like that. He was at Kutacane, too. A strange man. When the piano fell apart, he took the keyboard and played it silently for hours. A little odd in the head. I shouldn't believe much of what he says, if I were you.” A sudden thought struck him. “He's not here, is he?” he asked, in some alarm.

“No,” I said. “He's not here. I don't know where he is. That's the point. When was the last time you saw him?”

He screwed up his face. “That would have been in Kutacane. It was all confused towards the end. We weren't sure whether the Dutch had already surrendered or not. There was talk of moving the prisoners again. Some of the men just deserted, or maybe they went to do some real fighting. It was hard to know. When there was no point in staying, I left. The Japanese are not always great respecters of the cloth, you know. My own capture in Palembang was terrible. They burst into the church, firing, halfway through ‘Rock of Ages'. I thought we were all to be killed. All the priests were seized, all the workers, even the choir. I never got to deliver my sermon. My assistant, Hendrik, was the only one to get away.” Coincidence? I thought not but was glad Dion was still free. He sighed. “Look, Walter had been working on this painting,
The Vision of Ezekiel
, he asked me to look after it in the camp, to put it in a safe place. It was an ungodly great thing. The Japanese were said to be twelve miles away and when we moved there was no space for luggage and the camp was burned. I'm sorry, my son, but there it is. All I took was my Bible. It was God's will. If it is any comfort, I am not entirely sure it was not a heretical work. The face of the prophet was most inappropriate, the face of a depraved idiot. Anyway, it was
sauve qui peut
.”

“
Sauve qui peut
. For Walter that would mean ‘Italian wine for anyone who can bear to drink it'.” He looked at me as if I were mad. “Soave – it's a kind of Italian wine – it was a game we played – never mind.” I remained calm but my voice broke. “So you saved a bible that could be replaced anywhere and burnt a major work of art, the summation of a man's life? It was possibly a water closet – I mean a watershed – of western art. That's like burning his soul.”

He wasn't having that. “You know nothing of theology or of burning souls, of … of …” He was turning crimson. “Down, down on your knees now, bow your head and pray with me for guidance.”

I turned on my heel. “If I were you, father, I'd get out of the habit of kneeling down, head bowed, when there are Japanese about.”

After that, we saw little of each other in the camp. Father Scruple was finally killed in the last of the regular Allied airraids, one Sunday morning – regular since the camp was always mistaken for a Japanese barracks – so he never got to deliver his sermon, on the unpredictability of divine grace, that day either. They moved us inland, upland and our last few months were the worst – the cold, the rain, all the animals dying from standing around knee-deep in water. Then, one day, we got up to find Yoshida and his men had driven off and we were completely alone, abandoned orphans in the storm. We had won the war. It seemed that – to our great surprise and doubtless his own – H.E. the G.G., Jonkeer Alidius Warmoldus Lambertus Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer, had told us nothing but the truth. It wasn't safe any more, with the
Pemuda
wandering around and making probing raids to work up their courage, so we drifted down to the city of Makassar, mostly on foot, walking through redemptive green fields beside the swirling waves of the South China Sea.

No one can imagine the confusion and mental dislocation of those times. The Japanese had notionally surrendered and were, theoretically, acting under Allied orders, until they could be disarmed and replaced. Some supported the
Pemuda
, giving them weapons, others fought them in the streets. Crucially, Soekarno had been allowed to read out a formal declaration of independence under Japanese tutelage, while the Dutch intended to blandly resume government just as before the war with no concessions to changed realities. In Surabaya, the British Indian Army was fighting a pitched battle against an emerging Indonesian force, with terrible loss of life and everywhere were young men, inflamed by the highest political rhetoric, committing the most terrible atrocities against civilians that would soon be repaid in kind by the Dutch. The heady smell of freedom was already tainted with the stench of blood and corruption. In a bar, Hofker and I found some sort of Dutch welfare officer, who lent us thirty florins a month to live on, and settled in a room in an old abandoned bungalow. It wasn't much but was more than the Indonesians had, yet the improvidence of unsecured loans troubled me. In the evenings, we sat in the dark and listened to the news on a looted wireless whose glowing tuning dial was our only illumination. Seeded among the Dutch broadcasts, were strident new voices, some in Indonesian and English, mostly ranting of injustice. One particularly struck me. It was clearly ultimately English, female, and saying the most offensive things possible about the Allies and rapidly became known as that of “Surabaya Sue”, a sort of lesser sister of “Tokyo Rose”. But there could be no mistaking those intonations. It was Manxi busily still surviving. It was at this point, roaming the hot and devastated city, that I discovered the Japanese teahouse.

