Empire of the East (11 page)

And so it turned out to be, for it was as near a reproduction of Holland under a tropical sun as it could have been possible to devise in that fateful year, 1939, when it was built. With power about to fall from the Dutch grasp, this must have been among the last batch of the optimistic small enterprises in the colonies. It was a solid bourgeois mansion set on a hilltop in a great spread of lawns with cunningly spaced European specimen trees, and a wide, undulating landscape behind it that had nothing about it of the Orient. Such a vista would have attracted great admiration in the Low Countries, where there are few prospects that include hills. In the rear of the hotel the view had been left to itself and was largely monopolized by the shape of a volcano, its glowing flanks coppered in the last of the light, and detached a little from the earth by the gathering mist. A private road, illuminated as if for a fiesta, curved up the hill to the entrance, reached by skirting a park for one hundred cars, all its spaces empty. Despite a suspicion that there were few guests, there were staff in plenty: a rush of bellboys to unload baggage, a head-waiter listing the fearful contents of a welcoming Bukit Kubu cocktail, maids in national costume polishing and picking things up, a man who wanted to know if he could book us horses for the morning.

Treading softly over thick pile carpets we were taken on a tour of bedrooms, some of them enormous. The Bukit set out with some success to create a Victorian atmosphere. The furniture was dark, ornately carved, and with that slight ghostliness imparted by innumerable coats of wax. Heavy brass fittings on doors and windows provided a measure of pomp. The bathrooms housed ancient geysers bearing warning notices, and a tug on what looked like a cathedral bell-rope released a Niagara in miniature from the cistern.

Although we could not discover that, ourselves apart, anyone was actually staying in the hotel, prosperous-looking Indonesians dropped in from time to time for a silent ritual in the lounge, as if seeking benefit from an aftermath of past greatness in its atmosphere. A row of deep and comfortable armchairs looked on to the fireplace, and the visitor seating himself in one of these faced a message in letters beaten in a large brass plate. This said
ELKE GAST BRENGT VREUGDE-AN
(Every guest brings happiness) and it was a testimony to the irrepressible mateyness of the largely vanished Dutch.

A Dutchman had come in while we were there and lowered himself into a chair, glancing up at the happiness notice before turning away quickly in our direction to begin an eager conversation. He introduced himself as Peter Manders, a bridge-building engineer, a big man with an earnest expression and dressed in local Sumatran style in a jacket buttoned high at the neck, which if anything — as such items of oriental regalia worn by a foreigner often do — emphasized a Nordic appearance. He lived in a villa down the hill, but popped up here from time to time for a change of faces, and a chat with anybody he happened to know. At this point he made some mention of being bored.

‘Not enough for you to do here?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not that. With life I am never bored, but the job I am doing is too tedious. I am here to look after bridges but they look after themselves. Nothing goes wrong with them until they collapse. Then I must order a new bridge, that is all. The hope has been to save money by cutting quality of standards, but the bridge falls down and money is lost. I am expensively paid to watch the happening of a process over which I have no control. This is bad for my professional conscience.’

We were interrupted by an assortment of maids on their morning round, who scrambled round the room to empty ashtrays, pick up the petals that had drifted in through the window from a flowering tree, and impart a rapid and perfunctory polish to all the numerous brass objects in sight. Manders nodded approvingly. ‘Karo girls,’ he said. ‘They put out offerings to the spirit of domestic work.’ He laughed, and for a moment was unrecognizable.

‘So what do you do to amuse yourself?’

‘Oh, I climb the volcanoes. There are two of them, Sibayak and Sinabung. You saw Sibayak on your way up here.’

There was a pause. I waited to be told what else he did, but after a moment I understood that he had nothing to add.

‘You mean, you’ve climbed them more than once?’

He laughed again, and I sensed that he was glad to have been asked the question. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘so many times.’

‘Wonderful exercise I should imagine.’

‘I have worked out a system. I climb Sibayak, then I maybe leave it a week and climb Sinabung. After that it’s Sibayak again. I think maybe twenty climbs apiece.’

‘And the two of them keep you happy?’

