Empire of the East (33 page)

Shinta had other problems on her mind. The first was to protect her charges from the stealthy approaches by football-shirted Danis with bottles of lethal Baliem whisky for sale. The second was the absence of an adventurous Mr Enquist, who owned a bus company in one of the Dutch cities. He had gone off with a local guide and was long overdue.

Eventually he showed up plastered in yellow mud and avoided Shinta to take me into his confidence, and I gathered by the odour on his breath that he had discovered an outside source of Baliem Old Highland Stag. ‘Also,’ he said speaking of the guide, ‘this man was keen to sell me his wife. I think maybe he could not work out the price in dollars, so he said it would be two small pigs.’ He slumped into a chair and yawned.

‘What time may we expect to be served dinner?’ he asked.

‘In theory seven. In reality about nine thirty,’ I told him.

‘Ah yes. Yesterday it was the same. Chicken with rice.’

‘I assume so.’

‘Yesterday there was a beak in my food. Miss van Steen discovered part of a foot.’

‘Shinta has a leaflet to show you which covers situations like that,’ I said. ‘It says: “Public criticism of others will cause you to lose face.” ’

‘Ya,’ he said. ‘That I heard already. Why don’t they give hutspot or maybe boerenkool? That we are used to. It is easy for them to make and for us to eat. Maybe now I will go to bed. Also the walk today was not interesting. If you are keen to see this, at Bugi there is a female dried baby. But you must walk half a day, and now I am tired.’

Enquist went to bed and one after another the Dutch were shunted into the dining-room to do what they could with the chicken with fried rice, and I was left alone with Shinta. ‘These people can only think of food because they are bored,’ she said. ‘I am accustomed to a programme, there
is
no programme. We do not offer enough.’ Previously she had taken tours to the island of Sumba to see the villagers spear each other on horseback. Also to Komodo Island where the package included the provision of a goat to be slaughtered and left in a ravine up which the dragon would come scrambling to tear it to shreds. ‘These were strong programmes,’ she said. ‘For some there is poetry in the shedding of blood, but I think always drama.’ Would it not be possible, she wondered, to arrange an entertainment similar to the Komodo Island one based on the gigantic lizards she had been told existed somewhere in the mountains north of Wamena?

I was sure, I told her, that if there was money in it something could be done. At this she seemed much encouraged, and decided that she would call on the government tourist office the next day and discuss the possibility with them.

Almost brainwashed by the losmen into patience and calm, the Dutch bundled up their souvenirs and were carried away. With their departure the minor points of punctuality inculcated by the latest guests were forgotten, wailing Javanese music demolished silence, the evening meal reverted from rice with chicken to just rice, and the impressive but harmless flying beetles that found their way through open doors or holes in the mosquito netting were frankly ignored.

The Ludwigsons then arrived, a vivacious smiling woman and her two daughters who had recently escaped from the routines of wealth in Palm Beach, where they occupied a sea-front mansion next to that of a famous film-star whose name I have forgotten. They had come here, Mrs Ludwigson said, with a touch of defiance in her announcement, in search of innocence. It would have been easy to mistake this family for a trio of handsome sisters. The girls, Sandra and Lucille, were in their late twenties. Edwina, their mother, would have been a beauty in her time, and at forty-eight she was exceedingly well preserved. They crammed as much information about themselves as possible into the first half-hour of our acquaintance, at the end of which we were all on first-name terms. It was easy to talk to the Ludwigsons. They radiated friendship, were avid for new experiences, and were confident from all they had heard that Irian Jaya was well placed to supply them.

‘We talked this thing over,’ Edwina said, ‘and decided the time had come for a let-up from the scene back there. Listen, there I was with this house, a really great family and a load of good friends, and I was asking myself, where do I go from here? What am I doing with my life? For God’s sake, I just felt superfluous. Norman, would you please level with me? I have this feeling I’m getting old. Do I look old? I want you to be frank.’

I told her sincerely that she did not, although there was planning in her features and expression that muffled the spontaneities of youth. ‘My girls wanted to come along. They don’t like to let me out of their sight. That’s the way it is in our family. We stick together, we always have done. Oh, just look at those two guys dancing back there. Would those be people who work here? Don’t you just love this place?’

Now the pressure had been taken off the kitchen staff, a noise from that area suggested a dance might be going on, and presently a couple of the staff burst through the swing door giggling and fencing at each other with ladles. Edwina’s attention was diverted from this spectacle by a procession containing a hundred or two tiny bugs curling away from us across the floor on some mysterious communal errand; she shook her head in pleased wonderment at the sight.

