Empire of the East (25 page)

The impression it still gives is of a temporary civic arrangement. Just as Charles V of Spain agreed to the siting of his new capital at Madrid, where it was easiest to use it as a centre to reach other important places, Jayapura was probably kept in business after the Dutch pull-out as a convenient staging point, already in possession of at least the basic furniture of a city. Nevertheless the atmosphere is one of impermanence, and there is a feeling of restlessness and nomadism in the air. The crowds of men drifting past the booths and stalls lining the streets that largely replace shops are like seamen on shore-leave. People seem obsessed by time, and perhaps that is a symptom of something or other. The roadside stalls display cheap watches galore, and citizens are everywhere to be seen wearing two watches — sometimes three — on their wrists.

An unevenness is instantly evident in Jayapura’s adaptation to the modern world. Stepping from the raucous street through the still portals of the Import Export Bank, the customer finds himself in a temple of Muzak and computerization. Here he encounters wonderfully uniformed hostesses who receive him with the grave or smiling acquiescence, according to the merits of the case, of geishas of finance, which indeed they are. But strictly speaking, the twenty-first century is about to dawn only at street level, and access to the bank at the time of my visit was across a plank laid over a hole — one of dozens — in the main street’s shattered pavements. This revealed a section of gully in which sinister-looking shapes — some undoubtedly of animal origin — were steeped in black ooze. An evening stroll without a torch down the Jalan Yani was a hazardous affair, and one soon became aware of sly nocturnal movement on the edge of such pitfalls and a shadowy scuttering then disappearance of an animal seeming to be larger than a rat.

A few guerrillas of the OPM (Free Papua Movement) were supposed to be holding out somewhere in the central highlands, giving sufficient trouble until the last few months for a police permit to be necessary for a visit to Irian Jaya. Relaxation in this matter had been so recent that while the Indonesian Embassy in London ruled that permission still had to be applied for in Jakarta, it was only on arrival in the capital that I learned that this was not the case. A
surat jalan
(permission to travel) could now be obtained from the police office in Jayapura, situated most conveniently next door to the Maloc Hotel where I had booked in. Unfortunately, having arrived on a Saturday after office hours, I was faced with a wait of two days at the least before travel into the interior could begin.

Jayapura had no attractions. The reception clerk at the Maloc smiled incessantly as he demolished hope. There was nothing, nothing, nothing; no restaurant where a man could take his wife, no night club, no casino, no gymnasium or public swimming bath. A cinema, yes, but only showing B-grade Indian films. Also a Rollicking Bar. This was the way it was named but he would not recommend hotel guests to pay it a visit.

Consequently, the Maloc offered the only possible respite from the city’s tremendous tedium. Mr Beringis, an English-speaker who had something to do with tax-collection, smiled and said that Indonesians saw Jayapura as the Siberia of the tropics. Slowly I was beginning to separate the Javanese smiles. The reception clerk had the congeniality of a man with a splendid digestion. Mr Beringis’s rueful smile covered up for
You see it is necessary for someone to be sent to Jayapura, but the belief of the man who is chosen will always be that he has fallen foul of the boss and head office.

‘No wife can agree to live in such a place,’ he said. ‘So I must face the world alone.’

‘Are the beaches here any good?’

‘They are lacking in shade, and the sea is dangerous.’

‘Pity.’

‘Speaking for myself, the fact is I am not a beach man. Well, there it is. I have two more years to serve. Oh yes, this is a sentence. I feel myself in prison.’

Mr Beringis thought that the main tourist attraction of the town might be of some interest to me. This was a crocodile farm where baby crocodiles caught by the locals were grown to a commercial level. The skins went to Paris and the meat to Singapore and Hong Kong, where the Chinese ate as much of it as they could get, as a cure for asthma among other ailments.

‘The smell of the surrounding area is very bad,’ he said. ‘Shortly after I came to Jayapura I made the acquaintance of a lady and took her to this place, offering to buy her a skin for a bag. She did not wish to take the skin. I think this outing was not a success.’

