A Fortune-Teller Told Me (41 page)

The next morning as I was having breakfast at the Hotel Dharma Deli, a legacy of the Dutch colonial period, a distinguished-looking Indonesian gentleman sat down next to me. He had come from Jakarta on business. He was an official of the Ministry of Forests—a low-ranking official, he explained. Married? he asked me. For a change I said no, and in this I seemed to him very fortunate. His second wife did nothing but quarrel with the first, and he had had to put her out of the house together with their two children. He had remained with his first wife and three children, but now he missed the others. Who had sent him to me to tell these stories? Was it Heaven, to put me on guard against the “little wife” I was to meet the following month?

In Medan some countries of the world are represented not by professional diplomats but by honorary consuls, usually old-time residents with a long experience of the place. I was sure I could learn something from them, so I went to see the German consul. He was away, but his secretary suggested some people to see, and made a couple of appointments for me. Finally we got on to the usual subject.

“Dukuns?
My grandfather was a famous
dukun
in the region of Lake Toba,” said the secretary. “He was a rajah, a prince. When the revolution against the sultanate reached even here, many other rajahs were slaughtered and their homes burned, but my grandfather was spared because he had used his powers for everyone’s good. The people of the village hid him underground and kept him there for days on end. When he died he was 118 years old. He was an expert in black magic, but first and foremost he had a thorough knowledge of forest herbs. My grandmother
helped him a lot; she mixed medicines for his patients, and most important she raised ducks … but only red ones.”

“Ducks?”

“Yes, because my grandfather’s powers came from red ducks. He had to eat at least one a week, and it had to be cooked without anyone tasting it. When he received patients Grandfather always held a wooden stick carved with many figures. We still have that stick in the house. It was the symbol of his powers.”

The secretary’s grandfather had had seven wives and eighteen children. Her own father was the eldest son of the first wife, and as such should have inherited the powers of the
dukun
. “Grandfather, on his deathbed, called my father to him and whispered something in his ear, but my father said he was very sorry, he couldn’t do it: he had studied, he had converted to Christianity and become a Protestant pastor, he couldn’t have anything to do with magic,” she said. “Grandfather died a very disappointed man at not being able to pass on his secrets.”

The young woman remembered her grandfather’s house as a place of great peace and serenity. This was a formula I knew of old—as if there really were a relation between harmony, equilibrium with nature, and the exercise of occult powers. For that, if for nothing else, I felt it was a shame that her father had not wanted to maintain the old tradition on the shores of Lake Toba. Another page ripped out from the book of human knowledge?

From Medan I took a ferry that crossed the Straits of Malacca and set me down in Butterworth, a city on the Malaysian coast across from Penang, and from there I took my beloved old train for Bangkok. It was full of backpackers and those seasoned foreigners—American ex-soldiers, German petty crooks and an assortment of dropouts who survive by running bars with girls for rent—who have to go to the Thai consulate in Penang every three months to renew their “tourist” visas.

At the end of my compartment—second class, because there is air conditioning in first and you could die of cold—I noticed a monk. He was tall, with the usual orange tunic and shaved head, and a yellow canvas bag over his shoulder. He had dark skin, and from a distance I took him for an Indian. I went and sat next to him, and found that he was in
fact a tanned Dutchman. He was thirty-five years old, and had been born in Surinam, where his father was a judge. At sixteen he was sent to Holland to study. He had scarcely arrived when he went through a crisis. “I came from a world that was poor, with no modern conveniences, where people were relatively happy, and I found myself in a world of wealth and comfort where everyone was unhappy.” This had set him “on the search path,” as he put it: six years meditating in India as a yogi with a “great teacher,” never cutting his hair or beard, wearing nothing but a rag around his waist; then as a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka with various teachers.

“Buddhism is very well suited to our Western mind,” said Bikku—he chose to be called thus, by the simple name of all monks in Thailand. “It meets our need for rationality. A principle of Buddhism is: ‘Don’t believe anything you can’t prove, don’t believe in anything you can’t experience yourself.’ The teachers are important, all of them. The great difference is that the Thai Buddhists only show you the way, you must make it on your own, while the Indian teachers tell you: ‘Believe, have faith in me and I’ll take you to paradise!’ And in the end you follow the path sitting on their shoulders.”

Only in a train, with so many hours of travel ahead, with the countryside gliding pleasantly past the windows and a fine sudden tropical storm with bucketing rain you catch by the handful to splash your sweaty face, can you let yourself go like that, and talk without worrying about the time or the apparent absurdity of the conversation.

“Bikku, do you believe in the powers?” I asked him.

“Of course. It’s through meditation that one acquires them.” Of this he had no doubts. Through meditation he had managed to cure himself of a throat tumor, he said. From his bag he fished out a small purple book, which in a few pages told the story of a Burmese nurse who was given up for lost by the doctors. She began meditating, and she was cured of cancer. You need only believe, the power of faith does the rest.

Bikku said there is no cure for all illnesses, and that every healer is able to cure only certain diseases. It is the same with the powers. There are masters who can materialize another person’s thoughts (you are thirsty, and the master creates a glass of water in your hand), others who know how to talk to plants or to postpone their own death. The teacher of his teacher in Sri Lanka had lived several hundred years, and
his own teacher, Ananda Maitreya, was now ninety-seven and could go on living as many years as he cared to, through meditation.

Speaking of powers, Bikku said one must be ultracareful in developing them. An important role of the teacher is that of guide, because the powers can be used for evil as well as good: they can cure, but also kill. The
bomoh
and the
dukun
use, for black magic, the same powers the monks use on the path of enlightenment.

