Island of Demons (59 page)

The Neuhauses' old house stood across the street from Sanur beach. From here, you could see the spot where we had carried Conrad's torn body ashore. Here, the invading Dutch forces had landed, followed by the Japanese, followed and preceded indifferently by the annual plagues from Nusa Penida. The beach itself was deserted, dominated by the sound of waves throwing themselves against the coral reef, the lashing of the wind in the palm fronds, sand powdering against the fleshy plants that only Walter knew the names of. The
akvarioom
had the desolate, moss-blackened appearance of all down-at-heel seaside attractions out of season. I walked up to the warped steps of the porch, ducked under the sagging bougainvillea and knocked on the door. Inside, tired net curtains twitched. A lot of flies had decided to crawl between the net and the glass to die there. I knocked again. Hans Neuhaus opened the door a crack and stared resentfully through the gap.

“What do you want?”

“It's me.” Of course it was me. Whoever I was it would still be me. “Rudolf Bonnet.”

The door opened a little wider. He was unshaven, unwashed, clothes bleached and worn, a hairy belly pulsating between the flaps of a too-tight shirt and talking through a cigarette. There was a bottle of beer gripped in one paw though it was only ten in the morning. Hans had run to fat – no, not run – collapsed into fat. After the camp, I was just bones, one of those Torajan walking skeletons.

“What do you want?” he said again and sidled out on bare feet, holding the door close behind him as you do when you have someone in there you don't want seen. A whiff of something like despair seeped out. He closed it against the resistance of a sticking frame.

“Where's your brother?” I had always dealt with Rolf in my limited and unfortunate contacts with the Neuhaus brothers. There were two old chairs in a corner of the porch. He kicked one over and sat down. I took that as an invitation and sat in the other. I hoped he might offer me a beer so I could refuse it.

“You don't know? No, of course, you weren't here. You were on the other side.” He looked at his great ugly feet, a shock after Balinese feet. Hairy, gnarled. There was a bunion coming there. “He's dead.”

“Oh. I'm sorry.” I was not particularly sorry. I had never got on with them. Social niceties were a nuisance. “When? How?”

He swigged. “Three years ago now. It was supposed to be the Japanese. We were sitting right here one day and they had troops searching the woods back there.” He jerked a thumb over one shoulder. “They were chasing some guerrillas,
Pemuda
, who the hell knows what they were. There was shooting. The story is Rolf was hit by a stray bullet, right in the middle of the chest.” He jabbed himself in illustration and flinched. “I got a written apology from the army. The bullet was Japanese. Of course it was Japanese. All the bullets flying around, in those days were Japanese. You want a beer?”

“Yes please.” He shuffled off. I heard voices inside. He came back with one, foaming at the neck and another for himself. I felt sorry for him, a lost twin. Wait. They were not twins.

“They say it was the Japanese but I think it was that little bastard Sampih.”

“Sampih? But how? Why?”

He stretched out his legs to settle into the subject. “You know he's big in the nationalist youth round here. You Dutch have been after him. There was a patrol round the other day asking questions. He and Rolf had this big fight at the opening of the aquarium. Rolf made some joke about him and Colin and he just blew up, stalked off cursing. He said one day he'd come back and kill Rolf.”

“He said that about lots of people. He said it about his own father. He probably said it about me.”

He leered and belched. “Did you know his father was dead?” He nodded. “Yup. Killed one dark night as he walked through the woods. No one knows who or why. It couldn't be robbery. He hadn't got a penny. No Balinese would have gone there, in the dark, alone. They found him with his throat cut.” He gestured throat-cutting with a nasty wet noise in his mouth and laughed bitterly. “Does Sampih know where you live?” I refused to entertain the notion. I had not been through so much to have my throat cut over nothing, now there was finally peace. I felt a sudden weary rage against the world. I had reined myself in long enough.

“Walter,” I burst out. “What happened to Walter? The last time I saw him in Ngawi, you were in the same camp and I think you went to Kutacane with him.”

