Empire of the East (15 page)

‘Nothing,’ Pencastu said. ‘That’s it. He says to tell you you are a frog.’

‘A frog, huh? Like you said.’ He began to lower himself over a puddle. ‘You want I should croak?’

‘You must do what you feel, Mr Boone.’

Boone, who was splashing about in the puddle, produced a belch. The magical man bent down to watch him closely. His two assistants giggled in a nervous, shamefaced way. The thought occurred to me that, spurred on by the cannabis, Boone might be playing a trick on us, or that he had been enlisted by Pencastu as part of the act. ‘Is this some sort of a joke?’ I asked.

‘This is no joke,’ Pencastu said. ‘If you fed Mr Boone flies right now, he would swallow them down. I just told the man no flies.’

‘So what happens now?’

‘He’ll splash about a bit and then he’ll snap out of it. Act like nothing ever happened. Best idea is to go along with him. Ask no questions. If the guy wants to forget it, well, OK.’

Boone dragged himself clear of the puddle and got to his feet. He took off his shirt and wrung it out. A few heavy drops of rain were falling again and he looked up at the sky. The chief magical man, looking a little worried now, spat out blood. The new set to Boone’s jaw made him almost unrecognizable. That, and an intercepted side-glance in our direction, spoke of confusion.

There was a sudden clatter of running feet over the boards above us, loud and continuous laughter, then a muddle of shouting, waving figures appeared at the top of the steps.

‘More customers for our friends here by the looks of it,’ Pencastu said. ‘The hash sure doesn’t help. Give it another hour or two and they’ll all want to be frogs.’

Oriental festivities of these days are designed to prohibit sleep, and peace — as so confidently predicted by Mr Pencastu — returned to Bukit Lawang only at dawn. It was time wasted to go to bed, and with the call to prayer in our ears we set out for Medan, reached in a couple of hours over empty roads.

Here we split up. Gawaine and Robin had decided to use up the last few weeks of their year of freedom in Vietnam in search of the ingredients of adventure that might help see them through the flatlands of computerized living that lay ahead.

I was delighted to be able to contact Claudia by phone in Jakarta and give her the flight number and time of my arrival next day.

C
LAUDIA AWAITED ME
at the Jakarta Airport, looking, to my relief, little the worse for peregrinations of the kind endured rather by Victorian masochists than the travellers of our day. There had been long gaps in our correspondence, and my suspicions at the time that they were through illness proved right. Inevitably both she and Rod had suffered from malaria in addition to a short list of tropical sicknesses, all exceedingly unpleasant. Such experiences serve only to harden travellers of her kind, and I knew that I was in for an interlude of basic accommodation whenever this could be found, of spiders in the thatch and drowned geckos in the water tank, of spiced tea, boiled rice, the absence of bed-springs, and mosquitoes galore.

Her ambition now was to round off her Indonesian year by joining me on a visit to East Timor, which could only be reached via Bali. Our hope had been to make the connection the same day, but we were told at Jakarta this could not be done. We should have to make an overnight stop-off at Bali, said the man at the Garuda counter, and fly out by Merpati next day.

Having been discouraged by the reports of friends who had recently visited this once star attraction of the Indonesian archipelago, I should have been glad to miss this stop-off, but there was nothing for it. There had been six flights from Jakarta alone on the day we arrived, and at Denpasar airport ordeal was by seething crowds, among faces stamped with anxiety and surfeited with predicaments. Eventually we unscrambled our luggage from the carousel’s jumble, then joined the long queue at the taxi office where fares had to be paid. There the news was that all hotels in Denpasar were full and the resort at Sanur offered the only hope of beds. Here, where we got in by the skin of our teeth, Claudia found none of the familiar discomforts that would have put her at her ease. It was agreed that we would look round for a derelict losmen the next day, but as it turned out these had ceased to exist.

