Island of Demons (52 page)

“And do you,” asked Van Diemen through a local interpreter – himself blushing – “see the perpetrator of this foul and unnatural act in the court today?” He stared at Walter and nodded to the boy. Ketok looked around, eyes wide with terror, seemed to hesitate over Koch as a possible candidate and then said in a small voice, “How can I tell? Do not all white men look alike? And do they not even change their clothes so that they cannot be known?”

Van Diemen threw up his arms in despair. Walter hooted again and whispered furiously to Koch who rolled his eyes before he rose to cross-examine with a grin on his face.

“Wayan,” he asked gently, “When did all this happen?”

Wayan Ketok bit his lip. “Just before last
galungan
.”

“Are you aware that there were, at that time, in that house,
two
painters called Walter, Walter Spies – here on trial – and Walter Dreesen, the manager of the establishment?” Ketok listened to the translation, gaped, looked as if he were about to burst into tears. “Can you really tell us with absolute certainty which Walter it was that mistreated you?” Ketok seemed to shrink further. “I put it to you that it was not my client here, Walter Spies, who mistreated you but another Walter entirely.” The words were fed slowly through the translation process. Ketok rose, bewildered, to his feet.

“But why?” he cried, looking at Van Diemen, fearful yet outraged at the injustice of it. “This is stupid. How can white men all have the same names and not expect us to be confused?” There was hubbub in the court, de Jonghe shouting and banging his gavel, the Balinese mis-explaining to each other what had just happened, Margaret and Greg laughing, sundry Dutch raging in exasperation.

“Court adjourned! “ shouted de Jonghe testily. “Court adjourned! Silence! Clear the court!”

As always in this world, our triumph was to be short-lived. The next day, Van Diemen returned, soothed, sleek, assured, bearing no trace of his routing. The ranks of the audience had been dramatically reduced for the Dutch found wearisome all the Balinese and the Balinese all the Dutch. The Balinese, it is true, found certain parallels with their traditional theatre, much of whose dialogue is incomprehensible, but were irked by the constraints imposed on gossip, audience participation and informal dining. Van Diemen had a star witness. It was little Resem.

They had shaved his moustache to cut years from his age, shorn his long hair and dressed him up in what was virtually a schoolboy uniform. He had lost weight. The cumulative effect was that he looked about twelve years old. Again, it was Van Diemen's task to lead him through a statement authenticated, not by his thumbprint, but by his proud written name. After all, Walter and I had taught him to read and write. It seemed, actually, to be a fairly dispassionate and accurate account of his relations both with Walter and with other unnamed partners. Jealousy sparked within me, displaced by a terrible fear that he would stand, point to me and cry, “If you don't believe me, ask that man. All these things, I did with him also.” The statement was in Balinese, as one would have expected, but
in coitu
, he suddenly switched to a highly technical, latinate Dutch, medical vocabulary. Koch was onto it at once, quoting back words.

“This term, ‘intercrural'. Is that a word you habitually use?”

“It is the word Mr van Diemen told me to use.” Tonny began to shift uncomfortably in his chair.

“I see. Did Mr van Diemen help you otherwise with your statement?”

“Yes, Tuan. He helped me know what to say.” Resem was always a good honest boy – young man.

“I see. Did he offer you anything for saying this and signing it? Some reward?” Resem shook his head.

“There was no reward. The Tuan just said that if I lied I would be sent to Java and die there and no ceremonies would be done for my death and I would wander in Hell for ever.”

“So you made this statement in fear of eternal death and damnation?”

Resem smiled, innocently. “Yes, Tuan,” he said. “That is why I was so careful to tell the truth.”

Van Diemen harumphed triumphantly and returned to the chase. To crossexamine, he rose with intimidating dignity. “How old are you, Resem?”

Resem furrowed his brow. “I do not know. I was born in the year of many mice.”

“And how long ago was that?”

“That was when I was very small, Tuan.”

“According to Dutch law, you are a man – not a boy – at twenty-one years old. Are you a man – not a boy?” I felt Margaret stiffen beside me at this act of semantic highway robbery.

