Among the Believers (57 page)

One dish was brought out by one of Linus’s younger sisters, a pretty girl of ten or twelve in a frock. Then another girl, much older, came out to look at the visitors. Her face was twisted, her teeth jutted; her dress hung oddly on her. Her movements were uncoordinated, and her slippered feet dragged heavily on the smooth concrete floor. She sat
on a chair in the other corner and looked at us, not saying anything; and then, after a while, she lifted herself up and went out with her dragging step.

Some minutes later Umar said, delicately, “You may have seen that sister of Linus’s. She is not well.” She had fallen ill when she was young. They had taken her to a doctor, and the doctor’s assistant had given a wrong injection, which had damaged her nervous system. So the house of the poet, the house of the village headman, was also a house of tragedy.

Linus’s mother arrived: the woman for whom the father had converted, and because of whom the family was Catholic. Umar got up, with a definite stoop, and did a shuffle sideways, a big man trying to make himself smaller than the small woman. And a stream of musical speech poured out of both of them before we all sat down.

She was small and slight in the Indonesian way, and she might have passed unnoticed in the street. But now, detached from the Indonesian crowd, in her own house, and our hostess, her beauty shone; and it was possible to see the care with which she had dressed—blouse, sash, sarong (her daughters wore frocks). It was possible to see beyond the ready Indonesian smile (disquieting after a time) to her exquisite manners, and to see in this farmer’s wife the representative of a high civilization. Her face was serene and open; she held her head up, with a slight backward tilt; her bones were fine, her eyes bright, though depressed in their sockets, and her lips were perfectly shaped over her perfect teeth. Her speech—without constraint or embarrassment—always appeared to be about to turn to laughter.

She and Umar talked for some time in this way, and it seemed they had much to say. But it was all part of the ritual of welcome, Umar told me later. They had used the polite Javanese language, which was different from the everyday language; and they had said little. Linus’s mother had said that she had had to go to the school of one of her children to get the child’s report; that was why she hadn’t been able to welcome us when we arrived. She was ashamed to welcome people as distinguished as ourselves in a place that was hardly a house, was a mere hut. And Umar had been equally apologetic about our intrusion, which was perhaps upsetting the harmony of her household. That was how it had gone on, apology answered by apology.

One concrete thing had come out, though. Umar mentioned it
afterwards, when we had left the house and were walking through the village. Linus’s mother was worried about Linus. He didn’t come to the village often; he stayed in his little house in Yogya; he wasn’t married; and he didn’t have a job. And she had a point, Umar said: Linus was twenty-eight.

I said to Linus, “But isn’t she secretly proud that you are a poet?”

Linus said in English, “She wouldn’t have even a sense of what being a poet is.”

Umar said, “There is only one way Linus has of making her understand. And that is to say or suggest that he is being a poet in the classical tradition. But that would be nonsense. She would reject it as an impossibility.”

For someone like Linus’s mother, living within an achieved civilization, poetry was something that had already been written, provided, a kind of scripture; it couldn’t be added to.

But something was about to come up for Linus. A Yogya paper had asked him to do a cultural page, for twenty-five dollars a month. It was a short bus ride to Yogya, but the life that Linus was trying to make for himself there—poetry readings, newspapers—seemed a world away from the tight, rice-created village.

The shady village lane twisted. The earth was lava-black, and swept. The gutters were full of racing water—without water there can be no rice. The mosque was a plain shed on low pillars: no dome, no special roof. Islam didn’t come to Java as a civilization; it came only as a faith, or a complement to the old faiths; it used what was already there. The mosque was open; inside there were a few bamboo mats, nothing else. A few steps away, at a bend in the black earth lane, was the Catholic church, a plain shed like the mosque, but with a corrugated-iron portico over the concrete steps and with a cross at the top.

The mosque was open, as mosques should be. The church was locked. It wasn’t much of a lock, though. Linus broke a twig off a hibiscus bush, pushed the twig into the keyhole, and turned. The church was almost as bare as the mosque. It had a crucifix. High up on the walls were three small framed pictures of the stations of the cross. The glass was flyblown and cobwebby; the pictures had lost their colour and two had slipped in their mounts. The wire netting at the top of the wall, just below the eaves, was torn in many places.

