Island of Demons (8 page)

My parents raged around the European quarter of the capital for weeks. We went to the Dutch theatre. We ate in Western hotels. We shopped in the European quarter. We made little expeditions to the cool hills of Bogor and the tea plantations beyond. I continued to sleep in my parents' day-bed amongst my old paintings which they had brought with them.

“What am I to do with these? I can't cart them around with me.” To look at them depressed me. There was tired old Gabriella with her false bosom. Either they were good and I lamented my present ineptitude, or they were so bad that I despaired of ever achieving anything. It had never occurred to me that European oils would melt in the Indies. They seeped and merged and sagged. I was becoming an involuntary Impressionist.

“You never know,” said father. “You might need them for a quick exhibition. I met a bloke the other day that has space.” I sneered and pooh-poohed and then he organised an exhibition in a publisher's building in three days flat and, suddenly, I was the talk of Batavia.

“Forget about sugar. Rubber's the coming thing,” so bank director Poos a few months before the Crash. The Indies were booming, with collapsing labour costs and rising commodity prices. Even to me the market seemed diseased. Poos was the sort who could only succeed in the Indies. At home he would have been, at most, a chief clerk. He had terrible dandruff in his eyebrows. Here he was on the committee of the artistic circle. There had been some hard drinking at the opening and now we were sweating our way through the inevitable
rijstafel with
copious amounts of beer, the glasses weeping with condensation. Hot, musky air steamed in through open windows as if from a laundry.

“The new Sumatran fields won't come on stream for another three years and production can't meet demand.” He sucked prematurely on a fat cigar, a
Sumatra cum laude
, rudely not waiting until everyone had finished eating, and one of the hotel's staff wafted across and lit it before he could reach for his matches. He puffed and an ashtray was extended for his flicking into. “Bloody marvellous, the service. Can't do a thing for yourself. Mind you,” he leaned forward and winked extravagantly, “it gets a bit much when you try to go the lavatory.” My mother, over the other side of the table, choked on her chocolate dessert. Poos exhaled fragrant smoke, unconcerned whether it spoiled her pudding or not.

“They'd be lost without us, the natives. What would they have to do? I suppose you've been following the news about the calls for independence, the PNI and all that? It'll never happen of course. Once Soekarno's locked snugly away, it'll all be forgotten.” It is impossible to convey now the incredible sense of solidity of colonial rule. The Dutch after all had been in Java for three hundred years and everywhere were the signs of their – our – military power and absolute technological stranglehold. Did I really look around, see the countless brown faces of the staff and read them as a statement that one day a great wind would blow and sweep us all away while they would endure like the rooted
waringin
tree I had sketched that afternoon? If not, I do it now.

“Talking of artists …” Poos must be about to say something embarrassing since he was speaking louder, “… one of my managers had a bit of bother with one on the boat out.” My ears pricked, sensing danger. “Niemeyer from Probolingo, nice fella, though not quite white and even the white bit's Jewish so it hardly counts – but we're pretty tolerant and relaxed out here as you've doubtless had occasion to see, Mr Bonnet. Anyway, thanks to that particular artist's activities, he's left with a daughter in the club and …” He became aware of his own sallow daughter, seated beside me, dripping onto her plate. I thought that would lead him to break off but no … “so I want to see you, young man, keep your hands firmly on top of the table, if you know what I mean.” He guffawed roundly, sucked his teeth and bit on the cigar, flicked more Javanese-assisted ash.

“Is he sure it was the artist, Mr Poos?” My own father, anxious to save the honour of his son's profession. Mother seemed unsure whether to disapprove generally of heterosexual lust or take comfort in the mere possibility of it amongst artists.

“Oh, no doubt about it, Mr Bonnet. A thoroughly bad lot, apparently, a prey to every human vice, whereas everyone else on board was totally respectable.”

“Tell me. What was the name of the ship–”

“Mr Poos,” I interrupted hastily, “would you advise me to convert my Dutch currency into Indies money immediately or should I wait?” I was aware that a foot was caressing mine under the table.