“I am a man since I had my teeth filed.”

De Jonghe sat up. “What's that – teeth – what?” He displayed his own dentition, yellow, unfiled, defiled.

“It is a ceremony, Your Honour, at which a person's teeth are filed even, with special reference to the canines. It is regarded as the point at which a child may become an adult.” De Jonghe yawned. I saw Walter grin and whisper something to Koch who frowned non-comprehension till Walter threw up his arms. I knew it was his standard joke about Balinese being the only people who got “short in the teeth” as they aged.

“Proceed.”

“I shall produce evidence, Your Honour, from Dr Behrens,” he snapped his fingers and pointed to his papers, “that, according to his best calculations, this young man was between fifteen and eighteen when he entered the accused's service.” He turned back to the witness box. “Resem. When did you have your teeth filed?” Poor Resem looked confused.

“I cannot tell exactly. Tuan Walter paid for it to be done, so that he could see the ceremony and the music. You cannot do it without music. It was when I first came to work for him.” I could see where this was going and did not greatly like it.

“So there was a time when you worked for him, when your teeth were unfiled and you were not yet a man?” Resem nodded.

“Oh yes.”

Van Diemen leaned forward and spoke very slowly. “And, at that time, had you already ‘played' with Tuan Walter.” There was a long, slow silence that crept around the courtroom like an icy draught.

“Truly, I cannot remember, Tuan. There was no reason for me to remember. It may have been when he was comforting me from the pain and he came and sat with me.” I heard my own release of breath. Sweat was running down my face. Of course, I heard the words before Van Diemen got the translation. He turned and stared at me, saw – I knew – right through me and curled his lip. I shuddered and impulsively clutched Margaret's chubby hand.

***

“The Balinese,” said Margaret with damely emphasis, “have the good sense to see maturity as a performative, not a mere fact of biology or a matter of arbitrary clocks. If a boy
acts
like a man then he
is
a man.” Hat on her knees, she was giving them the faith of cultural relativism hot and strong.

Van Diemen was not having that. “You are surely not suggesting that biology is not involved?”

Margaret sighed and fiddled with her hat. Her fingers yearned for a blackboard. “Okaaay! Look at it this way. Biology itself involves cultural concepts. In the Nile delta of Egypt, for instance, where the disease bilharzia is endemic, the first symptoms of intestinal bleeding appear in males in the early to mid- teens. This is seen as ‘male menstruation' and a natural physical mark of sexual maturity corresponding to female menarche. Biology is seen through cultural eyes”. Van Diemen frowned.

“You tell 'em old girl!” Greg sat beside me, eyes shining, openly admiring.

“Then, you are surely not suggesting that age is not involved?”

Margaret threw him a pitying look. “The Balinese have no sense of time as we understand it, that is, as a line extending infinitely forward and back. Balinese have a number of interlocking calendars that engage like the wheels in a gearbox so that time, in their experience, is circular. Naturally, this conforms perfectly with their notion of reincarnation.”

Van Diemen made the sort of face that dentists see a lot of. This was alien territory to him, where he was at a disadvantage. He switched back to what he knew best, innuendo.

“And yet they manage to tell today from tomorrow and yesterday from today. Dr Mead, I wonder if you might clear up one thing I do not understand. The documentation here refers to you as the wife of one, Gregory Bateson. Is your true name Mrs Bateson or Mead?”

Margaret smoothed her spotty dress. “It is both. I am married to Gregory but, for professional purposes, I have retained the use of my maiden name. I do not accept that marriage should involve the total loss of my own identity.”

Van Diemen flicked through papers. “I see. Oh yes and of course that would make more sense when one has been married repeatedly as I believe you have.” He had established that she was a wanton woman and a bad wife.

“This is my third marriage.”

“I see. You have kindly told us various things about childhood around the world. I wonder. Do you have any children yourself, Mrs Bateson – I beg your pardon – Dr Mead?”

“Not as yet.”