Christianity had come to Indonesia not long after Islam. It was the
religion of the colonizing power; but, like Islam, it had also come to the villages as a complement to the old faiths. And it was Islam, as the formal faith of the people, that had served Indonesian pride during the Dutch time. Not far away—the village was small and the walk was short, but it was like a walk through Javanese history—was a house with a board that said it was the office of the Muhammadiyah. This was a reforming, nationalist Indonesian Muslim movement that had started in the Dutch time; it was now said to be “conservative.”

A small village, a short walk; and now—in this village of perishable buildings—centuries were added to history. We walked through the village to the house of the Muslim
koum
. Umar Kayam translated this as “elder,” and he gave me some idea of the
koum
’s duties. He was called in by Muslim families on important occasions—a birth, a funeral, an anniversary, or simply when a family wished to have a religious ceremony; and he performed then the
salamatan
ritual. This ritual had to do with the consecration of food and the distribution of the consecrated food. From my Hindu childhood I recognized the ceremony as a Hindu survival, and I thought of the Muslim
koum
as a kind of successor to the Hindu priest.

It was a surprise to find him living in a hovel at the end of the village, just next to the rice fields, his house decayed, the inner room dark, junk in the verandah, the bamboo walls sagging, the whitewash turning to black some way above the black earth.

He didn’t invite us in. He came out and stood in the front yard, on the damp black earth, in the shade of trees. He was in shorts and a white tee shirt. His wife, not introduced to us, stood in the verandah and watched. He looked more a farmer and a peasant than a priest. And it was a further surprise to learn of his other duties: as
koum
he washed the bodies of the Muslim dead and shrouded them for burial. In himself, then, the Muslim
koum
combined the ritual duties of priest and untouchable. He embodied—and in an extraordinary way, this man of ritual—what had been preserved of the Hindu system of caste.

He was sixty-four, small, muscular, and still sturdy, his brown skin shining with sun, with only a looseness of skin around the knees to hint at his age, which showed more in his face. His cheekbones jutted like shelves; that, and a paleness of forehead and his flat hair, suggested that he wore a heavy hat while at work in the sun.

It was of his corpse duties that he was now speaking to Umar, and
his speech was jovial, as though he was about to break into laughter. His duties did not abash him. He had inherited his position as
koum
from his father, and he had also inherited an acre of land. That explained his physique, that labour in the rice field. He had done well. He saw himself as a successful man who had lived a good and useful life.

So he had no regrets? Things had gone well for the country?

He seemed to explode into laughter. Gone well? Things had got better and better. Life had never been better; he lived in the good time. What was there in the past for him to regret? There had been the Dutch; and when he was twenty-six the Japanese had occupied Java.

What was that time like? How had he got on with the Japanese?

Again his speech was like an explosion of laughter. It was a
dreadful
time, he said. Everything was short. They had no cloth. They had had to wear pants of sacking. And after that there was the revolution, the war against the Dutch. The village was one of those the Dutch regularly searched after they had invaded Yogyakarta; he had often had to run away and hide. No, this was the good time.

What of Sukarno, the leader against the Dutch?

And the reply of the old man, the peasant standing beside his hovel, was astonishing. His face softened; his voice softened. He said, “Ah. He was a handsome man. He spoke well.”

Umar said after he translated, “Beauty is important here. A leader has to be good-looking. But I suppose that is true in most countries.”

Yet it was strange, even in Java, with its ritual and courtesies: beauty and a gift for oratory leading a colonized people through cruel wars. Wouldn’t there have been more to Sukarno in the early days, in the 1930s?

“Ask him when he first heard of Sukarno.”

The reply came, and Umar laughed. “He says 1945. I must say that’s news to me.”

I said, “I was expecting to hear about the young Sukarno in the 1930s.”

