Island of Demons (49 page)

“Beh!”. “Beh!”. “Beh!”.

I thought here to find a justification of my own views. “So,” I said, eying Walter and Resem and directing the moral at them, “the story teaches us that gambling is a foolish and dangerous habit, unholy even.”

Kumis looked at me in astonishment. “Nooo, Tuan” he said, and shook his head. “It says that gambling is the very root of Bali and that, without it, we would still be ruled by the Javanese.”

Walter hooted with amusement. “And that we should all continue to live as bachelors or be eaten by dragons,” he laughed.

I Bagus Gede returned long after the setting sun. In the darkness, lightning licked and crackled over the distant mountains and an electric charge tingled in the damp air. A bedsheet to serve as screen for the shadow play had been set up over a bamboo frame by the edge of the ravine with the musicians assembled and idling behind it. The demons and sprites that lived there would be conscripted to the audience. The great box of ornate, buffalo-skin puppets had been brought up and covered with a white cloth. Bagus Gede was meticulously about his preparations, chanting and praying, handing out the puppets to be set out, good on one side, bad on the other, by his assistants, invoking powers for strength and eloquence. Finally, the smoking lamp was lit and glowed behind the screen, the wooden hammer pinioned between his toes. A series of staccato raps with it, against the box, brought the musicians to order and they launched into the overture. The
kayon
, a representation of the holy tree of life with the sacred mountain at its base, was leaning against the screen. It would punctuate the various scenes but now was a character in its own right, being made to leap and twirl and pulsate to the rhythm of the music. It was immediately clear to me that Ida Bagus was drunk.

“You know, I think he is already in a trance!” whispered Walter, astonished. He crept over, on bent knees to avoid offence, to watch more closely. The Meads prowled, watching the audience, not the play – the play, to them, irrelevant – Greg firing off shots, each one greeted by a murmur from the crowd, Margaret pointing out victims like a Salem witchfinder.

“Nothing important at this stage,” he explained through his pipe. “I just want to get them used to flash photography for later.” Too good for a puppeteer to miss. Each time he did it, the characters projected on the screen jumped and made a joke about the thunderstorms in this play. Then came a series of smutty jokes about foreigners whose sex was mysterious since they covered their breasts and slept with everything, even pigs. The gang of little boys in the front row loved that, giggling and tugging at their genitals. Being spoken by servants, therefore in Balinese, as opposed to the Old Javanese of the high caste puppets, even I could understand it. Drunk or not, Ida Bagus was on fire. It was what you might call a three-star performance. Accents, gestures, refined and low, dirty jokes, cosmic themes, sound effects, songs – hands, feet and voice all engaged them on the simple screen, manipulating the rods attached to arms and legs to coax the figures into uncanny life. McPhee was round the back, where the puppets were all gold and bright colours, fussing over the constitution of the orchestra – why were there drums? – the tuning, the use of different themes. This was the spot for those who were not content just to watch the effect but were interested in the skill of the performers. Perhaps it has something to do with the obsessive Balinese distinction between
sekala
, the world of the visible, and
niskala
, that which lies beyond the senses. I do not know. The Balinese do not know. You would have to ask Margaret. QED. I picked up an air that Walter and McPhee had explored at their last piano recital.

Jane, Mrs Pussy, came and perched beside me, lit two cigarettes, handed me one, just as Rangda made her first appearance to a crash of gongs that echoed back from the other side of the ravine and a shudder ran through the crowd. The puppets for other characters were held close to the screen so that they were small and sharp but Rangda fluttered some way behind it, large and inchoate, as if still crystallising into existence.

“Rangda is the non-childbearing woman,” she said, “for whom everything is jealousy and negativity. Sometimes I think that's me. Of course, sometimes it's Margaret. That's why she was so keen to use the name for Beryl. You men without babies just don't have the same things to put up with. And in the dramatic version, the kindly, protective
Barong
is the nurturing father and gets all the good lines.”

I shrugged. “In the mountain villages here, men without children are not allowed to live in the centre or play a full role in life. They are considered never to have grown up, like – I suppose – Walter and myself.”