He looked at me in horror. “Oh Christ! Didn't anyone tell you?” He looked shifty. “Everything was chaotic at the end. The Dutch were falling apart, the whole fucking world was falling apart.” He swigged. I clutched my bottle and glugged at it the way a child does, seeking comfort. It was bitter, unpleasant. Whatever was coming, I knew, was bad. “The Japanese were supposed to be just down the road. The guards shoved us all in trucks and took us to Palembang where they had three old rustbuckets waiting. The idea was that we would be shipped off to Ceylon where the British would put us in
their
camps. They crammed us in, men on the open decks in the sun, they didn't care. Rolf and I nearly died from the heat and lack of water. Walter was lucky. He got a cabin, well … part of a cabin. We set sail. It was an incredibly calm, clear day and we had just got abreast of Nias when a single Japanese plane spotted us. It circled, saw we were civilian, no escort, and came in to attack with machine guns, strafing the decks. Cowardly bastard! Dozens were killed. It climbed up and headed for Java, then, it was as if it changed its mind and came back again. I could see this dot getting bigger and bigger, coming straight at us and then it pulled up again. We were just sighing with relief when the first torpedo struck, then another and the ship was going down. It was everyone for himself. The other ships, with the real Nazis on board, did nothing, just kept going. Our crew's only concern was to save themselves and they just pulled away in the lifeboats. Before we knew it, Rolf and I were in the water with hundreds of others. You could see Nias far off and there was nothing else to do but try to get there. We were lucky I suppose. The current must have been with us. We trod water and let it carry us along. Lots of the others made the mistake of trying to swim and exhausted themselves and drowned. Then, later in the day, the sharks started coming in.” He shuddered. Involuntarily, I looked at the beach. “You could hear the terrible screams of the men as they were taken, one by one.” I could hear them too or rather Conrad's as he lay just there, his young blood pumping into the beach and our pathetic concern not to get sand in the wound as if he were a picnic sandwich. “Anyway, we were lucky. We made it. It took us weeks to get off the island and then the Japanese sent us back here.” There was silence. My mind swirled with watery confusion. I had to know. I had to make him say it.

“Walter?” I croaked.

“He must have been locked in the cabin with the others. They shouted and banged on the doors but the crew didn't even try to save them, just jumped in the boats and rowed away. The Japanese got them, of course, put them in some hellhole of a camp. I'm sure lots died.” Said with unseemly satisfaction. No comfort to me. His voice fell to a whisper. “The worst part was that endless black night, with the sharks, the sea like ink, the deepest sea in the world, miles of it cold below you. At the start, there was this moon and then a shadow came over it and there was just this slice of it left. I thought it was the end of the world. Then it got bright again and by the morning we were being cut to pieces on the coral round Nias with these huge waves throwing us about. He pointed to his leg and ran one finger down a long, deep scar like a furrow. “At first, I thought it was a shark and I was a gonner but it was just coral slashing at me. Rolf got me to shore, saved my life.”

My knee was shaking, knocking against the chair. “What? What was that you said about the moon?”

He shrugged. “Nothing much. Just some sort of an eclipse. Not even a total eclipse, just like someone had taken a big bite out of the moon.” He wiped his hand over his face and then sat up foursquare like Abraham Lincoln in his monument, the voice defiant. “I tell you. Since then, I may sit here and look at it but, since that night, I have never set foot in that sea again and I never will.” There was the sound of a door shutting softly at the back. After two minutes, a bicycle came, as if coincidentally, round the corner of the house, what was clearly a young fisherman pedalling languidly, sarong hitched up to show fine calves. He and Hans exchanged grins.

“Good morning,
Tuan
,” he called too loudly and winked.

17

James Grits was talking in crossword puzzles again but my mind was distracted by my nose, a waft of scents, a very Balinese mixture of roasting meat, incense and frangipani blossom from the tree over by the gate. In Malay – now Indonesian – they called it “dead Chinaman flower” from its being found amongst the tombs of Chinese cemeteries, which detracted not one whit from its prettiness. It was favoured, these days, to aromatise lavatory air-fresheners, which rather did.

“The panoptic inscription of otherness evokes comparable chords of difference across the whole spectrum of harmonic discourse,” he declared. “Painting is self-definitionally a frozen synchronicity of diacritical stigmata.”

The meat smell would be my lunch, skewers of grilled and spiced chicken flesh in a peanut sauce fired specially with diced chilli by Nyoman. The Balinese palate was normally shy of chilli. In Balinese cuisine, colour is more important than taste. My mouth watered anticipatorially, a spring coaxed from an arid rock.

“The contrast, collision and accommodation inspired by such cultural intersections incite a reciprocal sense of loss mediated by a nostalgia for anachreontic similitudes. The diagnostic representational power of Walter Spies's actual works derives counterfactually from the present absence of so many of them. It is the re-factualisation of Walter Spies's works alone that can serve to de-mythologise him.”

“A lost cause.” I said through drool. “The war. The Japanese, the shipwreck, the deplorable failings of the postal service.” Iced mango. Nyoman had perfected the trick of freezing pure mango pulp, scented with a splash of
brem
, into a cunning ready-made sorbet. I would have that after.