‘Tell me, Mr Beringis, do marsupial rats exist in this part of the world?’

‘I am ignorant of animals, Mr Loosidge, but opinion is that most kinds are of the marsupial variety.’

I decided to give the crocodile farm a miss and devote the rest of the day to finding out what I could about the interior of the island, and the travel facilities that existed. From this emerged the striking fact that no one I spoke to had more than the foggiest idea of what went on beyond that rampart of low scrub-covered hills that debarred the city from the relief of cool breezes and separated it from the rest of the country. Whatever was required for the establishment and maintenance of so many settlements behind the vast emptiness of the mountains, forests and swamps was unloaded here in the docks to be flown a hundred miles or so to Wamena, sometimes described with a patronizing smile as the highland capital. A passenger plane went there every day carrying government officials and technicians and bringing them back, and a number of commercial flights transported thither everything from corrugated iron by the ton and even dismantled steam-rollers to the endless catalogue of essentials for survival in an area that produced nothing.

Only the persons directly involved in these operations, as it seemed, ever went to Wamena, and once arrived there saw no point in exploring across the boundaries of this hastily put-together town. The technicians from Jakarta were hygienically lodged in company barracks. Merpati aircrews returned the same day to Jayapura, where they were comfortably lodged in the Maloc, with air-conditioning that really worked and a colour television in every room. Thus the highlands, a half-hour away by air, full of strange men, beasts and birds, remained in Jayapura the great unknown. No member of the staff at the Merpati office, entitled to travel on the company’s planes at one tenth of the normal fare, had bothered to make the journey. The Protestant Mission Centre to which I was directed as the centre of all information relating to the interior had nothing to offer but devotional books. The government information office was closed. This almost total lack of contact between the mountains and the coast worked the other way, for in the two days I spent in Jayapura not a single Papuan was to be seen. Perhaps they were kept away by the police, for it seemed probable that the appearance in these streets of one dressed in the normal tribal nakedness would have startled the public as much as in Jakarta. A tobacco kiosk tucked away in a corner, displaying postcards of highlanders in feathers, paint and penis-gourds, was never without an assembly of giggling boys.

I was to have continued my enquiries the next day, but found the whole town closed down, for although all physical evidence of the Dutch occupation had vanished, awe of the Sabbath remained. So silent, so devoid of activity, so shuttered and deserted the town appeared, one was tempted to wonder whether the locals had decided that the best way to deal with this Dutch legacy was to stay in bed. With the onset of this strange calm — the disappearance of the snorting Japanese motorcycles from the streets, the silencing of the Hindu roarings from the cinema loudspeakers, and of the Muzak whisperings at the entrance to the bank — the city’s mood had changed, and for a moment Jayapura proclaimed itself as part of South-east Asia. Feeling in need of exercise, I began a brief exploration on foot. The wind had turned round, and down by the port the odours of crude oil had been pushed aside by an ancient mangrove smell of roots fermenting in mud, and seabirds with long tapering wings had settled on the cranes.

Thereafter I investigated the north of the city and where the road to Sentani Airport began to wind up into the hills. Above this was an area where people who had gone a little wild with destitution had tucked their shacks into whatever niches in the mountainous landscape they could find. Encouraged by the Sabbath desolation they had come down to where the streets were about to end, and were picking through the packaging materials used to protect imported machinery that had been discarded at this point, prior to charging themselves with enormous loads, perhaps to be used in house-refurbishing, and humping these back uphill.

At exactly 6 p.m., in a moment of gathering gloom, all the lights of the town went on. Here the Sabbath was confined to the twelve daylight hours. Now it was at an end; doors and windows were flung wide, and the population poured out of their houses. In a matter of minutes the streets and the town’s many haphazard spaces were filled with gamblers. Groups of hard-faced punters squatted in circles to join in the unidentifiable card games and contribute sounds like the snap and whimper of hunting jackals to outcries of triumph and despair on all sides. ‘Find the Lady’, embodying all its routine trickeries, was played with small discs of polished stone. Jayapura is celebrated for its extreme population mix — the seafaring mélange from the islands, its Minang merchants, Chinese laundry-men, Indian vendors of junk jewellery, Javanese officials, and a variety of technicians and mechanics kept busy with the electricity supply and the shattered drains — and here with the collapse of the Sabbath they had come together to play bingo. Contestants had settled by the hundreds between the holes in the pavement and within feet of the streaming traffic in the road. In response to numbers called through a megaphone they marked the squares of paper they had been given. In reality, it seemed, only the middle class were debarred from Jayapura excitements.

