Empire of the East (31 page)

The one thing that impressed me about the airport building at Wamena was an enormous artificial flower placed in the path of arriving passengers. This, a polystyrene Rafflesia fully four foot in diameter, had been so painstakingly created that for a moment I thought I detected a sickly floral fragrance in its vicinity, whereas the fact was that the airport as a whole smelt of nothing but a powerful anti-mosquito spray in use. After the flower came the information desk where I enquired for a taxi driver called Namek who, according to a Jayapura agent, could usually be found at the airport, and was the only Dani in Wamena who spoke English reasonably well.

I was taken to the back of the building, where he was pointed out to me, occupied at this moment with some tourists who were photographing him in national garb. He was short for a Dani, with glittering eyes and a black beard, and as he hurried forward at the end of the session to introduce himself his limp translated itself into a skip. His flat fur hat, of the kind once worn by Henry Tudor, enhanced a dignity by no means impaired by his nakedness. Apart from this head-covering he wore nothing but a two-foot yellow penis gourd, the
koteka,
held in the upright position by a string round the waist. The scrotum had been tucked away at the base of this, exposing the testicles in a neat bluish sac. After the nudity of Endoman this did not surprise; moreover, as the plane had taxied in I noticed half a dozen nude men unloading a cargo plane.

We shook hands. Namek repeated the greeting
‘weh, weh’
a number of times, excused himself, and came back wearing ill-fitting ex-army jungle fatigues. It now turned out that the taxi, in which he had a quarter share, was the magnificent ruin of an ancient Panhard-Levasseur, formerly owned by a Javanese rajah. It now awaited us, refulgent with polished brass, at the airport gate. In this we travelled in some state to a losmen he recommended, the Baliem Vista, where we learned that no rooms would be available until a Dutch tourist group had vacated them later in the day.

As I had discovered during these travels, the losmen is a respectable Indonesian institution: a basic hotel, with neither frills nor nonsense; honest, cheap and usually clean, often run by a family who leave the imprint of their good humour on the atmosphere, take an interest in the wellbeing of their visitors, and send staff members scurrying round to keep them happy with free-of-charge pots of tea at odd hours of the day. By chance we had arrived in the midst of a minor crisis. The town had been showered overnight by large flying insects which, although harmless, were of menacing appearance. Many of them had found their way into the losmen, where they hurtled noisily across the rooms and down passages, colliding with staff and guests. Their energy then exhausted, they were swept into large piles until time could be found to clear them away. Namek took a gloomy view of this phenomenon, which promised, he assured me, a change in the weather that was likely to be for the worse.

We withdrew from this scene to settle in a species of porch, opening on the street — a typical feature of such an establishment — and here we discussed the possibilities of an investigatory trip into the interior of the Dani country.

‘How do you come to speak English so well?’ I asked him.

‘My mother was killed in an accident and a Catholic father adopted me,’ he said. ‘From him I am learning English and Dutch.’ He spoke in a soft sing-song, eyes lowered, as if soothing a child, then looking up suddenly at the end of each sentence as if for assent.

‘Now I am registered driver,’ he said. ‘No other taxi has assurance. Also I work in my garden. Tomorrow I will bring you sweet potatoes.’

‘Are you married?’

‘I have two wives,’ he said. ‘My father had two handfuls. That is the way we say for ten. We are always counting on fingers.’ He raised his eyes to mine with a quick, furtive smile. ‘You see I am going downhill.’

‘Catholic, are you?’

‘In Wamena all Catholics.’

‘Doesn’t your priest object to the wives?’

‘For Danis they are making special rules. It’s OK for them to have many wives. I cannot catch up with my father. Times now changed. Maybe one day I will have one wife more. That is enough.’

There was a moment of distraction while the losmen’s cat raced through and over the furniture in chase of the last of the fearsome insects. Namek showed me the muddled letter from the agent. ‘My friend says you are wanting to see of our country. May I know of your plans?’

‘I haven’t any,’ I said. ‘This is just a quick trip to get the feeling of the place. What ought I to see? Merauke, Sorong? The Asmat would you say?’

