Island of Demons (10 page)

Bagus talked steadily into the afternoon, like trickling water bouncing from rock to rock, of ceremonies and gods and women and Fatimah and someone called Walter Piss till my head began to nod. What seemed a few minutes later I awoke with a start and a stiff neck and cursed myself like a fool. We were in Denpasar, back in a world of concrete and corrugated iron and paradise had abruptly vanished. To one side white men in still whiter flannels were chortling and playing tennis on a great field, lavishly attended by ballboys and waiters. There were the usual ugly shops and drains. A sluttish woman was leaning, appropriately, on a large sign advertising the wares of the Goodyear rubber company. We turned into a gravel drive and there was the Bali Hotel. I was slightly relieved not to find my parents waiting on the verandah, peering out from the dusty box trees.

Suddenly Bagus was by the side of the car, hands clasped in respect, head bowed, reaching for the door as my luggage was unstrapped by two strapping, bare-chested lads. It seemed that for Bagus I was now “
Tuan
”, “master”, and existed only in the third person. If Tuan would like to enter the hotel, his slave would attend to the car. Did
Tuan
wish for the car later? Then his slave would wash it and see
Tuan
again in the morning at ten o' clock if that was acceptable to
Tuan
.

“Bagus, what about you? Where will you eat and sleep?”

He blushed.
Tuan
should not concern himself about that. His slave would sleep in the car, the better to guard it, and they would feed his slave in the hotel kitchen.

The hotel was a thing of potted palms and white tile floors with something of the disapproving air of a sanatorium. At the desk, a neat Eurasian signed me in and noted my easel. Perhaps I was a friend of Mr Piss? No? A pity. A most amusing gentleman, Mr Piss. Would I care to see the menu? The
plat du jour
was boiled gammon and cabbage. No thank you. Just a pink gin in the room that came with a white-painted hospital bed and enough white netting for three brides.

I retired to the bathroom, ladled cool water over my head from the big maternal earthenware pot and felt the suffocation of the still air. It was the dry season and the refreshment of rain lay months off. I stretched out undried on the bed, barely resisting the temptation to throw off the mosquito net that gathered the heat down around me so that I flowed with sweat and groaned against the Dutch wife, a cool bolster that you draped yourself around to allow the flow of air. I finally fell asleep to the whine of the mosquitoes circling the net in frustration, like hungry flies around a meat safe.

Like our Lord, it was only on the third day that I rose again for, the next morning, I awoke with a raging fever, a sharp throbbing in my head and my legs danced of their own volition. I staggered to the bathroom to heave drily for several hours. Shirtsleeved Dr Stove, irritated to be disturbed at breakfast, palpated indifferently as he chewed. A waiter stood beside him with bread and cheese on a plate.

“Stay in bed for two days, drink plenty of water, quinine every four hours, aspirin for the headache and to lower the fever.” He reached out blindly, wrapped bread around filling, popped it into his distended mouth and a thermometer into my own.

“Is it malaria?”

He shrugged and articulated through chewed bread. “With these symptoms, in Holland, I'd tell you to take codeine and aspirin for flu. Out here we say quinine and aspirin for malaria. We never really know what it is. But in both cases it works – usually – unless you die. But you won't. You're going to feel pretty drained for a while. Get out of this furnace. Go to the hills.” His own advice seemed to irritate him more, he who could not escape the heat of duty.

“Kintamani?”

“That's a bit far. Up there you'd catch pneumonia and peg out, like as not. Somewhere like Ubud. There's an old government resthouse there, a
pasangrahan;
I sometimes send the fever cases there. Bit tatty but do you I should think.” He looked at the plate hopefully, found it empty and shrugged again. The thermometer, held up to the light, seemed to bore him. “Avoid fat, no booze of course and don't forget your John Hancock if you pass your time the other way.”

John Hancock? Ah, of course, Hancock and Goodyear.

“Could you possibly do me a great favour and tell my slave … driver, Bagus, what's going on?

He grunted and seized the empty plate, heading, no doubt, for a refill. “And I'll leave my bill at the desk.” It would,. I foresaw, be covered with crumbs and buttery fingermarks.