Apart from the gaming, a great rush to the shops was a feature of this no man’s land of time between the demise of the Sabbath and business as usual on the next day. Both the smaller shops and the supermarket next door but one to the bank, which was also reached by planks across a black chasm, were crowded with eager shoppers. On offer everywhere were sporting trophies in the shape of cups of all sizes with lavish and often dismal embellishment. The public had formed a tight cordon round the supermarket’s central display, commenting excitedly on the maenads, tritons and cherubs, before making their choice, capturing the attention of a busy assistant, and being accompanied to the check-out. The shimmer of silver and gold misled. It was far and away the largest collection of such objects I had ever seen in one place, but all were of plastic, although indistinguishable at a distance of two or three yards from the real thing.

A sprightly young assistant, later identified as son of the cinema owner, just back from college, explained the public enthusiasm for such implausible purchases.

‘You see normally these cups are being awarded for achievements of many kinds. For running like greyhound. For throwing ball into net. For lifting heavy weight with separate class for lady competitors. Always the purpose is to encourage athletical success.’

‘But not today, you say?’

‘Today is special occasion for giving such cups as presents to good friends. This, in Jayapura, is friendship day. If friendship is big, cup must be big. Oh yes, a man who receives much admiration may fill a room with them.’

‘But for every one he gets he must give one in return, isn’t that so?’

‘That he must do. That is natural thing.’

‘Well at least it’s good for business.’

‘Oh yes. On friendship day we are being given shot in arm.’

Sentani, a flat spot in the foothills above Jayapura, is Irian Jaya’s busiest airport, and having collected the necessary travel permit from the police I went up there on Monday morning to investigate the availability of flights into the interior. As in Irian Jaya’s few other small towns, Sentani contained a number of tribal people, who were always Danis. To get to the primitive Yali tribes, you had to travel far into the interior, and the only means of transport in this case were the light planes of the Missionary Air Fellowship, which very rarely carried anything but the missionaries themselves, their supplies, and the occasional government official. A traveller motivated presumably by nothing better than curiosity could buy himself a seat in a missionary plane, but having reached his destination could normally expect, at best, nothing more than a hut in which to shelter. Few of these remote outposts had mission houses with resident missionaries, and where these existed it had been made known that visitors were not welcome. It was a situation calculated to bring the insistent traveller a little closer to the Stone Age than almost anywhere else in the world, for a few of these areas in which the Yali and Dani tribes live have come under missionary influence only in the last ten to fifteen years. In these, in some cases, stone implements are still in use to cultivate the fields.

The missionary in charge of the offices of the MAF could provide little enlightenment as to the practicalities involved. His manner was cold and distant. ‘Why did you come here?’ he asked. ‘What is the purpose of all this?’ I tried without success to make him see that I was not involved in some ridiculous and probably discreditable adventure, but my lack of evident motivation dumbfounded him. ‘I can tell you nothing. I have only just arrived myself,’ he said. He passed me over to an exceedingly polite and genial Indonesian clerk, who — however much he may have felt it — showed no surprise at being asked to recommend a primitive village. ‘You better go to Endoman,’ he said. He had never been there nor to any other Yali village, but someone had told him the people were pygmies, which he found very interesting, and was sure I would, too. ‘I was told they were eating each other when we got there,’ he said. He followed me out and we stood to admire the sparkle and sheen of the missionary planes, mathematically lined up on the tarmac; the soft cool breezes of the efficient air-conditioning played upon us even outside the office. ‘It’s kind of hard to think of pygmies as cannibals,’ he said.