‘You may show me your surat jalan. Did you put down these places?’

‘I only put down the Baliem. Can the others be added here?’

‘No. For that you must go back to Jayapura for permission to go to these places.’

‘In Jakarta they said it could be done here.’

‘They are wrong. Go to the police office and they will tell you.’

‘It seems a waste of time. Even suppose I go back to Jayapura — am I sure of getting the permissions?’

‘Here nothing is sure. One day they are telling you yes, the next day they say no. They will not agree to tell you on telephone. Now also telephone is not working.’

‘So what do you suggest?’

He was reading the surat jalan, going over the words letter by letter with the tip of his forefinger, each word spoken softly, identified, and its meaning confirmed.

‘With this surat jalan you may go to Karubaga,’ he said.

‘And what has Karubaga to offer?’

‘Scenery very good. Also you are seeing different things. There are women in Karubaga turning themselves into bats.’

‘That’s promising,’ I said. ‘How do we get there?’

‘By Merpati plane,’ he said. ‘To come back we are walking five days. In Karubaga you may find one porter, maybe two. Also one bodyguard.’

‘Why the bodyguards? Cannibals?’

The thick beard drew away from his lips as he humoured me with a smile. ‘No cannibals. Sometimes unfriendly people.’

The many frustrations of travel on impulse had left their brand-mark of caution on me. ‘What are the snags?’ I asked. ‘Tell me the worst.’

‘Very much climbing,’ he said. ‘Heart must be strong. Surat to be stamped by police in five villages. At Bakondini no river-bridge. Porters may bring you on their backs across river, or rattan bridge to be built one day, two days — no more. Every day now it is raining a little.’ As he spoke a shadow fell across us. Part of the porch was of glass, and through it I saw that where a patch of blue sky had shown only a few minutes before, black, muscled cloud masses had now formed. An outrageous flower of lightning opened in the sky. A single clap of thunder set off a cannonade of reverberations through the echoing clapboard of the town; morning darkened to twilight, and then we heard the rain clattering towards us over the thousand tin roofs of Wamena. Pigs and dogs were sprinting down the street, chased by a frothing current, then disappearing behind a fence of water.

The rain stopped, the sun broke through, and the steam rose in ghostly tattered shapes from all the walls and pavements of the town. Mountain shapes, sharp-edged and glittering, surfaced in the clear sky above the fog. ‘In one hour all dry again,’ Namek said. We came back to the question of travel. ‘I’ll think about Karubaga,’ I said. ‘Any suggestions about using up the afternoon?’

‘We may go to Dalima to visit my smoked ancestor,’ Namek said. ‘For this we may bring with us American cigarettes.’

In Wamena they smoked clove cigarettes, and there was a long search in the market for the prized American kind that were rarely offered for sale. By the time we found a few packets, the shallow floods had already dried away, and the journey began. We chugged away on three cylinders into the mountains to the north, left the car sizzling and blowing steam at Uwosilimo, and trudged five miles up a path to Dalima. In these off-the-beaten-track places the Dani had held on to their customs until the last moment, cropping ears and amputating fingers years after such exaggerated expressions of bereavement following the deaths of close relatives had been stamped out elsewhere. Persons of great power and influence, known as
kain koks,
were not cremated in the usual way but smoked over a slow fire for several months and thereafter hung from the eaves of their houses. There they continued to keep a benevolent eye on the community for decades, even centuries, until the newly arrived Indonesians launched their drive against ‘barbarous practices’, took down the offending cadavers and burned them or threw them into the river.

Namek’s ancestor had been one of the few successfully hidden away, and now, in a slightly more relaxed atmosphere, he could be discreetly produced for the admiration of visitors with access to cigarettes from the United States, which the ancestor had let it be known through a shaman was the offering he most appreciated.

