Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (19 page)

I asked, “Can you remember any message?”

“I remember. It was: ‘I don’t teach about devas, the many gods of Hinduism. I don’t teach about reincarnation. You could arrive at nirvana even if you live in this world.’ ”

“What year was that?”

“This was in 1993, about.” The year, perhaps, when his father died.

“When did Landung discover this gift?”

“Maybe around 1990. Once Landung told me he didn’t believe he had this gift of receiving messages from God or Siddhartha or the true spirit in this way. That night Siddhartha came and said, ‘When you receive a gift from God, don’t throw it away.’ ”

“When do you have your meetings?”

“A spontaneous feeling in all of us. But sometimes we can’t collect together all of us. Sometimes Landung feels there is a message in his palm—”

“Even when he is working?”

“Yes. He will stop it, saying, ‘Wait, wait, wait. I am busy today. Maybe tonight.’ And then we take it to the lady to read.”

“Are the messages short?”

“Sometimes short, sometimes long. If Siddhartha comes, it means he wants us to think and discuss his teaching.”

“Do you get messages in a moment of crisis?”

“He told us about Jesus Christ. He is coming in a mystery. We cannot predict.”

“Does he give more practical advice?”

“When I was sick, Siddhartha told Landung through the palm that I had to try to look for a certain kind of leaf, something in the village. Then you must steep it in hot water and drink the mixture. It worked.”

“Does your mother know?”

It was as with Linus’s poetry. “I never told her. Her narrow experience in the spirit world will be surprised. She will not believe my explanation.”

The most important revelation they had had from Siddhartha was that he was a prophet—which meant (though Linus didn’t say so) that Siddhartha, the Buddha, was in the line of prophets that (according to the Muslims) ended with Mohammed: which meant that this Indian-Javanese figure had connections with the two competing revealed religions of Indonesia.

What Siddhartha said through Landung’s palm was, “When I meditated for fifty-four years in a small lake, suddenly I received a voice: ‘Look at the bright star in the sky.’ In that sky I saw a man in blue clothes, very bright, and he brought a bucket, and inside the bucket was a baby, and the man in the bright blue clothes introduced himself as Adam, and the baby introduced itself as Jesus. Then I saw writing in the sky:
This is the man I promised you.
” Siddhartha told Landung, “I don’t know who gave me the direction to look at the sky.” When Linus heard this he said directly to Siddhartha through the woman friend who was translating, “It was John the Baptist.” And Siddhartha answered, “A long time I have wondered about that person. It’s only today that I’ve got to know his name.” So Linus began to feel that he was in touch with Siddhartha.

I asked Linus, “When did this mystical group start?”

“It just happened. In the late 1980s.”

We were sitting at the oilcloth-covered table, next to the dividing screen and the wall shelf with the ornaments and images. I had a partial view of the dark inner room. Linus’s sister had some time before left her chair before the television. Now Linus’s mother appeared, small, her footsteps almost without sound. She had come back from the village funeral and was in her home clothes, which might also have been her working clothes; later, when the sun was lower, she would be going to her rice field to plant out seedlings. Now she sat in the chair before the television set—the blue light flickering on her face, the sound turned down low—and watched a Latin-American
telenovela,
or soap, very slow, in bright, unnatural colors. It was something she followed, Linus said; and it was strange to think of this low commercial form (so particular to the yearnings of Latin America) leaping the hemisphere, leaping cultures, to speak directly to this sorrowing old woman in her shut-in Javanese world.

While her husband, the village leader, lived, the broad-fronted house on the main road had been one of the six important houses in the village. Now, without him who had been its light and center, with the tarnished sofa set low on the concrete floor, the darkening ceiling matting, and with Linus’s mementos—in a corner, on a wall—of a festival of the performing arts in London from five years before, it was as though dust had metaphorically settled on people and things.

But the house had treasure: in Linus’s bedroom was his collection of antique krises, local daggers, of serpentine shape, with leaf upon leaf of various metals. These krises, always personal to their owners, had spiritual significance, Linus said. The handle and the hilt, or the blade and the sheath, had an obvious sexual symbolism: the spirit came from the lingam
and yoni emblems of Javanese Hinduism. He had about sixty of these krises. He had been collecting them since 1982 (the year before his sister had died, the sister whose death he had written poems about, in a six-week burst in 1987). The krises were mainly from the thirteenth and fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some, he said, were of the sixth and seventh centuries. I thought he meant the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he insisted.

The krises were in his bedroom, and we went to see them when his mother (unwittingly like a dragon guarding mystic treasure) had done with her telenovela, and had gone to her work in the rice field. It was dark in the bedroom, and the darkness was like part of the privacy of the rooms at the back of the house. The krises were in an old brown wardrobe. The ones with scabbards stood against the corners of the tall compartment. The naked ones lay flat and hidden on a top shelf. They were fearful things, their blades jagged and sharp, different leaves or layers of metal showing, some of them seemingly rusted. They encouraged thoughts of Linus’s invalid sister (perhaps now resting in her own dark room) and her three-day rages; and then they set the teeth on edge.

It occurred to me that Linus had over the years spent a fair sum on these krises. But he didn’t answer when I asked. He said that he was guided in these and other spiritual matters by a wise man of sixty-five, also a Javanist-Christian, in the next village. Krises gave off vibrations of energy; it was possible for this reason to be led to them by “pendulum study.” Knowledge about them also came to him in dreams.

When he saw that I couldn’t follow, he said, “All the animals in this world have a magic power, and some of them a very strong one. When this animal dies this magic doesn’t die, but comes out and stays in the sky.”

“Where in the sky?”