The next day we drove – no, in those days one still motored – up to Ubud through villages that all seemed asleep and turned blank walls and gateways to the road. The manager of the Bali Hotel, as I paid my bill, favoured me with his views on my – Fatimah's – motor car. He disapproved of it as being a two-seater, not a four, so that driver and passenger were obliged to share the same bench seat, suggesting imperfect racial segregation. For myself this was barely tolerable, for a female passenger it would be outrageous. As Bagus and I drove in this scandalous propinquity, occasional resting figures like public statuary might be glimpsed dozing under trees or beside baskets of cockerels set out to watch passers-by. We swooped along the smooth roads and warmth seeped from the wind that buffeted my arms and face.

Ubud was little more than a small village, a thing of a single street, a shabby palace and a market. The
pasangrahan
lay some small distance beyond, by the river. According to standard terms it might be used by any bona fide white visitor unless a Dutch colonial official required it on his tournée, in which case, it was to be instantly ceded.

“There,” said Bagus pointing, “there the house of Walter Piss. We go visit him?”

“Certainly not.” I was unforgiving. “I have not come here to spend my time with Dutchmen.”

Bagus shrugged and drove on, turning almost immediately to pull up outside an old wood and bamboo house that quavered in the heat and stridulations of crickets. We got out and walked around, calling. Was there anyone? Hello? It was deserted. The guardian must be otherwise engaged. Never mind. I settled on the verandah and waited. Bagus arranged himself on the ground against a pillar and fell immediately and profoundly asleep, like a machine that had been switched off. After an hour or so, came a crunching of gravel from the back, at first tentative and then more insistent. I rose. The guardian should have a bit of my mind for abandoning his post. Already I was full of the white man's rage of the Indies. In my head, I rehearsed the list of instructions I should issue for my immediate comfort. Bath. Dinner. Gin. The path led me round the side of the house through a neglected garden of red lilies that swarmed with insects and between two raddled pavilions used for storage. There was a crouched figure in there performing some task of village idiocy, rootling in the shadows amongst the firewood and the old lamps.

“You!” I called. “Where have you been? Don't you know I've been waiting here for over an hour?”

The figure stood up, tall and slim. A ruefully grinning face appeared covered in cobwebs and dust. A white face, about the same age as my own, but in his case, very handsome with classical, even features beneath a shock of unkempt honey-blond hair and icy blue eyes that washed over you like a cold wave. He was dressed like a schoolboy on holiday, wearing a simple khaki shirt, open at the neck, and shorts with sandals scuffed onto very brown feet without socks.

“Terribly sorry,” he blushed, “I'm afraid you have caught me. I'm trespassing.” The voice was light, humorous, oddly accented. “You haven't perhaps seen a white cockatoo? She answers to the name of Ketut when not being naughty, which she clearly is today. Normally I wouldn't be offended if she went back to the wild – her choice – but I brought her so far from Nusa Penida and she'd be all one her own in Bali, you see. Oh sorry,” he extended a dusty hand. “My name's Walter. Walter Spies.”

I shook the hand. Then the penny dropped. “Oh my god, it's you. Walter Piss – Walter Spies. I should have guessed. I'm Rudolf Bonnet. Isn't
Ketut
a human name, fourth-born child and all that?”

“Yes, naturally,” he ran his fingers through his hair, a characteristic gesture. “It's a sort of joke. Cockatoo is
kakak tua
, ‘old elder sister or brother' so that leads to eldest child so … er … well … it's a sort of joke,” he ended lamely. “As for Piss, that's as close as Balinese can get to Spies. I've had to get used to it.”