The whole village turned out for us in holiday mood, the women topless and in their best grass skirts, and the men in
kotekas
of the local style, with feathers dangling from their tips. We distributed cigarettes and the current
kain kok
tottered into view, overwhelmingly impressive with the boar’s tusks curving from the hole in his septum, his bird-of-paradise plumes and valuable old shells. Beaming seraphically he punched a small hole in the middle of the cigarette and began to smoke it at both ends. He was the possessor of four handfuls of wives, and of this Namek said in a sibilant aside, ‘Now he is old, and his women play their games while they are working in the fields.’

At this point the smoked ancestor was carried out having been crammed for this public appearance into a Victorian armchair. One arm was flung high into the air, a malacca cane grasped in the hand. The other hand, reaching surreptitiously down behind his back, held the polished skull of a bird. The Tudor-style hat affected by all the clan’s leading males was tilted jauntily over an eye socket, and the ancestor’s skin, quite black and frayed, was split like the leather of an ancient sofa. His jaws had been wrenched wide apart by the fumigant, and now the old
kain kok
lit a Chesterfield, puffed on it, and wedged it between the ancestor’s two molar teeth that remained. Behind him descendants of lesser importance awaited their turn to make similar offerings.

The scene was in part grotesque but abounding in good cheer. The women rushed at us giggling and happy to show off their mutilated hands. The village was a handsome one, scrupulously clean and well kept, and I was fascinated to see that the villagers had uprooted trees in the jungle and replanted them in such a way that they drooped trusses of fragrant yellow blossoms over the thatches of their houses. These attracted butterflies of sombre magnificence which fed on the nectar until they became intoxicated, and then toppled about the place like planes out of control, and were chased ineffectively both by the children and the village dog. In such Dani communities it is more or less share-and-share-alike, and it seemed that in the allocation every child over the age of seven had been given a half-cigarette. These they were puffing at vigorously, and the village was full of the sound of their jubilation.

Namek was free next morning, and when I mentioned my interest in horticulture to him he suggested a trip of ten miles or so down the valley to Megapola (the name means ‘big delusion’), a village a few miles to the south of the capital where, he said, the best of the gardens were made. Megapola was another beneficiary of the simple, one-family housing idea, and here, as elsewhere, such dwellings had remained closed and shuttered and the equatorial sun had stripped away most of the coats of yellow paint applied to the wood. What was singular about this village was its new school where the Dani children, at the time of our arrival, seemed to be having a remarkably good time. The principal goal of these schools is to integrate culturally diverse populations into the Indonesian nation. A start is made by teaching minority children the state language, to be followed by other aspects of Pancasila, including — as I had observed at Endoman — an Indonesian brand of moral philosophy, and probably in this case a readiness on the part of the homeless to take up residence in Megapola’s empty shacks. Yet, extraordinary as it seemed to us, the children we saw were being taught skills that had no business in Pancasila, although of exceptional value in the traditional life of the Dani people.

Across the road from the school was an acre or so of land seeming, possibly as a result of past troubles, to have been abandoned and which in consequence had grown a covering of coarse grasses interwoven with a low-lying shrub resembling heather. Schoolboys between the ages of perhaps eight and fourteen had been set to clear this and restore the terrain to cultivation. They had been split into working groups in the charge of a Dani junior master with dark spectacles and Bermuda shorts. Everyone engaged in the project was in a state of hyper-activity —the schoolchildren brandishing their garden implements sprinting about in all directions and the master racing after them, bounding over walls and across ditches and roaring instructions to which little attention was given. Standing at the top of the school steps, the Javanese head, who might not have spoken Dani, looked on with an approving smile. He wore a flowered shirt, crocodile skin shoes, and a cap of the kind favoured by the President of the Republic. Occasionally he gestured authoritatively with a cigarette holder, although without effect, at some aspect of the operation calling for his assistant’s attention.

A gang of the older boys armed with adzes were hacking with a vigour that came close to ferocity at the close-knit covering of weeds, loosening it, then peeling it back in the way of a butcher flaying the hide from an animal carcase. A younger group, having worked off steam by running in circles and shouting at the top of their voices, were chopping with their adzes into the soil thus laid bare, while teams of even smaller boys raced into sight carrying armfuls of dry vegetation to be burned off before incorporating the valuable ash into the top soil, which had been thoroughly dug over to receive it.