Sanur was a little worse than expected, the whole area having been exposed to the ravages of insensitive development. The situation was summed up by a car service-station two hundred yards down the road from our hotel. They had invested in a splendid gateway salvaged from the ruin of a demolished temple. Beyond the rich grotesqueries of its carving, men smeared all over with oil were hauling up an engine block with a pulley and chain. The hotel had struggled to hold back a little of the past. Wonderful old jungle trees had survived in the garden, thrusting steep-walled flanges supporting their massive trunks deep into surrounding flower beds, and when aware of newly planted saplings in their vicinity, lassoing them with aerial roots in an attempt to choke them, or pelting them with oily, malodorous seeds. Groups of staring youths lounged in the street where vandals had been at a majestic banyan. Notches had been cut all over its wood, ‘to remind people of things’, we were told.

We were at the Merpati office as soon as it opened next morning in the hope of picking up tickets for that day’s flight to East Timor.

Our reception seemed strangely cool — almost to the point of hostility. This in itself seemed extraordinary in Indonesia where the level of politeness maintained in such everyday transactions is very high.

‘When do you wish to go?’

‘Today if possible.’

He studied us in silence for a moment. By this time East Timor had been open to outsiders for over a year, but few people as we had heard had wished to take advantage of the new freedom, and our enquiry may have been unexpected. He went to the back of the office, spoke into a phone and returned. ‘There are no seats,’ he said.

The news came as no surprise. ‘Are there seats tomorrow?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. He shook his head in an emphatic manner. ‘Tomorrow the plane is full.’

‘Can you put us on the waiting list?’

‘The waiting list is full.’

‘In that case would it be possible to find out when seats will be available?’

There were signs of impatience. He had been fiddling with a button, which he dropped on the counter and picked up again. A tiny muscle had begun to tug at the corner of his eye. He went back to the phone for a longer conversation than the first, then returned. ‘There are seats in eight days,’ he said.

‘On the fourteenth?’

I was suspicious about the non-availability of seats to an island offering no attractions to the tourist, but there was nothing to do but settle for what was offered. I decided to discuss the situation with the tourist agent in the Bali Beach Hotel, who wrote down our details, went away to make enquiries and came back with the same story as the Merpati man had produced.

The hotel was full of joyous Australian boys who amused themselves by trying to proposition the stony-faced waitresses. The only Indonesian guest introduced himself as Victor Malik, picture editor of a Jakarta magazine. His predicament was similar to our own, for he had been on his way to a rajah’s funeral in Sulawesi at which an enormous number of buffaloes were to be sacrificed, only to learn on arrival in Bali that no seat had been booked for him on the Sulawesi plane. Mr Malik took no more pleasure in Sanur than we did. A few moments before he had invited us to join him, the waitress, he said, had been rude to him. He had been served warm beer and, on making the mildest of complaints, the waitress had uttered an insulting epithet in the guttural, low-caste Balinese language, which, as it happened, Malik understood. Describing the incident, the smooth round face crumpled, and he blinked, as if on the verge of tears. ‘I am very polite to persons in menial positions,’ Malik said. ‘It is the first time that one has been rude to me.’

‘They’re under a lot of pressure here,’ I said.

‘There is no excuse. I am a polite man. Why should such a person treat me like a dog?’

The waitress came with the replacement beer, and slapped away on her sandals, head averted. A whistle followed her from one of the tables. I had noted the angularity of her features, and the thin, compressed lips. None of the staff of this hotel, nor the youths lounging in the street outside, showed any signs of the demure amiability attributed to the race as depicted.

Malik sipped his beer, and calmed down. ‘So what will you do while you are waiting?’

‘Is there anywhere we should see?’ I asked.

He laughed at the idea of it. ‘My friends, you have come too late.’ An idea struck him. ‘Every morning at Jimbaran the fishing fleet comes from Java. You will think you are at the theatre. Here they don’t fish any more so the Javanese people bring them the fish. This is not real. This is from the
Mahabharata.
To see the Javanese fleet — ah! But now they say the Javanese people will stop. Also, if you are in time I don’t know, because the people at Jimbaran have sold all the land round the port and the ships cannot come.’ His enthusiasm revived. ‘How long will you be here? Please find out if the fishing fleet is still coming. I would like to come with you to see this sight if you will let me know.’

Claudia took a more hopeful view of Bali than I. In the previous year she had stayed some weeks in the houses of village people at the far-western tip of the island, and here, beyond the reach of the tourist invasion, she believed there had been little change. Perhaps Jimbaran, reached by a side road on the neck of the Bukit Badung peninsula, had also managed to escape. This I doubted but early next morning we picked up a taxi and set forth in hope.