The Grand Hotel reared up, like a beached whale, in the more gracious area of the city, overshaded by dusty palm and eucalyptus, a great white colonial structure of approximately Palladian pretensions. The houses on either side lay shattered as though it had vastly shrugged but, in the hotel, only the gardens had suffered. It had served as the social and cultural centre of the Japanese occupation and behind, in the grounds, stood a new addition, a classic Japanese teahouse of grained wood, tatami mats and formally exuberant rooftiles. It had the most curious effect on me. After years of the temporary, the requisitioned, the grimed, worn down and abraided, it sparkled with crisp freshness, cool rational control, mastery over matter, precision of purpose and I looked at it and felt a lump in my throat for all that had been lost. The door consisted of two sliding sections leading off a passage of pure dove-grey granite and gave onto a series of sere galleries divided by panels of wood and heavy, oiled paper panels. In the main room, these had been painted in a delightful eighteenth-century style with pictures of
kimono-clad
ladies and gentlemen of the floating world. They strolled, gossiped, posed, took tea and – oh my God was there no escape – bared breasts, geishaed variously and played musical instruments. The artist had begun one of the ceiling panels, a scene of a bucolic pleasure- garden with little red hump-backed bridges, lakes, peach trees in blossom. Half a lady floated, free of the ground, like a Balinese
leyak
. He had left before her legs could be finished. His paints lay in a heap on the floor, his brush discarded beside them. It was like finding the ancient imprint of a hand on a rock wall, as I once had in Italy. It is impossible not to lay your own hand over it. I knew at once what I would do. I would set my hand where his hand had been, let his
anima
flow into me as he had let that of the Edo period enter him. I would finish those legs. I would finish the ceiling. I sought out the manager, a bewildered Armenian whose neutrality status was so complicated that the Japanese had never finally decided whether he was friend or foe, and brooked no contradiction. At first he was suspicious, hesitant of local reaction. He had been thinking of organising the burning of the tea-house as a social event. Sell a few tickets. Throw in a beer or two. I argued, not on grounds of aesthetics, but utility. The port was awash with the Allied soldiery – British, Dutch, Australian, American – their pockets stuffed with unconvertible military scrip. Of course, no one but the Japanese would ever want to eat filthy Japanese food but this would make the finest Chinese restaurant. It was agreed that the ceiling would be painted. I should even be paid.

The next six weeks were spent working with an energy I had never known, though I moved, only stiffly at first, back into the pathways of my former craft. Birds twittered and blossoms flowered from my brush, slowly and then in gathering spate. The opening – a grand affair to which the mayor came and made a clumsy speech about the beating of swords into ploughshares and – ha! ha! – paintbrushes. I was surrounded by high-ranking Canadian officers, though of what service I could not divine. There is no reticence in uniforms. A detailed biography of military violence ran through the badges punctuating their sleeves and the ribbons swarming over their chests but this was a language I could not read. At one stage, one of them passed me his military handbook and stabbed a finger at page four. A bold title read, “Women” and underneath the single sentence, “Always remember the Japs were here before you.”

“The
lapangan kota
,” I said wearily. “The town field. Over behind the fort.” My own fieldwork days, I was almost sure, were over. Then at some stage, over red-eyed coffee and cigarettes, the mayor asked me to do something with the townhall, its interior freshly replastered after the hacking away of Nippon military insignia. The great powers were like little boys, running round the world scribbling on each others' walls.

The honorarium paid for a passage aboard one of those high-nosed Buginese ships, a voyage of six days shared with rough but cheery lads, sunburned skin like sandpaper, all inveterate gigglers, who lived simply on rice and fish and prayed every day and invited me into the fishy communal bed where we all slept, chastely entangled, in restfully non-co-varrubious propinquity. And then we were in Buleleng. Hugs, waves, a packet of rice and fish and a fervent prayer for the journey – for seamen, any journey on land was full of danger. I stepped onto the same beach as so many years before – finally back in Bali. I was home. Black sand stuck to my feet and tears pricked at my eyes.

***

The rain came down, as Walter always said “not in sheets but in eiderdowns”. I had thought to walk into the house and just find him there, sprawled on the sofa, cigarette spiralling into smoke, a book or an animal or some ancient artifact on his lap. But it was clear no one had lived here since Dr Nasiputi, who would not be getting his tenant's deposit back. The goats, who now claimed the sitting room as their own, had refused to be chased back out into the rain and glared satanically. One munched on a Japanese newspaper and farted, another was finding the final chapter of Walter's book on dance rather hard going. Everything had been systematically looted, except for the books which were of interest to no one – all the contents, some of the beams, the doors carved by Lempad. Rain was streaming down the walls, where ferns nested in with the insolence of all life, through the eroded thatch. Soon the cement would start to crumble. I could still see Walter, in my head, as he once sat there over the river, Vicki snipping away at his hair and the birds swooping down to carry it away for their nests. Where Sobrat's first painting had hung, was a square of paler plaster like untanned flesh under discarded shorts. The house was returning to the earth, like water swirling down a drain, taking with it the joy and life of which it had once been the centre. Only silence remained. I had gone to the palace – looking depressed and down at heel – both it and me – and asked for Cokorda Agung. A cook whispered that he was in the prison in Denpasar, detained for the expression of views skeptical of Dutch rule and denounced by members of his own family. The kaleidoscope had been given another twist. And Tuan Walter? He shrugged. Who could tell? I knew what I must do.