“I wasn’t expecting that. Sukarno was exiled for much of that time. There wasn’t that amount of media coverage in those days. And what there was the Dutch controlled. I was expecting him to say that he first heard of Sukarno during the Japanese occupation, when the Japanese brought him back from exile.”

So the old man had heard of Sukarno only after independence had been proclaimed in August 1945. Sukarno had appeared suddenly, the leader, not only a man with an army, but also a man to follow because of his looks and because he spoke well.

Two white cows at the other end of the yard were eating cut grass. The tinkling of the bells around their necks accompanied the old man’s bubbling talk. Life had turned out well for him, after all, better than he might have expected during the Japanese occupation, when times were hard and he had no knowledge of the existence of a leader.

But why, though being so well-to-do, with his acre of land, which was a lot, and his duties as
koum
, why did he live in such a poor hut?

Umar and Linus talked, and Umar said afterwards, “It’s a matter of a particular life style.” Then Umar put the question to the old man, and the old man said, “It’s the way of Islam.”

It was a way that was no longer being followed, he said. Only a third of the Muslims lived as Muslims; only a third went to the mosque. There was a change among the young, though. Why? Perhaps, he said, it was because in the government schools religion was being taught as a subject, and the young people had to study it if they wanted to get good grades.

He and Umar talked some more. The slender, long-legged cocks of Java walked about the damp yard; the cows’ bells tinkled; the old man’s wife watched us from the dark, junk-filled verandah and smiled.

Umar said, “I’ve been asking him about the
wayang
.” The puppet theatre. “Whether as a Muslim he objected to the Hindu stories. He said no; they were just stories.”

We made our way back to Linus’s house—more tea, more steaming corn, a plate of hot chips made from some kind of dried fruit. Linus’s mother walked out with us when we left. Shelled corncobs were drying on a mat in the front yard. The cobs were to be sold, to be crushed for oil; everything had a use here. And this time I took in the little roadside shack which was the family shop: Linus’s family were also traders.

Umar wanted to show me the traditional Javanese house. Linus knew where one was. The house was not prepared for a visit, was cluttered; but the woman of the house smiled while we looked around, and showed us where the shrine to the rice goddess would have been. And it seemed to me that after this intrusion, Umar, as we left, made
an especially low bow and did an especially long sideways shuffle. Such archaic elegance; and the ordinary main road, with its scooters, was only a few minutes away.

Here we had created a disturbance, though. The children had come out to watch. Every little girl had a doll, but it was a living doll: a little brother or sister held on the hip.

It was only half an hour to Yogya. But not all could make the journey from village to town as Linus had done. Linus was privileged. He was a poet; he had a sense of who he was; he could be a man apart. Not many villagers were like that. They had been made by the villages. They needed the security of the extended family, the security of the village commune, however feudally run, however heavy the obligations of the night watch or the communal labour in the rice fields. For such men the villages were indeed enchanted places, hard to break out of. And if a man was forced to leave—because there simply wasn’t the land now to support him—it was for the extended family—and something like the village again—that he looked, in the factory or the office, even in Jakarta.

I
SLAM
, like Christianity, complemented the older religions. The religion of the village was a composite religion; the idea of the good life was a composite idea. People lived with everything at once: the mosque, the church, Krishna, the rice goddess, a remnant of Hindu caste, the Buddhist idea of nirvana, the Muslim idea of paradise. No one, Umar Kayam said, could say precisely what he was. People said, “I am a Muslim, but—” Or, “I am a Christian, but—”

And Umar told this story about the Prambanam villagers. In 1965, after the military take-over, the government, nervous of the communism of the late Sukarno period, required everyone formally to declare his religion. The people of Prambanam were in a quandary. In one way they were Muslims, believing in the Prophet and his paradise. But they didn’t feel they could say they were Muslims: they broke too many of the rules. They knew that their ancestors had built the great ninth-century temples of Prambanam—which people from all over the world now came to visit; and though they no longer fully understood the significance of the temples, they knew they were Hindu temples. They liked watching the puppet plays based on the
Ramayana
and the
Mahabharata
,
and they knew that these were Hindu epics. So the Prambanam people felt they should declare themselves Hindus.