“It is the poignant coming-into-being of a blank canvas, the un-creation of self-declared art that validates and de-frames a dialogic reassessment of exercised repressive hegemony.” Hibiscus tea, infused from blossoms gathered from my own garden. No, a glass
of Ersatz
Australian white wine

“Young man. Nobody left an account of his last work, as I am sure you know.
Scherzo
and
Urwald
were photographed in black and white,
Ezekiel
was sparingly described but
Campuhan
was completely lost. No one knows what was in it. Forget it.”

The anthropologists, having rejected Walter as a sadly naive eccentric, all those years ago, were now feasting on him cannibalistically, stripping the flesh from his bones, boiling those bones down to gluey prose. They vaguely perceived him as the answer to something but could still not see the question.

“But the undetermined existential status of the later works hypostatises the materiality and the calling-back-into-presence of their absent artefactuality, informing their own alterity. Is there no chance of their being found, re-DIS-covering themselves? Remembering is a process of deliberate forgetting and the obverse is true.”

I waved the smokescreen away, established another by the lighting of an indulgent clove cigarette. I permitted myself two a day.

“All vain speculation, I am afraid, Dr … er, Mr … Grits. We must accept the randomising process of history – the process that we call history. In this mordant climate, an untended artwork rapidly degrades. Walter did not always use the most durable materials, they were not available to us then. That was his great hope for the continued development of traditional art – the need to replace objects subject to decay. The termite and the moth the ultimate critic. Death leads to renewal, a very Balinese concept. QED. And now, I am afraid, at my age, I need to rest. I, too, have been ravaged by the tooth of time. I am sure you understand.”

I rose, abruptly but firmly frail, invoking senescence as my get-out-of-jail card. Grits gathered his goods from the tabletop unwillingly, stuffed them sulkily back in his case. It was not the loss of my insights but the removal of an audience for his own opinions that he regretted. Kasimura, in his Kempetei uniform, was the true archetype of all educators. Now what had happened to
him
? I led Grits slowly towards the gate, the perfect, self-effacing host. I led him over the treacherous loose tile, that obligingly pivoted under his weight and sprayed muddy water – left from the morning watering – up his leg as he stumbled and sprawled full length, case and papers flying. Charlie would have made it funnier. I watched his confusion, unable, from age, to help, but elaborately dusted down his front as solicitude naturally required, blessed him and his works, waved him, all hot and bothered, crestfallen and pratfallen, away down the road. He would not see the comedy of it but my own tread was light enough as I headed for the kitchen to give Nyoman his orders for my lunch to be served outside. Grits's glass stood on the table undrained. I abhor waste.

Passing from the kitchen, through the sitting room, I entered the bedroom. These days, I was the only one who ever came here. The shades were rolled down against the noonday heat and threw bars of bright illumination against the far wall, lighting up the painting that hung there. It was, of course, Walter's
Campuhan
, the last painting he ever did, held back, with judicious illegality, by the leggy postboy and finally delivered years after its completion. It was a small painting, some forty centimeters square, and simply framed and he had lavished upon it all the colours I had brought to distant Ngawi. The background was one of Walter's Rousseauish jungles, overlapping, interpenetrating plants, tendrils, flowers, every vein and pistil unstintingly delineated, but dark green to black in colour, as though seen against bright light. Amongst the flora, the fauna goes about its business. A wide-eared monkey turns its back and stares into the centre of the painting, butterflies flap, birds stretch their wings, an enormous cricket stridulates like a violinist and one of Walter's big, red dragonflies launches itself, whirring, into light. To one side, the crumbling royal temple across the river stands out in ghostly white. When Balinese spoke of Walter, they had no doubt that all his ill fortune flowed from having set the roof of his house higher than that of the temple. In vain, he would protest that he had had it checked by the government surveyor and this was mere illusion. The gods, it seems, though implacable realists, have eyes but no theodolites to measure their offence. Below the temple, on the river bank, sits the hairy giant of myth, a chicken coop of entrapped and distressed legong-dancing virgins to hand, busily cooking the rice with which he will consume them. Two streams, one white, one blue, converge on the centre which is flooded with great shafts of light from above, an energised core, where sunbeams and water fuse into some novel compound to create a pure, swirling vortex of translucent energy. Then the rich sky above fades into tones of deepest blue and violet and there is the demon, Kala Rahu, a hideous, coarse head with bulging eyes and one hopping leg, gnawing at the moon in great tearing bites of bottomless malice.