by Brian Aldiss
Staggering to the window, scratching and yawning sickly, I stared out at the tropical world beyond. The great light was about to bound into the sky. Terrible things were already mating or feeding in the branches of trees, celebrating the fact in querulous voices. Apart from the bed, the room was unfurnished. (Writing now, I know why: the Japanese had looted the furniture off the Dutch and the British had looted it off the Japanese.) In one corner, under the window, a metal trunk stood on its end. On top of it were a pink china figurine of a woman dancing, a cracked hand-mirror, a lipstick, and a pink comb with some teeth missing. I stared at them for a long time, whilst trying to get my lungs back into operation.
As I used the comb, my mind chugged into action along a branch line. I was looking at all the possessions that Raddle had acquired, or managed to hold on to, in the last four years. Today was Saturday, the day she sailed for the Netherlands and a new start in life. I went to have a good look at the pair of them, Raddle and Boyer, sweating together under the net. They were lying face to face, breathing into each other’s open mouths. Boyer was half-dressed. Raddle had everything off. She looked as defenceless as a rather mountainous old dog.
I thought well of her. Pissed though she was, maddening though Boyer had been, she had gone back to him. Just for the last time.
What a fewking world … Faithfulness, hopefulness, and charitableness, and the greatest of these was faithfulness, if you could possibly manage it.
As I rammed my bush-hat on and tiptoed for the door, a calendar caught my eye. Write Boyer a note. Must speak to him before he flies back to Padang. Well remembered, Stubbs, Marry Margey, get her to hell out of this equatorial hell-hole.
I took the calendar off the wall, got a pencil from my pocket, and scrawled him a few lines, politely thanking him for a pleasant evening, wishing his light o’ love a pleasant voyage on the Van Heutsz, and asking to meet him at the company office at fifteen hundred hours. It was a miracle of composition, all things considered: a microcosm of the world in three sentences.
The calendar showed a view of the centre of Edam, with a canal of that blue generally held in reserve for picture postcards of the Mediterranean. It was designed for 1939, the year the world stopped. I left it on top of the mosquito-net, message downwards, and hoped that Boyer would not be too hungover to read it.
The RAPWI camp lay embalmed in cool dawn air. The trees were absolutely still. On a wooden chair, a garment lay forsaken. The ashes of the barbecue fire were leprous, as if someone had been burning snake skins. The only movement came from a thin smoke, which withered and died among the branches: it rose, not from the barbecue, but from our black car. The vehicle stood where we had left it, grey cumulo-nimbus issuing from its gaping windows.
Just looking at the car made me feel worse. Turning my back on it, I stretched experimentally; I had been lying on my revolver all night, too besotted to move. A dead feeling pervaded me. Not only was I alone and among strangers, I hardly knew myself.
There was a movement at one of the bungalows. A figure appeared on a verandah and beckoned. When the gesture was complete, he still stood there, hand in air. As I moved slowly in his direction, another man came out of the bungalow and stood looking grimly ahead. They waited for me side by side.
They were young and Dutch. It crossed my mind that I had seen one of them before somewhere, but they conformed very much to a pattern, being tall, fair, tanned, dressed in jungle greens, stern, alert. When I reached them, one said, ‘Hello again.’ The other shook my hand and said, ‘Jan de Zwaan.’ He gave me a tin mug of coffee.
Letting slip the moment in which I could appropriately have said something in reply, I was condemned to silence. I drank. Sweet disgusting liquid seeped through all the furry obstructions in my mouth and throat, and coursed down into my stomach. The novel and, on the whole, welcome illusion of being alive overcame me. I let out a sly fart which immediately poisoned the air. The two grim young men did not twitch a muscle. Necessity was at work: I squeezed out a second fart, repressing the guilty smile on my face.
As I finished the coffee and returned the piyala, de Zwaan picked up something from behind him and swung it from one finger. It was a Jap aviator’s leather cap. ‘Okay, we go,’ he said.
He and the other man moved forward, and I fell in beside them. It would be a relief to get back to the billet.
Parked under linden trees was an old battered army truck. At a sign from de Zwaan, the three of us climbed into the cab. When the engine started, I looked out anxiously, expecting everyone to wake in their bungalows and curse us for murdering sleep. Nothing stirred.
