A Fortune-Teller Told Me (38 page)

By now the sky was astir with huge gray clouds outlined in red. A little solitary star gradually lost its brightness. I was as happy as could be. Here was proof of my powers, it seemed. I had blocked the engine of the car. I would not go to Jakarta, and if that ship did sink indeed, then most decidedly I should switch jobs! Sorcerer!

I went back to the city on a motorbike. In the afternoon the sister ship of the one bound for Jakarta was due to call at Kijiang en route to Medan on the island of Sumatra. That was fine with me. I would finally be sailing the Straits of Malacca, and it would be easier to get back on the homeward road from there.

For good measure I still had time to go and visit the oldest
dukun
in Tanjung Pinang.

The
dukun
lived in a village about nineteen miles from Kijiang, on the beach at Trikora. His wooden house was built on piles. He was sitting on an old mattress laid on the ground. He was very thin, and breathed with difficulty. Leaning against the wall was his wife, much younger than he was. His second. Two children were playing with a cat on the fine wooden floorboards. The elder had already read the whole of the Koran, said the old man with pride.

The old
dukun
did not know exactly when he was born. He did know, however, that his granddaughters were already having children of their own, and so with all those generations coming after him he figured he was at least a hundred years old. And then there were the coconut trees in front of the house: he had seen his father plant them, and now they were gigantic.

The family had always lived there, and all the surrounding land belonged to them. Moreover, they had always been the
dukuns
of those parts. Landowners and magicians, a perfect combination for achieving complete mastery, I thought. And so it was. “Whenever two people marry,” said the centenarian, “they have to come to me for a blessing, otherwise the marriage won’t last, they won’t get on, their rice will rot and have stones in it always.”

It was his father who had passed on the powers to him, on his wedding day. “The powers must be given to a member of the family, someone trustworthy who won’t use them to do harm or for purely selfish ends,” said the old man. His father had given them to all his children, both sons and daughters.

The
dukun
was weak, and it was a strain for him to sit upright, but he liked talking. Throughout his life he had used his powers to help people find lost possessions and to recover stolen goods hidden by thieves, but mainly he had used them to cure the victims of ghosts. “The really bad ones are the ghosts of those who have died violently, who have been put to death, and this island is full of those,” he said. “First the Dutch … They murdered large numbers; then the Japanese. This is a strange island, full of evil spirits.”

I asked him why, if the
dukuns
were so powerful, they had not used their powers to resist colonization by the Dutch and fight the Japanese.

“There’s a saying of ours: ‘Magic doesn’t cross oceans,’” replied the
dukun
. “That means that from here we cannot influence events on another continent. It also means that foreigners have spirits unbeknown to us and over which we’ve no control. With the Europeans in particular it’s very difficult to use our powers.”

During the war, however, he had been present at a number of impressive feats. There were certain
dukuns
who could make people vanish when the Japanese were about to shoot them. The old man swore he had seen this with his own eyes, and the two children were obviously impressed. The story will continue for at least another generation.

I asked the old man what he knew about the Bunyans. He knew them. They lived in the mountains. They were people, not ghosts.

The storm I had been so afraid of finally broke out. A cool, dense rain began to fall, and a pleasant moist breeze entered the wooden house by the open windows and doors. The old man started coughing. He said that since falling ill he had no more power. The last case he had cured was that of a boy of twenty whose head and arms had suddenly begun to get bigger and bigger. He had given the boy a herbal potion to take three times a day after saying some prayers. In the course of a month he had returned to normal. What caused the illness? The boy had been stealing, said the
dukun
. Similar cases had occurred in the past. People who had taken pineapples from their neighbors’ fields suddenly found their bellies swelling as if they were pregnant. Their bellies were full of pineapples! The same thing happened to people who stole coconuts.

This, to be sure, was a clever way for the
dukun-landowners
to terrorize potential thieves. But could it not also have been a response to people’s natural desire for justice and harmony?

I would probably never again have a chance of seeing a
dukun
close to death, so I ventured to ask the question that had been on my mind since I stepped inside the house: “Are you afraid of death?”

“I don’t know … I know only that in the course of my life I’ve seen spirits of all types. I’ve seen spirits of old women with long white hair, I’ve seen the ghosts of animals, I’ve seen the ghosts of the sea that
sometimes invade the bodies of fishermen when they are out on their boats. I’ve seen many strange things, and I expect to see more … even after,” he replied.

His wife was getting worried, afraid I might be another expert on black magic who had come to steal some secrets from her husband. In her way she was right, and I apologized to her. The old man was sorry I had to go, and wanted to give me his blessing. One more would do me no harm.

The driver had parked the car in front of the district infirmary, and the head doctor, responsible for the whole area, happened to be there. What did he think of the
dukuns?
People believed in them, he said, and that was enough. With normal medicines he could cure a fever in a few days, but a
dukun
could sometimes do it in minutes, and people preferred going to a
dukun
rather than the infirmary. He himself, when he took up this post, went to pay his respects to the
dukun
. “He owns the land, so he has control over the ghosts. Here everything works by a different logic from the one I learned at university, but it’s a logic all the same. So where does that leave me? I work here, and I have to believe what the people believe.”