Bikku, despite his declared need for Western rationality, had become an absolute believer in the way of Oriental mysticism. It seemed to me that he needed to believe it. He, like Chang Choub, had felt the need for a teacher, and had gone a long way to find him. I had the impression that along the way he had somehow lost himself, but that the road home had by now become impossible for him.

Bikku was returning to the small monastery near Hua Hin where he lived. He had been in Malaysia for kidney treatment. Since entering the monastic life he had been constantly ill. I venture to say this was due to the food and the rhythm of life, but he disagreed. His ailments, he said, were a form of purification from the bad
karma
that he had accumulated in his previous lives. Meditation also helped him to draw those evils out and rid himself of them.

Like Chang Choub, despite years of effort, self-denial and hard spiritual exercises, Bikku too seemed to me an unhappy person deep down. I was struck by his story of an experience in the mountains of Nepal, when he had the sensation that his body was dissolving and he was becoming part of everything around him—plants, mountains, grass, air. Then he heard a voice saying to him, “No. Not yet. Your time has not come.” The memory of that sensation had never left him, he said, and the thought that one day his body would dissolve in that way gave him a great sense of well-being, “Because the body is like a shoe that’s too tight. You can’t walk properly and you want to throw it away.”

While Bikku, thin and ailing, was speaking to me in that poetically veiled way of his desire for death, in the corridor two strapping Americans who ran a bar in Pattaya were discussing the problems they had with the girls, and the methods they used to get them to come to work every evening and hand over the right percentage of the money they made from the customers. I joined them, and after two hours I knew enough about the subject to open a bar of my own if need be. I
learned that one must hire at least eight girls (they do not all turn up every night, and there is always some client who rents a couple of them for a week); I learned to avoid making mistakes, above all not to pay the girls more than the other bars. I could earn at least two thousand dollars a month. Net! Even after paying off the local police! Where, if not on such a train, would I have had such a lesson in survival?

At dinnertime Bikku only drank some fruit juice, and then went to sleep. I spent the evening in the restaurant car, where the police, the train attendants and my bar owners went on swapping stories about Thai girls. We all drank that lethal mixture of local whiskey and soda with ice and lemon which they say eventually makes you go blind, especially the fake one made with methyl alcohol. But how can one tell? One must trust to luck. When I returned to my couchette I left the curtain open to enjoy the breeze. A large moon looked as if it were hung on a nail in the square of the window, as the train rumbled on through the warm night.

I woke early to say goodbye to Bikku, who got off at Hua Hin, 130 miles before Bangkok. Through the pale dawn light I could see the pinnacles of temples, like golden cutouts against the dark foliage of the palms. High up on a hill I made out the silhouette of the small monastery where Bikku lived.

Another couple of hours, then the train slowed down and began that pleasant clattering over the switches, the weaving and straightening-out that announces the arrival at a main station. Bangkok at long last! Two months had gone by. Two months traveling without planes because of a fortune-teller. Sheer madness, many people already thought. But being taken for a madman amused me more and more.

I
have never been able to feel for Somerset Maugham the affection that he inspires in most of his readers. He has always struck me as an excessively English writer, not the slightest bit interested in Asia for its own sake but only as an exotic backdrop to his stories of whites.

It happened by chance—by chance?—that when the car was waiting for me at the gate of Turtle House, my eyes, as I searched in a last-minute dash for a book to read at sea, fell on
The Gentleman in the Parlor
, which was lying on the round Chinese table in the library. It was a first edition which I had bought in Singapore twenty years previously. The book had been attacked by the Bangkok termites, and had just come back after being rebound. I shoved it into the last empty corner of my rucksack and left.

So it was with great emotion, compounded not only of pleasure but also of that uneasiness one always experiences when confronted by a mystery to which one has no key, that when I came to open this book, sitting on a pile of ropes on the afterdeck of a small cargo ship en route from Bangkok to Cambodia, I realized that Maugham was describing the identical voyage, made on a similar ship in 1929.

The book began: “I have never been able to feel for Charles Lamb the affection that he inspires in most of his readers.” Maugham tells how, on the point of departure, he looks for a book to take along; his eye happens to fall on one with a green cover, and subsequently he begins reading it on board ship …

What a bizarre year this was turning out to be for me! And life so splendid once again, so unusual, so full of surprises. Of coincidences?

Maugham had begun his journey in Rangoon, and was bound for Hanoi. And I, where had I begun mine? What was my destination? And
who was there pulling the strings of what happened to me? Because I had a feeling there was someone.

The chain of cause and effect that links human affairs is endless, and that means they remain without a real explanation. I was on that ship as the result of an infinite series of “becauses,” of which it was impossible to establish the first. That is the maddening thing about destiny—and the wonderful thing.

There is always an inexplicable bridge of San Luis Rey, where different people with different stories, coming from different places, meet by chance at the moment when the bridge collapses, to die together in the abyss. But the first step of each of the journeys which end in that assignation cannot be retraced.

In my case, any starting point that I might fix—the fortune-teller in Hong Kong, the escape from death in Cambodia, the decision in Laos, even my own birth—was not it. Perhaps because, when you come down to it, there really is no beginning.

I called out to Leopold, an old friend who had offered to join me in this adventure, and the three of us—Somerset Maugham was by now a powerful presence—celebrated the fact that we were there, enjoying the calm progress of a ship called the
Nagarose
.