“But they don't get all the evil and bad crap in the universe dumped on them, like Rangda. Margaret sees the roots of Rangda in the teasing mother as the embodiment of fear. Look …” She pointed. A mother was ignoring her desperately struggling child, slung under one arm, staring off into space, not even at the screen. “The mother alternately plays with the child and then just ignores it, a sort of cultural schizophrenia, that makes the Balinese so passive yet permanently anxious. The convulsions of the possessed are just the tantrums of the ignored child. We may not say it but we are never far from despising those who love us. And all men marry their mothers.”

Such nonsense. “Please,” I said, with distaste. “I did not marry mine.”

She smiled. “You sure didn't Rudi. You chose the other option and shunned all women. And, for once, in tonight's version Rangda gets it good, killed stone dead by a mighty holy man. Ida Bagus's favourite, all-male version.” She threw down her cigarette and stood up stiffly like an old barren, non-childbearing witch, rested her hand softly and sadly on my shoulder and went over to the Meads. Margaret was making energetic notes in the torchlight, arguing with Greg over something. I heard him say “Oh, put a sock in it, Margaret” and I got up and went to the kitchen. Low lamps were lit, clotting the shadows in the corners. There was a jug of water on the table but in this house they drank – rashly – the water unboiled and unfiltered, straight from the well. Coffee was still warm on the stove. That would have been boiled. I looked round for a cup, found none and poured myself some into a glass that stood on a shelf over the sink. In my household, after washing, I had instructed that glasses be rinsed in boiled water. Here, I would have to take a chance. The Balinese liked to know how much everything cost in a fancy foreign home, transforming it into a museum of
bule
profligacy, so, in the McPhee household, the routine for washing glasses primarily targeted, not hygiene, but the preservation of the price tags gummed on the bottom.

“
Leyak! Leyak!
” Witch! Witch! I slopped coffee down myself, cursed and made for the side wall. Walter was already there, peering into darkness.

“What is it?” He pointed. Over in the fields, was a wavering light, dancing over the surface of water. It could be a witch, or a torch, or a lamp or the biggest firefly in the world or anything you wanted it to be. The shouting was from a child. Doubt was already creeping into its tones, dissolved in communal laughter. It was that point in the play where Rangda calls out to her acolytes, the witches, to come to her in the midnight graveyard and the
dalang
always milked it for everything is was worth. The lamp was dimmed, the orchestra fell – antimelodramatically – silent as his cracked, insane, unaccompanied voice yelled to the forces of darkness to come – right here, right now – and the audience trembled, made each other jump and squealed in delicious terror. Jane's teasing mother, out there, would be shouting “Boo!” at her screaming child and the play's success would be reckoned by the number of dead bodies, undoubted witches, children of Rangda, found in the village the next day. The performance had never wavered and now the players crashed and banged into a collective fight scene, individual blows marked by Ida Bagus's rapping toe-hammer. Good against evil. Male against female. Life went on.

14

They came in the night in trucks with shouting, crashing of gears and deliberately importunate lights. They came on New Year's Eve with no congratulatory wishes, no ingratiating bottle tucked under the arm. They came with a warrant for the arrest of Walter Spies.

The scene had been heavily over-engineered – a dozen dark Moluccan troops with rifles,
controleur
Smit at their head clutching a rolled document like a public proclamation, waving handcuffs and wearing the revolver he had never before got out of its cardboard box. They leaped from the trucks, crouched low, fanned out and approached the house as if in expectation of a withering volley of defensive fire. Alas, this tactic took no account of the fact that only a narrow staircase led down to the main building, so they were forced to crush together again and virtually fell, mutually jostling, through the front door. This disappointed them, for they had looked forward to kicking it down. Colonial troops were inordinately proud of their desperately uncomfortable but very splendid high boots that set them above the unshod local population. All this, I had later from one of the Moluccans, known to me from his regular appearances – in quite a different uniform and footwear – in the prowling after-dark parades of the
lapangan kota
. Walter, to Smit's enormous disappointment, was simply not there. Even his managers, Lindner and Dreesen, were absent – at that moment innocently looking forward to the promise of the new year through pink champagne in Manxi's bar – but there would be time for them later. The troops had to content themselves with a token amount of happy destruction and with rooting the terrified boys out from under their bed with poking rifle barrels, though they were more scared of the black faces than the guns. On principle, the boys knew nothing, swiftly rolling down the shutters of native incomprehension to turn blank, questioning faces on their colonial captors. They were rounded up and taken away in tears, it having been explained to them that they were to help the authorities in their inquiries into breaches of the Netherlands Penal Code Article 248 (2) of which they had never heard and which they did not understand. Then they came for me.