There is a problem with all this linguistic badinage. What language were we speaking? I, surely, was speaking Dutch, maybe Malay, because it is impossible to be rude in a language you speak really badly. But Walter's Dutch was abysmal. Like many Germans, he found it too close to Plattdeutsch to take it seriously as a language in its own right. His pronunciation was appalling and the vocabulary he just made up for himself out of Germanic roots. Yet he understood it perfectly, as I did German. Stupidly, it took us a while before we realised that there was absolutely no need for us to speak the same language while holding a conversation. He could speak German, I Dutch, and it worked perfectly well. Of course, with others we would sometimes speak English or Malay or Balinese. So we would flit in and out of languages, sometimes from sentence to sentence, sometimes from word to word, using whichever came first to the mind. So I've no idea what all this was in. Anyway, I don't really remember the words. I was staring at the mouth. There was the suggestion of a blond moustache as of one who did not take more than boyish pains over his appearance and barely washed behind his ears before running out to play in the sun every morning. The lips had a full, infinitely mobile quality that denied any possibility of meanness and fell easily into a smile. The teeth were unaffectedly white and even and doubtless overjoyed to be in that mouth. They embraced you in a laugh of such childlike innocence that you forgot to listen to what they were saying. As I think I said before, he was the most magical person I had ever …

A sudden flash of white and a squawk and a large bird was crabwalking up his shoulder and nuzzling his ear. Walter chuckled delightedly.

“May I introduce Ketut.” We began strolling back towards the front of the house. He had a leisurely, elegant walk despite the sandals. He paused and inclined his ear to the bird and made a solemn face. “A little bird tells me that the guardian has gone off to his sister in Sanur and will be gone for at least a week. There is neither dinner nor fresh bedding to be had. You had better come and stay with me across the road.” Walter, it seemed, in addition to everything else, spoke bird talk, a paraclete of parakeets. He nodded at snoring Bagus, mouth vulnerably open, oozing drool. “Is that your young man?”

“That's Bagus.”

He smiled. “Hmm. Only comparatively.” He did the bird-whispering act again. “Ketut says he'd better come too. Naturally. Oh, I hear you're a painter. Me too – in a small way of business.”

5

I pushed the homemade mango marmalade back across the table and smeared the dollop from my plate onto the fresh-baked bread.

“The boys made it themselves, entirely without help,” Walter twinkled, “the very best
oat cuisine
.” There was no butter. Times were hard at Walter's.

“I simply cannot,” I repeated with tears starting to my eyes, “stay here another day.” It was one of those traumatic meals. At Walter's there would be lots of traumatic meals – mostly breakfasts. It was as if people lay awake at night rehearsing their lines for delivery at precisely the moment when drama is most intolerable. It was not material deprivation that was the issue. Walter's house was well enough, comfortable, indeed, it found many admirers and even imitators.

It was of original design, built of black wood, not
on
but
into
the landscape, a small, steep valley just above the joining of two rock-strewn rivers, Campuhan, a beautiful reserve of nature – mists and plants and dragonflies with rainbows on their wings. His nearest neighbour, across the water, was the old royal temple and among the rocks was a hollow where a primordial holy python lived. Such juxtapositions are untroubling to Balinese thought. Out among the water-smoothed stones lay a deep spot where he would encourage the boys to dive for the sheer pleasure of their screams of laughter and the beauty of their gleaming brown bodies, slicked and darkened by water. In the Balinese fashion, it was less a house than a series of interlinked buildings, with high, thatched roofs, at various levels, joined by paths and steps and even little bridges, constructed of a mix of delicate basketry, huge beams and ancient blocks of stone. Like a grand lady, it gleamed with subtle touches of gold at throat and ear but, in its flirtation with open space, it recalled childhood tree houses and “camps” constructed in the bamboo at the end the garden, a Peter Pan if not a Wendy house. Baskets of scented orchids hung down from the gables. Inside, it was dotted with local works of art, upholstered with vivid Sumba cloths in nursery colours and, of course, resonant with musical instruments, including a grand piano and a complete gamelan orchestra. There was nothing Walter could not get a tune out of. I have seen him play a teapot, blowing through the spout to coax well-formed notes through the manipulated lid. Walter was also a painter whose works found a steady market with the tourists and sometimes, over the years, one would be hanging in the hall but, he explained, he only ever painted to get rid of something within himself and when it was done, his only interest was to get it out of the house. It was some time before I saw any of his work. The whole house exuded melodrama, invited the suspension of disbelief – and encouraged damp. Mould blossomed on any exposed surface. My Johnny Hancock, long unneeded and unused, would be, by now, bright green inside its rusted-solid tin. My lower limbs sprouted not Nieuwenkampian moss but athlete's foot.