The Hidden Force (21 page)

And she longed to be off. Batavia suffocated her, despite her daily tour around the spacious main square. She had only one more melancholy wish: to say goodbye to Van Oudijck. Very oddly, this elegant and artistic woman had been struck and charmed by his character: that of a simple, practical man. Perhaps, just for an instant, she had felt something for him, deep inside, that contrasted with her friendship for Van Helderen: more an appreciation of his great human qualities than a feeling of platonic spiritual affinity. She had felt
sympathetic
compassion for him in those weird days of mystery: he all alone in his huge house, with the strange phenomena lurking all around him. She had felt deep sympathy for him when his wife, as it were, throwing away her exalted position,
had left in a shameless burst of scandal, with no one knowing precisely why—his wife, at first always extremely correct, despite all her perversion, but gradually so consumed by the cancer of the strange phenomena that she had no longer been able to restrain herself, revealing the innermost depths of her degenerate soul with the utmost indifference. The red spatters of betel juice, spewed by some supernatural agent on to her naked body, had infected her, had eaten their way into her bone marrow, like a decomposition of her soul, to which she might very slowly succumb. The stories about her that were now circulating—about her life in Paris—could only be whispered, unspeakably perverse as they were.

In Batavia, in conversations at receptions, Eva heard about it. When she asked about Van Oudijck, and where he was staying, and whether he would be leaving for Europe soon, after his resignation that was so unexpected—something that had stunned the entire official world—people were not sure, and wondered if he were no longer in Hotel Wisse, where they had seen him living for a few weeks, lying motionless in his chair on the front veranda, as if staring at a single point… He had scarcely gone out at all, he ate in his room and did not go into the restaurant, as if he—the man who had always had to deal with hundreds of people—had become shy. Finally Eva heard that Van Oudijck was living in Bandung. As she had a number of farewell visits to make there, she went to West Java. But there was no sign of him in Bandung: the hotel-keeper was able to tell her that Commissioner Van Oudijck had stayed at his establishment
for a few days but had left, and he didn’t know where he’d gone. Until finally, by chance, she heard from a gentleman at table that Van Oudijck was living near Garut. She went to Garut, pleased to be on his trail, and there, at the hotel, they were able to tell her where he lived. She was not sure whether she should write to him first and announce her visit. It was as if she knew intuitively that he would make his excuses and she would not see him again. And on the point of leaving Java, she longed to see him, both out of sympathy and out of curiosity. She wanted to see for herself what had become of him, to get to the bottom of why he had resigned so suddenly and erased such an enviable position in life: a position immediately occupied by someone behind him jostling for advancement, eager for promotion. So very early the next morning, without advance warning, she drove off in a carriage from the hotel; the hotel-keeper had told the coachman directions. She drove a long way, past Lake Lellès, which the coachman pointed out to her: the sacred, gloomy lake with the ancient graves of saints on two islands, while above, like a dark, deathly cloud, there floated a constantly circling swarm of huge black bats, flapping their demonic wings and screeching their despairing wails, circling all the while—a mournful, dizzying contrast to the endless blue sky, the demons, once so shy of the light, had triumphed and no longer shunned the brightness of day, since they obscured it anyway with the shadow of their funereal flight. And it was so frightening: the sacred lake, the sacred tombs and above it, as it were, a swarm of black devils in the deep blue
ether, because it was as if something of the mystery of the Indies suddenly revealed itself, no longer concealing itself in a vague blur, but actually visible in the sunlight, causing dismay with its impending victory… Eva shuddered, and as she looked anxiously upwards, it seemed to her as if the black swarm of wings would plummet downwards. Onto her… But the shadow of death between her and the sun only circled vertiginously, high above her head, and only shrieked in despairing triumph… She drove on, and the plain of Lellès stretched green and inviting before her. The moment of revelation had passed: there was nothing more but the green and blue luxuriance of nature on Java; the mystery had already become hidden again among the delicate waving bamboo groves and dissolved in the azure ocean of the sky.