‘They keep me happy because it’s never twice the same. Sometimes I climb by a different route, or at a different time of the day, or in different weather. Always the volcanoes’ moods are changing, and I also respond to them. Sibayak is female, Sinabung male. This is the Chinese yin and yang. I have a great collection of photographs. Many hundreds.’

‘All of the volcanoes?’

‘All. There will be an exhibition for them in Amsterdam when I return. Maybe in London, too.’

‘I look forward to seeing it,’ I assured him.

Life burgeoned in all its forms in indulgent surroundings. The gardens abounded with rampaging hot-house plants, with rampant climbers, weed-stranglers that garrotted plant invaders with bony vegetal fingers, daturas wrinkled like aged skin at the end of the day, sinister floral traps with insects dissolving in laryngitic throats. We picked our way through day-old chicks scampering everywhere. In the hotel’s famous lounge spoilt cats with violet eyes and only half a tail waited by each chair for the invitation to leap into a lap. Sparrows popped in and out of the eaves, but otherwise, repelled by the nine-hole golf course, and by a logged-over section of forest, birds in general were nowhere to be seen.

Once again we discovered that breakfasts in Indonesia are often of staggering proportions. At the Bukit it started with six eggs apiece, followed by steak, optional curries of various kinds, then toast and jam. Mounds of butter were shaped like volcanoes. ‘Why no guests?’ I asked the head-waiter. He shrugged. ‘This is North Sumatra.’

‘But it isn’t Aceh.’

‘We are a very short distance from Aceh.’

He suggested a paradise cocktail to start the day. He turned out to be an efficient, energetic and enthusiastic man driven almost to the edge of despair by the atrophy that, as a result of the emergency, had affected all the services he controlled.

‘May I ask if you have any special plans for your stay?’ he asked.

‘We shall be out today. Touring the neighbourhood,’ I told him.

‘Should you wish to eat in the hotel when you return a meal can be served at any hour of the day or night.’

There were other hopefuls in the vicinity, including a spruce and zestful young man collecting funds for a Protestant fundamentalist sect. He had chosen the golf course as his pitch, for it was occasionally in use by persons not staying at the hotel. Gawaine and Robin were playing a round while I looked on, and he headed us off at one of the putting greens. He was extremely insistent. ‘I want to visit you in your hotel,’ he said. ‘When will you be possible?’

‘At this stage I couldn’t say. When we’ve finished our game we shall be going out.’

‘This is important for me and, I think, important for you. Please to give room number.’

‘What is it you want to say? You may as well say it now.’

‘We are doing God’s work with backward people. For this we are needing all generosity you can give. But I want to talk with you. Long talking is necessary to tell how you can become helpers for God’s purpose. What time do you eating? Here it is half eight. So I will come at seven tonight?’

Robin emptied his pocket and handed over the few hundred rupiahs he was carrying. The man took them and laughed out loud in furious derision. He was the first rude Indonesian we had encountered on this journey.

Waiting his turn behind the disgruntled Evangelist, who clearly still refused to accept defeat, had been the man in charge of the horses. He now came forward with an expectant mime. By this time the boys had exhausted almost the full potential of the Bukit’s range of attractions in swimming, tennis, squash and golf, and now they looked to the experience of a jungle ride referred to in the hotel’s brochure. But since the man spoke no English, we could learn nothing whatever of the details.

Indonesian is the supreme example of a language proving that on the whole grammar is unimportant, and that human communication can be maintained without conjugation of verbs, past or future tenses, case endings, genders, definite and indefinite articles, and the rest. This is Malay brought up to date, which in its original form planters were compelled by their contracts to learn in one month. All the foreigner has to do, is to pick up as many words as possible, string them together, and bring the meaning into clearer focus, when required, by adjustment of the context. Two or three hundred words coped with rudimentary conversations. By this time we could master the routines of polite small-talk, ask and give directions, order food, express pleasure or dissatisfaction. Not a single word we could muster between us had any bearing on horse-riding. We were obliged to agree with nods of the head to what the man unintelligibly asked of us, and to send him away with appropriate gestures to fetch the horses. I then questioned Gawaine and Robin as to their equestrian skills, to be told that these had been provided solely by tired Mexican hacks on the beach at Acapulco. ‘Did you gallop?’ ‘Well, not really. The fellow with them gave them a whack on the backside when we started off, and they galloped a bit, but only a few yards.’