‘So what are your plans?’ I asked.

‘They aren’t necessary,’ Edwina said. ‘What we stand in need of is fresh day-to-day experience, and it doesn’t matter how it comes. No planning. No clocks. We were living in a prison house of our own making. The time comes when you have to say to yourself, “Right, this thing stops here and now.” We’re taking another direction. What we need is a culture shock, and that’s something you can’t plan for. Mistakes? Sure we’ll make mistakes, but we’ll be getting some place with a new view through the window. You get what I mean?’

Sandra, the prettier of the girls, said, ‘Do they have a bar here?’

‘They have a bar,’ I said, ‘but there’s nothing to drink. Irian Jaya is dry. You can’t even get beer.’

‘Do you suppose they have soft drinks?’

‘Normally, but I know they’ve run out. They get deliveries of Sprite from Jayapura on Tuesdays. That’s tomorrow. You can get bottled water.’

‘Well, that’s good to know,’ Edwina said.

‘I’ll check to see if any’s on ice,’ I said.

‘For me it doesn’t matter one way or the other. I guess ice is something I need to forget. I’m quite happy with whatever’s going. Back home you need something — you crook a finger, and that’s bad for anyone. What do they feed you on here?’

‘Fried rice.’

‘Is that on Mondays only?’

‘No, that’s every day. They stir a few different odds and ends into it according to the days of the week, but it’s always fried rice.’

‘Well, I have news for you, Norman. I happen to like fried rice. How about you girls?’ Sandra and Lucille agreed that they, too, liked fried rice, but with less conviction than Edwina.

‘Fruit do they have?’ Edwina asked.

‘Yes, bananas.’

‘Nothing but?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I like bananas, too. How about that?’

‘If you can get by on a diet of rice and bananas, you’ve nothing to worry about. They’re always on the menu.’

‘Talking about food,’ Sandra said. ‘How long is it to dinner?’

‘It’ll take about a couple of hours after you order. Best get your order in now.’

‘No hurry in my case,’ Edwina said. ‘I have an inner dialogue going. This place draws me out. Why didn’t we come here before?’

Apart from the shortage of legitimate drink, it happened to be a good day to arrive in Wamena. The rain had held off, with the promise of a fine, clear evening. The joggers had already passed, and the flush spreading through the sky was about to disguise the extreme banality of the town in a brief interlude of charm and distinction. Middle-class Javanese settlers who were susceptible to such things had hurried into the street for a stroll in the brief romanticism of the setting. With the fading of the light a party of them, bags and pockets stuffed with family snapshots, descended on the chairs in the losmen’s lobby, and we found ourselves split up.

Now I found myself seated next to Lucille, who was quieter but more intense than her sister. The Javanese women smiled and chatted. ‘What do you suppose they’re talking about?’ Lucille asked.

‘Their children,’ I said. ‘All Javanese conversations are politely non-controversial. When you meet someone for the first time you could ask what is their favourite colour.’

‘That’s interesting,’ she said. ‘Mine’s yellow. Listen, I wanted to talk to you. This place is supposed to be pretty corrupt, isn’t it?’

‘From all I hear, yes.’

‘Can you get hold of booze, for instance?’

‘If you feel like paying the kind of price they ask for it. A whisky boy shows up most nights. He’ll sell you what he calls Scotch.’

‘I suppose it’s really bad.’

‘I’ve never tried it but we had some Dutch here who took a chance. So far as I know, none of them went to hospital, but it’s a wonder to me they didn’t. It’s said they cook up the alcohol with palm sugar and wood shavings. It smelt like herbicide.’

‘I have to tell you,’ she said. ‘We have a family problem. It’s not something I want to talk about. Can I leave it at that? What time does he come?’

‘About seven,’ I said.

‘What I’d like to do is make sure we’re in our room. Maybe you could tap on our door when he’s left. Say “dinner’s ready”, or something like that.’

‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘No problem.’

The Javanese pocketed their family photographs, made an end to their prolonged leave-takings and went off. The Ludwigsons retired to their room for evening aerobics and meditation, and I decided on a short stroll in search of the evening breeze. In a matter of minutes the town had emptied of light, and as if someone had pressed a series of switches, one after another all the affable daylight sounds — the slap of running Dani feet, the grinding of bicycle chains, the soft twanging of Papuan Jew’s harps unlocated in the velvet gloom, the gentle smokers’ coughs provoked by Baliem cigarettes — were silenced. Fifteen miles away in the mountains, lightning flickered on and off like a broken electrical contact. It was one of those nights when the moths were flapping stealthily everywhere.