The coachman drove slowly up a steep road. The liquid paddy fields climbed upwards step by step in reflecting
terraces
, an ethereal green of the carefully planted rice shoots. Then suddenly it was like an avenue of ferns: giant ferns, which rose upwards and fanned out, and big, fabulous
butterflies
fluttering around. And between the ethereal bamboos a small house became visible, half stone, half woven bamboo, with a garden around it containing a few white pots of roses. A very young woman in a sarong and linen jacket, with a soft golden blush on her cheeks, jet black eyes peering in curiosity, observed the unexpected sight of the very slowly approaching carriage and fled indoors. Eva got out, and coughed. Around a screen in the central gallery she suddenly glimpsed Van Oudijck’s face, peering, He disappeared at once.

“Commissioner!” she called, in her sweetest voice.

But no one came, and she was embarrassed. She did not dare sit down and still she didn’t want to leave. Around the corner of the house peered a small face, two small brown faces of two very young Eurasian girls, and then disappeared again, giggling. In the house Eva could hear whispering, very emotional it seemed, very nervous. “
Sidin! Sidin!
” she heard them shouting and whispering. She smiled, gaining courage, and walked around to the front veranda. Finally an old woman came, perhaps not so old in years, but old and wrinkled and dull-eyed, in a coloured chintz jacket and shuffling along on slippers and with a few words of Dutch before reverting to Malay, smiling politely she asked Eva to sit down and said that the Commissioner would be there immediately. She also sat down, smiling, and didn’t know what to say, or what to answer when Eva asked her
something
about the lake. Instead she ordered syrup, and iced water and wafers, and did not talk, but smiled and attended to her guest. When the young girls’ faces peered round the house, the old woman stamped her slippered foot angrily and scolded them, after which they disappeared giggling and raced away to the sound of bare feet. Then the old woman smiled again with her ever-smiling wrinkled mouth and looked in embarrassment at the lady as if apologizing. And it was a long time before Van Oudijck finally arrived. He welcomed Eva effusively, and apologized for keeping her waiting. He had obviously shaved quickly and put on a clean white suit. He was visibly pleased to see her. The old
woman, with her eternal apologetic smile, left them. In that first, buoyant moment, Van Oudijck struck Eva as completely his old self, but when he had calmed down and pulled up a chair and asked her if she had news of Eldersma, and when she herself was going to Europe, she saw that he had grown old, become an old man. It didn’t show in his figure, which in his well-starched white suit still retained something of its broad-shouldered military bearing, something rugged, with only the back slightly bowed as if under a burden. But it showed in his face, in the dull, uninterested look, in the deep furrows in the almost pained forehead, the yellowed, parched look of his skin, while his broad moustache around which the jovial lines still played, was completely grey. There was a nervous tremor in his hands. He questioned her about what people had said in Labuwangi, still with some residual curiosity about the people there, about something that had once been so dear to him… She glossed over it all, putting the best face on everything, and was especially careful not to mention any of the rumours: that he had deserted his post, run off, no one knew why.

“And what about you, Commissioner? Will you be
returning
to Europe soon?”

He stared into space, then he laughed bashfully before replying. And finally, and almost in embarrassment, he said: “No, dear lady, I shan’t be going back. You see, here in the Indies I was once somebody, there I would be nobody. I’m nobody anyway now, but I still feel that the Indies have become my country. The country has taken hold of me
and now I belong to it. I no longer belong to Holland, and there’s nothing and no one in Holland that belongs to me. I may be burnt out, but I’d still prefer to drag out the rest of my existence here than there. In Holland I wouldn’t be able to face the climate or the people any more. Here I like the climate and I’ve withdrawn from people. I was able to do a last favour for Theo, Doddy is married, and the two boys are going to Europe for their education…”