“Oh no need to be hasty seeing as the two are tied together. The only real problem is the denominations, once you get into the native economy. You'll need smaller notes out there or coins and no one has change. You'll need an account too, what with all the pictures you'll be selling and I'll be glad to set that up.”

My father looked pleased that I was finally taking an interest in business. My mother abandoned her pudding and it was whisked away by a delightful gazelle-eyed young man in a very tight, starched uniform. The whole East Indies empire ran on starch as a bulwark against the enervating effects of limpid heat.

Poos launched into, “Of course, even rubber pales when compared to the possibilities of oil …”

“Are
you
,” whispered Miss Poos excitedly through sharp, little teeth, “a thoroughly bad lot?” Inexplicably, she smelled of parsnips.

“Actually, no,” I said with sudden clear insight, revealed to myself and tucking my foot under my chair and out of her range. “I don't think I am. You know, I think my problem is that I really rather want to be good.”

***

The next two months were spent in the company of my parents. We toured the spiny backbone of Java, leaping from vertebra to vertebra – Bogor, Bandung, Yogyakarta. I thrilled to forests, mountains and volcanos, gorges and valleys, to limpid oceans and the huge waves that crashed on the southern coast – all glimpsed briefly from train windows. I saw palaces and princes, emerald rice fields and gushing springs – from passing cars. And I met many Dutchmen. We lived in hunting lodges and slick hotels and, for excitement, visited plantations and factories where the back of nature was bent in toil and hammered into shape with Dutch steel. My haul of sketches was slim. Javanese remained unknown to me except as the hands of brown helpers and the teeth of servile smiles. As was to be expected, I managed a small number of brutish encounters in the margins of my sketches – a palace guard in Yogya, our panting tryst completed in an impossibly hot sort of shed full of ceremonial yellow silk umbrellas and the flutter of moths that ate them – a young Chinese, working in his father's shop, whose deliberate spite appalled me – but they served merely to stoke my lust and self-disgust until finally my father said, “We are headed for Surabaya tomorrow. I must get back to Rotterdam to take care of my sugar shipments. Come with us.”

We were in Gresik, a small white-painted town north of the main port, famous chiefly for the landing there of holy Sheikh Maulana Mahil Ibrahim – may God preserve him – who brought the faith from Arabia, and for the manufacture of tinkling gongs. But all that was to change. They were dredging the harbour and tearing up the coconut palms and turning the coastline into brown soup. Factories and chemical plants were going up and there was talk of building the biggest cement plant in the East. The café around us was full of plump, pink young men in clean shorts: engineers, planners, accountants. They were even filming down by the harbour to show the taxpayers back home what great changes the ethical policy was bringing to the grateful masses.

“I can't possibly,” I said. “I haven't seen anything yet. You know this was all about Bali, the untouched East, undefiled and unchanging” An old man was arranging buckets, a bamboo ladder, brushes, sloshing a new coat of whitewash over the wall behind us. “I haven't painted anything yet.”

Father sipped beer. The engineers laughed as though I had said something witty. Mother took off her tortoiseshell sunglasses, a new American affectation, and shivered slightly in the wind. It was a mark of the speed with which she had acclimatised.

“How long?”

“Oh a month or two, three at the most. You know the way I work. I have to immerse myself completely in the locals, then it all comes quite quickly in a great rush.”

She pouted. “I hate to think of you out here alone. If only you were married. Perhaps your father could go back on his own.” She turned to him in supplication and he opened his mouth to answer in the affirmative. Oh no.

“Mother!” I seized her hand in a fit of hot filial passion. I had noted and not greatly liked the way she had included that swift barb about marriage and hoped it was not the opening shot of a larger campaign. “Then who would look after poor father? I am not alone. There are fifty million people here! You know I have to be free to move about, follow my nose. Then I can come home and paint it all up, take my time. You have seen how it is here, perfectly safe.”

She disengaged herself and held up the local paper, the
Oetoesan Hindia
, pointing grimly to thick, black headlines, like a lawyer in court. “But there is talk of these nationalists, strikes, political chaos.”