We were lucky in having found a taxi owned by a driver who not only spoke English, but had taught it in a secondary school. Alec Sueba knew all about Jimbaran, the Javanese fishing fleet and the micro-climate of the port area which made it possible for the ships to discharge their cargoes on the beach whatever the weather. Included in this excursion was a side-trip down the road skirting Benoa bay while awaiting, according to Sueba’s weather calculations, the arrival of the Javanese across the peninsula. All the coastal villages reached by this road had sold out to the water-sports industry, beached their fine, rakish ships and left them to rot, fitted all their children out with motor-cycle helmets, dismantled their shrines and rebuilt their houses with breezeblocks and encircled them with high walls.

We went back to Jimbaran to make sure that we did not miss the great moment of the arrival of the ships. It turned out not to be a port as described, but a beach free of surf and mysteriously protected from winds in its curve of the bay. Five miles away across the isthmus at Benoa we had seen the wind blowing the tops off the waves. Viewed from above, Jimbaran appeared to be lapped by a lake of milk. You could even see the currents showing in the water as delicate blue threads like the veins in a young child’s hand, although southwards along the coastline there were breakers under the Bukit Badung cliffs.

Jimbaran village was built in dry woodland and honey-scented scrub at the back of the beach and was quite devoid of water supply. The villagers depended upon rain to grow their sparse crops, and life there, Sueba said, had reached a low ebb after two years when it had hardly rained at all, and now they earned a few rupiah selling firewood, and one or two ill-nourished, long-snouted pigs. To add to their misfortune they had been adopted, said Sueba, by parasitic squirrels, who lived by what they could steal of the fish as soon as it was landed, and pugnacious and thieving crows that lined their nests with what trinkets they could find in the peasants’ hovels. ‘Surely they could get rid of them,’ I said, and Sueba explained, why they couldn’t. ‘They’re Buddhists,’ he said. ‘They must tolerate all forms of life.’ It was these people’s ruin, he said, that was at the back of the loss of Jimbaran and the banishment from it of the Java fleet that would put an end to the daily pageant. The land here, he told us, had been owned in tiny parcels by numerous families. For some years the developers had been at work on them, prising loose their grip until in the end the last family had given in. All the rest of the isthmus land was now staked out for hotels, and the calm haven of the ships from Java was to be designated a water recreation park.

We went back to the shore again where at this moment the awaited ships, well separated and line-abreast, were squeezing through over the horizon between the whiteness of sky and sea. For a short time they remained ghostly — almost transparent — before the brilliant colours came through the ivory mist.

A crowd of some hundreds lined the beach, standing in entranced ranks to watch the approach of the seven ships. Nobody moved, the silence — as if for a religious occasion — was absolute. The beach was overhung with great leaves and the fluttering shadows of large bird-kites with operable flapping wings flown by the village boys. The boys sometimes made them swoop menacingly low over the heads of the crowd, but no one paid any attention. Distantly, sails were furled, and the boats came in slowly and in what looked like strict order — the scarlet flagship with carved prow rearing almost to the height of the masts in the centre, the others spaced on each side at intervals of about fifty yards. Each ship was painted a different colour: Venetian red, emerald, lemon, ultramarine, gamboge, maroon. They were afire with burnished brass, and the glitter and glint of the tools of the sea put out on display. Brand new and meticulously woven baskets holding the catch had been stacked on the decks. Both the fishermen lined up in the boats, and those who waited on the beach to wade into the water and carry the catch ashore, wore ceremonial turbans. The anchors went down, and with that the scene came to life. A moment before, we could hear the crows chattering and the insects ticking away in the bushes; now there was a great human bustling noise. The turban-wearing unloaders waded in pairs to the boats, picked up the baskets slung from poles, and carried them to the shore. As soon as they were on the beach they put down their baskets and bowed to the sea. First the ceremonial baskets, and then the crates holding the less important catch, were brought up the beach, and a miscellany of unsaleable fish discarded everywhere. Children and old people were waiting for these, and when they had taken whatever they fancied it was the turn of the squirrels that came, dodging cautiously, then sprinting down the sand to snatch up what was left.