He suddenly bent over towards her and, in a different voice, he almost whispered, as if about to make a confession: “You see… if everything had happened normally… then… I wouldn’t have acted as I did. I’ve always been a practical man and I was proud of it, and I was proud of normal life: my own life, which I lived according to principles that I thought were right, until I had attained a high position in the world. That’s what I always did, and things went well for me. I had a charmed life. While others fretted about promotion, I leap-frogged five at a time. It was all plain sailing for me, at least in my career. In my personal life I’ve never been happy, but I’m not the kind of weakling to pine away from grief because of that. There is so much for a man to do besides his family life. And yet I was always very fond of my family. I don’t think it’s my fault that things happened as they did. I loved my wife, I loved my children, I loved my house: my home life, where I was husband and father. But that feeling in me was never fully satisfied. My first wife was a Eurasian, whom I married for love. Because she failed to get me under her thumb with her whims, our marriage didn’t work after
a few years. I think I was even more in love with my second wife than with my first: I’m a simple man when it comes to these things… but I’ve never been granted a loving family existence: a loving wife, children who clamber on to your lap and grow up into people, people who owe you their lives, their existence, actually everything they have and are… I should have liked to have had that…”

He paused for a moment, and then continued, more secretively, in even more of a whisper: “But what… you see… what happened… I’ve never understood, and that’s what’s brought me to this… That, all of that went against, conflicted with life and practical sense and logic… all that”—he banged his fist on the table—“all that bloody nonsense, which still, which happened anyway… that’s what did it. I stood up to it, but I lacked the strength. It was something that nothing was strong enough to counter… I know, of course, it was the Prince. When I threatened him, it stopped… But my God, dear lady, what
was
it? Do you know? You don’t, do you? No one, no one knew, and no one knows. Those terrible nights, those inexplicable noises above my head; that night in the bathroom with the Major and the other officers… It really wasn’t an illusion: we saw it, we heard it, we felt it. It pounced on us, it spat at us: the whole bathroom was full of it! It’s easy for other people who didn’t experience it to deny it. But I—all of us—we saw it, heard it, felt it… And none of us knew what it was… Since then I have felt it constantly. It was all around me, in the air, under my feet… You see, that… and that alone,” he whispered softly, “is what did it. That’s what
meant I could no longer stay there. That’s why I seemed to be dumbstruck, reduced to idiocy—in ordinary life, in all my practical sense and logic, which suddenly seemed to me a wrongly constructed philosophy of life, the most abstract reflection—because, cutting across it, things from another world manifested themselves, things that escaped me, and everyone. That alone is what did it. I was no longer myself. I no longer knew what I thought, what I was doing, what I had done. Everything was thrown off balance. That wretched creature in the native quarter… he’s no child of mine: I’d stake my life on that. And I… I believed it. I had money sent to him. Tell me, can you understand me? I’m sure you can’t, can you? It’s incomprehensible, that strange, alien sensation, if one has not experienced it oneself, in one’s flesh and blood, until it penetrates your bone marrow…”

“I think I’ve sometimes felt it too,” she whispered. “When I walked with Van Helderen along the seashore, and the sky was so distant, the night so deep, or when the rains came rushing from so far away and then descended… or when the nights, deathly quiet and yet so brimful of sound, trembled around you, always with a music that could not be grasped and scarcely heard… Or simply when I looked into the eyes of a Javanese, when I talked to my maid and it was as if nothing I said got through to her, or as if her answer concealed her real, secret answer…”

“That’s something different,” he said. “I don’t understand that: I personally knew the Javanese. But perhaps every European feels that in a different way, depending on his
predisposition, and his nature. For one person it is the
antipathy
that he felt from the beginning in this country, which attacks the weak spot in his materialism and goes on fighting him… while the country itself is so full of poetry and… mystery… I’d almost say. For another person it’s the climate, or the character of the natives, or what have you, that are hostile and incomprehensible. For me… it was facts I could not fathom… at least that was how it seemed to me. Then it seemed as if I didn’t understand anything any more… That was how I became a bad official, and then I realized that the game was up. So I quite calmly packed it in, and now I’m here, and here’s where I’ll stay. And do you know a funny thing? Here I may at last… have found the family life I want…”

The little brown faces peered round the corner. And he called to them, beckoned to then with a kind, expansive, paternal gesture. But they charged off again, their bare feet pattering. He laughed.