‘They were worn out,’ I said. ‘The trouble is these won’t be.’

The man was away longer than we had expected, and after a while one of the porters came out of the hotel and crossed a corner of the golf course, making in our direction. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘You waiting for horses?’

‘Yes. Will they be long?’

‘Not long. Very soon. This is not waiting-place. I take you now for waiting-place. Please you come with me.’

We walked together, crossing the course to reach a hotel road leading to a pavilion and a children’s play area with coloured light bulbs and speakers suspended between poles, toy motor-cars — in all cases short of a wheel — and a large Mickey Mouse shoved in a corner on its back. ‘This waiting-place,’ the porter said.

‘Where are the horses kept?’ I asked. ‘At the hotel?’

‘Not at hotel. Horses at farm. Now they are coming.’ He gestured at a bench. ‘You please taking seats.’

Gawaine sat down and instantly the speakers burst into life and we were overwhelmed by glutinous Indonesian rock.

Silence was something for which payment was demanded in the East. The cheaper the losmen the more insistent and ear-splitting the noise. On this score the Bukit had been very good, for until now the only music had been the distant grumble of television from the servants’ quarters somewhere in the depths of the building. The lady in Jakarta reached a powerful, warbling crescendo, and I rammed my fingers in my ears.

The porter’s concern took the form of an embarrassed smile. ‘You no like?’

‘Can you switch it off?’

What he had to say was swept away in an immense caterwauling, but I caught that most characteristic of Indonesian Bahasa words,
belun,
with which absolute negatives are usually avoided. ‘What he’s trying to say is that it can’t be switched off from here,’ Gawaine said. ‘I suppose we can put up with it for a minute or two — in any case, here come the horses.’ I followed his glance and saw the horses coming towards us round the shoulder of an artificial hill at the edge of the course, making a composition of striking simplicity in their setting. For a moment they were silhouetted against the volcano: the two small horses, one prancing and tossing its head, the man who was trying to control them. The volcano, overlooking the small-scale grandeur of the Bukit’s topiary and lawns, was in some way unexpected and extraordinary, cast from metal in a mould rather than earth and marked with the spoiled colours of an ancient incandescence under its thin chaplet of cloud.

I looked back from the volcano and the horses to the porter with his unchanged grin, which had something about it that reminded me of the ingratiating foolishness carved on the face of the Mickey Mouse lying on its back. The horses were coming close. ‘They don’t look very big, do they?’ Robin said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but that shouldn’t foster a false sense of security. They probably haven’t been exercised for weeks. They’ll take it out on you.’

The porter seemed to have followed the gist of our discussion. ‘Horses good, very quiet,’ he said. The speakers were yowling and bellowing and he tried a joke. ‘Horses are liking this music,’ he said.

‘They’re all right,’ Robin said. The groom held their heads while he and Gawaine patted their necks confidently. They had rough coats the colour of coconut matting, and when flies settled on their flanks they slashed at them with long tails, and they responded to the patting by showing the whites of their eyes.

The groom and the porter held the horses’ heads while the boys got on.

‘How do they compare with the ones in Acapulco?’

‘Quieter if anything,’ Gawaine thought. Apart from the fact that they were half the size, the main difference was the stirrups. Mexican stirrups were iron boxes shaped like shoes. ‘Don’t put your feet too far into these,’ I said. ‘Otherwise you might get dragged if you’re thrown.’

At this point another man had appeared, as if from nowhere. ‘This guide,’ the porter said. ‘You want guide for jungle?’ They did not.

In theory the forest began a hundred yards away. A path led up a slope into woodland where a board had been nailed on a tree trunk bearing the word jungle and an arrow pointing to the left. The switch in environment was sudden and dramatic. Where we stood a hibiscus hedge did its best to screen utilitarian buildings, but immediately beyond the turn in the path the lower part of a giant forest tree was entirely concealed by its aerial roots.