Access to my studio, insomuch as it was formally still part of the palace, involved a rather more extensive etiquette. Nevertheless, at three in the morning, the result was much the same – the sound of marching feet, the crunch of gravel, the door burst in – the eruption of the starkly political upon the nakedly domestic. My inherent modesty drove me, in those days, to the wearing of a sarong whilst sleeping, though for Smit, that, too, might be a dangerous sign of “going native”. Though I rose from my chaste and lonely bed with expressions of astonishment and outrage, I must confess that none of this came as a great surprise to me. I had even considered the merits of allowing them to discover me naked, red-faced therefore not red-handed, for come they must.

The obscure act of the Penal Code in question, it should be noted, proscribed physical intimacy between adults and minors who were members of the same sex. This, I felt sure, embraced McPhee's shameful activities but not those of myself or Walter. Much was made of the affront to Queen Wilhelmina's dignity that such behaviour constituted, something which seemed to me mysterious. I could see that the motions of her genitals, involving as they did the legitimacy of the state, were a matter of concern to me but not vice versa. (“Vice versa,” Walter would have quipped. “Isn't that what we're charged with, Bonnetchen?”) Until the very end, poor Resem was convinced all this fuss sprang from the disrespectful manipulation of his loins into the shadowed silhouette of Her Majesty on the living room wall.

Advance warning had come via McPhee's expensive annual subscriptions to Batavian newspapers, delivered by air. When their divorce had come through, Jane had left with the Meads and he had stayed on alone in all the conditions of increasing seediness that come upon a solitary man living on scant funds. I had visited him some time afterwards to find him bearded and chainsmoking, petulant and lachrymose, drinking at ten in the morning and shockingly indiscreet in his indiscretions. Now, seeing which way the wind was blowing, he had promptly decamped, abandoning the house, Sampih and Jane's pussies to their fate, but, traps packed, he had sent one of his boys over with the front page – and much would be made of this at the trial – with an attached note that read: “In view of the precarious situation, I have decided to head back to the States at once. I think you might want to do likewise”. The newspaper, it is true, was full of alarmist international news, the crumbling peace accords between Germany and the Allies since the Reich had gulped down the Sudetenland with scarcely a belch, the threatened annexation of the Polish corridor, the imminence of another European war – nothing it would be argued, that could be of relevance to us here, up a hill, in far Bali. But beneath the pinned note, lay another article with the infelicitously worded headline, “Crackdown on Boy Sex in the Indies – More Arrests to Follow”.

It was with this present scene in mind that I had ensured that I would be sleeping alone and, around the room, arranged a cavorting throng of dancing and bathing Balinese ladies – as randomly disconnected as in any splodgy roundel by Matisse – comely and bare-bosomed, in oils and pastels, like some nineteenth-century deathbed tableau of the great artist and his works. They would bear strident false witness for me. I was cowering behind what Walter termed “my protective breastwork”.

Smit stood there, blazing torchlight down on me, dark silhouettes crashing into each other behind him in the confined space. “Boots,” I said, invoking the householder's sacred right to protect his property. “Would you mind asking your men to take off their boots? The floors here are a shallow skim of raw cement over soil, polished to a high finish. Your men's boots are wrecking it.” I reached out for matches, laid ready on the bedside table, and made a pantomime of coolly lighting the lamp.