I plodded back to the losmen with its dim lamps, evening inertia, and the patina of stale kitchen odours.

At first there were no signs of life, then I heard movements in the patio and found the whisky boy there picking dark objects off the floor. Someone had left the street door open, and a few moths had come flapping through it, drawn to the lights. The whisky boy showed me one held very gently in the palm of his hand. The moths had fierce, bold eyes on their wings to deter the predators of the night, and soft bodies which curled away, twitching, in sensitive repugnance from the shining pavement surface upon which, in their confusion, they had either alighted, or fallen. A recognizable insecticide odour polluted the air in the vicinity of the whisky boy’s head. He was drunk, and his expression as he handled the distressed moths, was one of alcoholic compassion. He was the employee whose job it was, after an invocation of the merciful Allah, to cut the throats of the chickens that later featured in the
nasi goreng,
yet at this moment he was obsessed with the problem of carrying moths to the safety of the patio shrubs and persuading them to settle there. I asked about the whisky, and he said that a woman had cleaned out his supply.

With this there was a rattling of pans in the kitchen, and within minutes the familiar smell of rice frying in coconut oil. Knowing that culinary operations in the losmen were careful but slow, I gave them a half-hour before knocking on the Ludwigsons’ door. In a few minutes they came down and we went in to dinner. As sometimes happened with new guests, the management had gone out of their way to put a little extra effort into this occasion, and there was a first course of tough little segments of disjointed chicken cooked in sate sauce, which for all its pungent fragrances was unable to suppress the spiritous odour that had followed the Ludwigsons to table. The suspicion dawned that the whole family had been hitting the bottle.

They seemed almost ominously cheerful, and tore enthusiastically at the ligaments and muscles of a bird specially toughened for local taste. Edwina had picked up one of the
Let Us Smile Together
leaflets. ‘Isn’t that great?’ she said. ‘Isn’t that just great?’

The waiter was thanked as the leaflet said he should be. ‘If you enjoyed your meal you should go out of your way to express your pleasure. A desirable compliment might be
Makanan yang enak sekali di restoran ini
(Dishes are particularly delicious in this restaurant).’ Mrs Ludwigson, overbrimming with graciousness, seemed to make an understandable job of this, for the waiter pressed his hands together, beaming, and the cook in turn was called to the door to take a bow.

With the electricity supply failing fast we were dependent upon the spiralling glow-worm in a low-wattage lamp, misted by mosquitoes, suspended over the table. The waiter removed the debris left over from the first course, then returned to light three small candles. This pleased the Ludwigsons, who appeared happy to snatch at small pleasures, and full of nervous, brittle jollity, producing laughter at the smallest excuse, or for no reason at all. Everything was funny; the tooth-cracking chicken sate had been a joke disguised as food. They had read in the leaflet that the polite way of calling the waiter’s attention was by flapping one hand down beside the table, which they did whenever he put his head through the kitchen door. This was uproariously funny. Spurred on by such frolickings Edwina remembered an episode at the airport when a man waving the Stars and Stripes had pounced on them and thrust into her hand a barely legible computer print-out. ‘ “American friend, please no touch baby’s head, no kick dog, no telling you bastard for Indonesian man.” Doesn’t that really kill you?’ Sandra asked.

In the early stages of this meal I took a deep draught of Jayapura bottled water, noticing only when it was too late an unusual chemical flavour and then an odour that revived the memory of long-forgotten school experiments. It was only to be concluded that the bottle’s contents had been tampered with; almost certainly blended with Old Highland Stag. As far as it was possible to do in the slightly hysterical environment, I settled to await possible effects, and immediately the imagination took over. Perhaps I was very slightly drunk, perhaps not. I have noticed that imagination often enters into the processes of intoxication. The only suspect symptoms at this time seemed to be an enhanced concern with details of our surroundings of which less and less could be made out due to the slow wasting away of the light. For the first time, although I had been in this room on a number of occasions, I noticed the tide mark left by the last flood all the way round the sea-green walls. Why should it be, I asked myself, that although I had sat as I did now within feet of the carved ancestor from the Asmat hanging from a wall-bracket I had never been repelled by his priggish expression? The only picture in the restaurant was of a blue-eyed, cross-carrying Christ, mass-produced possibly by the million in Japan, and at this moment it was something that seemed extraordinary to me, as did the fact that it should be prominently displayed here by the owner, who was a Javanese professing the Muslim faith. The background of these musings was the Ludwigsons’ merriment, and the crackling of the wood cooking our food.