We always look in the wrong direction for trouble. No wonder so many are killed crossing the road. It was only thanks to my father's sheer pigheadedness that, when The Crash rocked the world's finances in a couple of weeks, he would be safely at sea with his assets tied up in neither worthless paper nor plummeting guilders but a precious food cargo that kept its value on the Dutch market and buttressed the family in the harsh years to follow.

“All that is hot air mother. You heard Mr Poos. Nothing ever really changes out here. Besides, that is Java. Bali is outside all that.”

The old man, having painted the wall to his satisfaction, now began to paste a poster to its still-wet surface, fighting the fresh sea-breeze that tried to tear it from his grasp. Job done, he stood back, lit a cigarette and admired. I pointed, in turn.

It was an announcement of the impending Surabaya Regatta, with promised – and eagerly awaited – return visit by the Royal Singapore Yacht Squadron, marchpast of schoolchildren in ancient Batavian costume and special promotion of locally produced cheese.

“You see?” I said triumphantly and with an irrelevance that was thoroughly compelling. “Nationalists don't eat cheese. But it's a pity he put the poster up upside down.”

4

Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight. I was at Buleleng, in the north of Bali, with the KPM ship fretting and treading water out from the shallow bay. But wait, I was not quite alone. A large cock came and inspected me, decided I was not a worthy adversary and stalked haughtily away.

All travellers' tales are lies. This was not the beach recorded by Cornelis de Houtman who wrote so lavishly of the beauties of Bali in the sixteenth century and whose crew were seduced into desertion by the velvet eyes of the ladies. This was not the paradise of Nieuwenkamp's lush pictures and the posters of the KPM. The sand was volcanic black, coal-dust not gold, an industrial product. A miasmal stench arose from the water and the sea reached out to grasp and suck in, not coral, but a rich deposit of human excrement daily dotted below the high-tide line. Crabs came and waved their claws at me in pathetic bullyboy bluff. I picked up my luggage and tramped wearily towards a straggle of buildings in rough brick where nasty yellow curs opened their throats and howled at me, gathering from the diaphragm, the way opera singers are trained to do, so that their rage lifted their front feet clear off the ground. Of course, the people here were Hindus, not dog-shy Moslems as in Java.

Everywhere people were stirring – coughing, shifting phlegm, sloshing water, groaning against the effort of another wretched day. I wandered pointlessly down a dusty main street where Chinese in dirty white pyjamas were opening shutters and rolling out purely literal barrels and finally found a coffee shop where fires were being stoked and the aroma of coffee to come promised a breakfast of some sort. I collapsed onto a metal stool and a man came and looked, smiled and went back inside, shouting something over one shoulder. Then a stool scraped and a voice came from a dark corner.

“You'll be looking for Walter, then?”

“I'm sorry?” I looked up and tried to focus. A dark form rose up like a wave and extended a pale hand into the light that fell through the open door and then a big man followed it and pulled up a stool. He plonked a bowl on the table, full of fishy rice porridge. It looked and smelled like the product of an elephant's ejaculation.

“Behrens,” he nodded. “I'm the government doctor round here.” His eyes found the symptom of the collapsible easel strapped to the side of my suitcase and he nodded his chin at it. “An artist,” he observed and smiled sadly. “Yet another one.”

I was dismayed. “Are there so many?”

The man returned with two mugs of coffee that he set down with surprising grace and began spooning in sugar by the tablespoon.

“Enough,” said Behrens with a cup-seizing gesture but whether he meant artists or sugar was not clear. He stirred, tasted and grimaced. “More than enough. We have French and American and Swiss and German and Austrian and even the odd Dutchman. We even have them homemade – born in the Indies. It's all the work of Krause and that book of pornography he published and then Nieuwenkamp and his great big breasts.”

“Nieuwenkamp,” I said. “I met Nieuwenkamp in Rome. He spoke of Venus or was it Eve?”

Behrens nodded. “Aye, well there you are then. You'll know what I mean. The poor Balinese don't know which way to turn. As soon as they drop their drawers or try to have a bit of a wash there's a
bule
there with a camera or an easel.”