“I don’t know at what level of the sky. And when the kris-maker makes a kris he will fast and pray, and the blessing of the god of the animals’ magic power will come down in the process of the making.”

Linus also, again with the help of his adviser, had a collection of magic stones. These stones could be found anywhere; he had even found one in the United States. In the pattern of the colors in a stone could be seen—as I understood—the souls or magic of animals.

He said, with a giggle, “Sometimes you can see a beautiful woman.”

The village was closely built up. Neighbors pressed on one side of Linus’s yard, beyond the broken pond and the flower patch. Between the yard and
the small plot of
salak
fruit trees that belonged to Linus’s family there were two sets of neighbors. A sharecropping family, a widow and two of her five children, lived in a poor hut seemingly patched together with old bits and pieces. After that there was a more established farming family, with a well-used but more traditional house, with a separate kitchen and washing-up place at the back, and with their own yard. Chickens—black and tall and slender: the chickens of Java—scratched in the dust. In a pen at the end of the shady yard two white bullocks rested after the labors of the day, skin loose over bone, oddly frail-looking and small for their ploughing duties in the deep volcanic mud of the rice fields. Bullocks were smelly, Linus said, but not as smelly as buffalos. And, not far away, in a corner of a yard shaded by young bamboo, we saw two black buffalos, their skin dulled with dirt and muck, tethered to stout, tall poles and resting on a spread of dried grass.

The main village road was a narrow, twisting dirt lane, now showing broom marks, now with damp patches: everyone had to clean the lane in front of his yard, and did so in his own way. There were house plots and fruit or garden plots. These plots were not big, and sometimes they had walls of beautifully cut and fitted lava blocks. Lava, like bamboo, was a local material; people handled it well. The village was full of shade. There was no feeling of openness. People didn’t want openness in a village.

With the volcanic soil and the damp heat everything grew fast, here and in the open rice fields. You couldn’t forget the lava of Mount Merapi: Linus’s obsession with the worlds buried underfoot was understandable. Part of the bounty of Merapi and the volcanic soil was the distinctive salak fruit of the region. Homemade boards on the main road advertised
SALAK PONDOH
. The small orchard plot that Linus’s family had was of young salak trees—like palm trees, but with thorny trunks, and with intricate spider webs on the thorns. Someone else had a plot of mature salak trees protected by an old lava-block wall made higher with wire and matting. Where there was so little space, where neighbors (and outsiders) always pressed, the products of the earth were precious.

But it was no longer a purely agricultural village. The five principal houses belonged to people who did other work, town work, and sometimes quite unusual work. The man just across the main road was a government officer of the third grade: he was Linus’s uncle through his step-grandmother (perhaps the second wife who had been indirectly responsible for the impoverishing of Linus’s mother). There was a compiler of an Indonesian dictionary; then another uncle of Linus’s who was a sculptor, a maker of official statues; an aunt, who was a Javanist and a mystic with a huge following, Linus said, and who sometimes lived in the city; and
there was a retired Muslim high-school teacher who had done the pilgrimage to Mecca. A factory worker kept a nice house, beautifully painted, and with Japanese bonsai trees and other plants outside, quite unprotected; but this was “only for show,” Linus said, meaning that the man wasn’t as well off as the others. And there was another relation of Linus’s—living next to the plain wooden building that was the Catholic chapel—who was a PE instructor in Yogya and traveled to work every day.

The village had changed, and Linus’s family circumstances had changed. But old village commitments, old loyalties, had to be honored; they were helping to impoverish Linus’s mother even more.

The neighbor who was a sharecropper was a widow and very poor. She had five children. Two worked as servants in Jakarta. The eldest and the youngest lived with her, working as laborers in the rice fields and elsewhere. The fifth child was a mason.

Linus said, “The mason came three months ago and asked to buy some little piece of land from us, to make a small house for himself.” The poor and cramped kampung hut in which the family lived was on land that belonged to the sculptor. “The mason said, ‘If you don’t give us land, where would we go?’ And then my mother reminded us that when my father was a child, the woman who took care of my father was the grandmother of this family. ‘So we have to remember this history of your father.’ So we will sell the land, a hundred square meters. We have a thousand square meters of garden. This relationship with our neighbor is more human. We’ve made a written agreement. That is new: until now everything was oral.”

They had three pieces of rice land, in all about an acre. It would have been worked cooperatively. This explained the crowded, busy little rice fields on the other side of the main road, far down the dirt road behind the good houses and the flags and decorations for the independence anniversary celebrations, RI50. As soon as the car began to go down that road, I recognized the land as the land I had seen in 1979 with Linus and Umar Kayam: it was what I had carried away in my head as Linus’s village and turned over the years to a pastoral vision of a complete civilization. I had seen it in 1979 on a morning in December. Now, in August, on a late afternoon, it was dustier and harsher, the Java of straw hats and many hands, fertility eating up itself.

For every eight pounds reaped, Linus said, a helper received one pound in payment; if the helper was a member of the family he received half of what he reaped. And this village was full of Linus’s relations.

There were other obligations. “When there are weddings in the village we have to make a gift often thousand rupiah.” Something under five dollars.
“This is the custom of the village people. After my father’s death, of course we don’t have many invitations, but we still receive some. One hundred kilos of rice will fetch forty-five thousand rupiah. From our land we get from twenty to twenty-five quintals. That is, two thousand to twenty-five hundred kilos.” Five hundred dollars’ worth, at the higher figure.

Linus said later—without prompting from me, and as though it was something he had had to think about—“I could become a rice farmer if I decide, but I think it will be hard for me to spend all my energies in the rice fields.”