She was a bad mother, a non-childbearing woman, a Rangda, a shrivelled academic who knew nothing of reality. The women in the audience instinctively heaved their bosoms in superior disapproval. There is something about women and their bosoms as symbols of virtue – perhaps Margaret is right and it is about childbearing – whereas breasts are a quite different matter. I have never understood, speaking as a man who has made his living at the breast, the odd alchemy by which wanton breasts become moral bosoms.

“And how well would you say you know Walter Spies?”

She looked over at him. Walter was absorbed in drawing something on a large pad. “I would say that I know him very well. He is a good friend.” Walter raised sad eyes puppy-dog and threw her a weak smile.

“Are you not, as a woman, troubled by his frankly avowed sexual aberrations?”

Margaret sniffed. “I don't see what my being a woman has to do with it. Anthropologists have to confront all manner of forms of cultural difference without hysterical value-judgements. Walter is not a true invert in that he is capable of intermittent sexual arousal by the opposite sex …” Very daring that in the 1930s. Blushes and scandalised gasps from the audience. “It is simply that his light involvement with Balinese youth fits very well with their own shallowness of emotional participation and dissociated impersonality. I should imagine that he might also be quite at home in some of those New Guinean sexual systems where sexuality is not a constant throughout a man's life but may follow a course from the passively to actively homosexual, in parallel to vigorous and simultaneous heterosexual activity. Now, in Africa …”

“Thank you, Dr Mead. I don't think we need to go as far as Africa.”

She leaned forward, getting carried away by her enthusiasms. “The point is that, although, in the West, Walter might be regarded as deviant, in that his temperament agrees very ill with our dominant character configuration, in Bali he is quite at home. Even an interest, such as Walter's, in art and aesthetics is not considered incompatible with masculinity in Bali. This entire prosecution has many of the qualities of those hysterical outbursts of paranoia that we see classically, in primitive societies, in witch-hunting. It might be said, of course, that this accords perfectly with the Dutch national character with its inherently passive-aggressive configuration that responds to pressure by external projection of internal conflict. Throughout Dutch history …”

I had been watching de Jonghe getting increasingly irritated by all this, fiddling with his gavel, yawning compulsively, but just as he raised it over its little block of wood, to strike Margaret down, an angry voice rang out from the gallery. We all looked up to see a wiry Balinese of indeterminate age, trembling with unshallow emotion and heavy associated involvement, leaning over the rail and declaiming with wild arm movements and tears in his eyes. Beneath the full, thick hair of an adolescent, he had a face lined with the vicissitudes of age, breathtakingly beautiful in its patinated complexity, the sort of face I should have loved to explore, layer by layer, in a poignant and shadowed Rembrandtian drawing. I heard a Dutch woman shriek in alarm, “Is it a nationalist?” Another cried in terror, “Are the natives running amok?” Chairs were kicked back, a sort of stampede in undersea slow motion occurred. The Moluccan soldiers exchanged troubled looks. They had understood their role in the court to be purely ornamental and had no orders on how to deal with events such as this. This was embarrassing, so, instinctively, they raised their rifles to shoot someone. Fortunately, at this point, the old man turned on his heel and stalked away, out of sight, behind the crowd. His bare feet could be heard thudding, outside edge grounding first – good Balinese dance training – down the stairs towards the door, driving the audience back once more the way they had come. He turned, tiny, in the doorway and gobbed a final mouthful of Balinese at the judges and strode off with poise and dignity. Margaret was there, at my elbow, shielded by Greg, staring after him.

“What did he say? I couldn't follow it.”

“He said we must all be mad, crazy. He was using, you understand, the lower speech register. What was all this fuss about? He said that Walter was one of the best and kindest men he ever met and that, if his son chose to spend time with him, then it could only do him good. We have just met Resem's father.” I thought about it. “I suppose,” I said doubtfully, “given the circumstances, it would be out of the question to ask him to model for me?”

Outside, the crowd milled around like children unexpectedly let out of school early. Standing under a tree, I spotted Cokorda Agung who beckoned me across with fluttering fingers. Had he been inside? Where could he possibly have sat without risking ritual pollution? A retainer lit an American cigarette and passed it with deference. Elegant slacks and shirt, clearly in his modern incarnation.