When I reached the port the ship for Jakarta had just pulled away from the quay, ten hours behind schedule. A woman stood at one of the kiosks that sold drinks, weeping desperately. Taking advantage of the long stopover, she had gone to Tanjung Pinang to do some shopping, and when she returned the gangplanks had already been taken up. All her baggage, documents and money were on the ship. The director of the Pelni Lines in Kijian scolded her severely and talked about discipline. He said his firm was not responsible and she would have to deal with the problem herself. Then he suddenly became very kind and offered to lend her the price of an air ticket to Jakarta: she would arrive before the ship, and would recover her things. She could send him the money by post. “This is not a problem of the Pelni Lines, but it is a human problem and I am responsible for everything here, even human problems,” he said ironically and kindly, turning to me and giving me a wink of complicity.

Black-rimmed spectacles, a felt peaked cap and gold braid like that
of an American admiral, a thin drooping mustache and a wide mouth full of big white teeth, Evert Bintang had sailed to all the corners of the earth. He spoke Dutch, the language of the colonizers, but he had no respect for them. “They were here for three hundred years, and what did they leave? Palm trees!” he said, pointing to a row of their beautiful crowns against the sky. He also spoke excellent English, and had clear-cut ideas about the women of different countries. The Italians? Splendid. The Spanish? Seductive. The French? Professional. As for Nordic women, however, they were horrible, the lot of them. “It’s the skin … that white skin gives me the creeps,” he said.

Given that he helped everyone, could he help me, too? I had a ticket for Jakarta, but I wanted to go in the opposite direction, to Medan. “No problem,” he said. Turning to the crowd that had gathered to watch the woman’s trouble and then my own—dockworkers, passengers, motorcycle-taxi drivers, soldiers and fat policemen with rusty pistols at their hips—he announced: “This man is not only a guest of the Pelni Lines, he is a guest of our country. So: red carpet!” He mimed unrolling a very long one in front of my feet. Everybody laughed. He took my ticket, called a young assistant, whispered something in his ear and off he went.

I adore these characters—braggarts and ham actors and even scoundrels, but basically warmhearted. I adore the theatrical aura they create around themselves, the intrigue, the words whispered in the ear of someone who comes and immediately goes, wads of cash passing from hand to hand like stolen goods, and finally the slap on the shoulder, the grin after the booming voice, the rolling eyes and menacing gestures.

Evert Bintang was born in 1939 in north Celebes. He joined the anti-Communist youth and in 1957, with a group of extreme right-wing guerrillas, went into the jungle to fight against the left-wing regime of President Sukarno. In 1962 he was granted amnesty, enrolled in the commandos and was sent first to Irian Jaya to fight the separatists, and then to Celebes “to root out the Communists,” this time by order of the government. “I was at home there,” he told me. “I knew the area, I knew every path because I had myself been a guerrilla, and we didn’t let a single Communist escape. We caught them, we tied them up and threw them into the sea. We loved our country and we were ready for anything
to keep it from falling into the hands of the Communists,” he explained. He had married a woman from Sumatra and this “mixture,” as he called his marriage, had produced “eight true Indonesians.”

The problem with Indonesia, he said, was that if the central government allowed the people even a little freedom the country would immediately split into ten different republics, because they all want to be independent: the Bataks, the inhabitants of Acheh and of the Moluccas … “And so we’d end up like the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia.”

He was not mistaken. Today’s Indonesia is an empire held together and dominated by the Javanese, who hold the key positions in the army and the civil administration. They realize that the strength of Indonesia depends on its remaining united. Hence the military dictatorship, hence the instant brutal use of violence against any dissent or any demand for greater autonomy. Hence the occupation of Timor, the Portuguese territory in the middle of the archipelago, and the repression of the local independence movement. For the Indonesians of the other islands the problem of national cohesion has little importance—they do not see far beyond their own village. But the Javanese are determined to hold the country together, and are relying on time to create a stronger feeling of unity among the people.

Evert Bintang told me he was a Protestant. He came close to my ear and whispered: “We’re a minority, but we’ve a future! Now that we’ve saved this country of ours from the Communists we certainly don’t want it to fall into the hands of the Islamic fundamentalists!” He seemed ready to pick up his rifle again, to tie up all the fundamentalists and throw them into the sea. “As Indonesians we believe in the five principles of Pancha Sila, and that is enough for us. The first principle is: ‘All Indonesians must believe in God. The second …’” and here he got stuck. Luckily, in the huddle of people around us there was a boy fresh out of school who mechanically reeled off the rest of the principles: “Humanism, unity of the Indonesians, democracy and socialism.”

“Right,” said my director, “even socialism. Yes, because we don’t want unrestrained liberalism of the American kind. But the important thing is that the first principle says to believe in God—without saying which God, however. It means that Indonesia is a country with different religions, not only Islam. Not only Islam, do you follow?” he said, with a sinister gleam in his eye. “We’re an archipelago of 13,677 islands, large
and small, with 186 million Indonesians who believe in the five principles of Pancha Sila. No way do we want to make Indonesia into an Islamic country, but it must be a great country—a great, very great country indeed!” He reached a peak of fervor. “And don’t forget, foreigner, that the sun rises on our side, that east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet. You Westerners work a lot with your heads, but you often forget the heart. But we … well, never mind. The sun rises here and one day we’ll rule the world, because we’ve all we need to do it. We’ve land, we’ve people, we’ve resources.” Then he added, “Even if we’re lazy and stupid!” He laughed. “Foreigner, look at the sun and you’ll understand. In Norway for six months of the year you don’t see the sun, not once. We have it twelve hours a day. We have splendid views of the sun: the sun rising, the sun setting. In Norway, nothing, none of all this! The sun will never rise in the west. Never. So remember, foreigner: the future is here!”