Bumping slowly forward, we arrived at the gates. A guard came up smartly to let us out, and followed us with his red-rimmed eyes as we drove through the entrance. Oh yes, I thought, this was where Raddle threw up, bless her, and I looked for the place in the grass. But the dholes and hyenas would have cleaned it up. Besides, the episode belonged to an earlier stretch of history.
We moved down the road at a fair rate. Already day had dawned. This was the brief hour of spring. Natives in wicker hats guided bullock-carts or moved among the fields. Palms dwarfed their grouped figures. Over everything lay a faint mist, with radiance at work behind it. Vague in the distance were Sumatra’s high mountains.
At the next crossroads, a figure was awaiting us, a carbine slung over his shoulder. We stopped. He climbed in beside us, which made for a crowded cab. It was Ernst Sontrop.
De Zwaan, who was driving, turned down a narrow cart-track with palm trees on either side. We roared up to a bullock-cart. De Zwaan hooted madly, and the driver and his wife pulled their creaking contraption over into the ditch to let us by.
Sontrop was talkative. ‘Hendrick Nieuwenhuis and Jan de Zwaan say that they wish they spoke English a little more. But that will not spoil our morning’s enjoyment. We come in this truck in preference to my car because of the rough nature of the ground.’
This hardly needed explanation. We had left the lane and were, as far as I could tell, driving fast over a herd of dead camels. The sun was rising in majesty over the world, the mists evaporating. Close at hand, the genuine jungle gleamed, dense, metallic, inviting.
We hit another track. It led us through a burnt-out village. Green things were pushing up everywhere through blackened remains. A few pigs ran squealing into the bush at our approach. Not a hut was left standing. ‘This was once a Batak kampong or village,’ said Sontrop. ‘Nippon burned it all down to the ground.’
A river lay at the end of the village. We followed another track, which ran beside the river for a while and then led into jungle. We stopped. We jumped out.
Drink plays terrible tricks. Only then did I remember the invitation to shoot crocodiles. They were not driving me back to the billet. They were taking me to piss around shooting crocodiles, of all insane Netherlandish schemes. I began looking round anxiously for cohorts of the Indonesian army about to break cover and shoot us up. Everyone said that the Dutch were mad – now I knew it.
The three of them went on methodically behaving as if they were sane and owned the shooting rights of the entire island. Hendrick Nieuwenhuis methodically coiled rope round his body, Jan de Zwaan broke open a wooden chest and issued Hendrick, me, and himself with carbines.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Bang, bang.’ He grinned.
His sudden change of expression made me realise that both he and Hendrick, if I had them in the right order, were probably a year or two younger than I. He put the Jap aviator’s helmet on his head, buckling it under his chin.
Nieuwenhuis had a parang or native chopping knife. With a few expert lops, he cut branches off nearby trees and arranged them over the truck so that it was concealed from casual view.
‘How long is this expedition going to take?’ I asked Ernst.
‘Just a morning’s fun. We must return in Medan at one o’clock. Then we must make a convoy to drive to Belawan, so that our Dutch people get safely to board the Van Heutsz this afternoon.’
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nbsp; He nodded affirmatively as he mentioned the fabulous ship on which so many destinies depended.
We set off in single file through the jungle.
Green things surrounded us. Tall trees rose everywhere, their trunks unpunctuated by any branch until they erupted into foliage. Their bases were hidden by varied bush. Each growing thing flourished in its set place according to rank, like soldiers in an army, from the humble privates beneath our feet to the lofty generals and field-marshals far overhead. The whole parade formed a gigantic organism of light and shade.
In the high canopy, birds flitted. In the undergrowth, mousy things scuttled. In the space between, against the gigantic bars of the tree trunks, were draped creepers as thick and hairy as my arm. We moved slowly through this rain forest, more marvellous than any cathedral. As in a cathedral, our senses were caught by the paradox of space and enclosure.
The track twisted where it would, and we had to follow it. We were in the jungle for twenty minutes. I had wound the more reliable of my watches, setting it at eight o’clock when we left the truck. At eight-twenty, we emerged by the river again. Here it was wide and still, more like a pool than a stream. The far bank rose steeply, perhaps a hundred yards from where we stood. The pale stems of the forest were reflected in the tall water. Some trees had been felled, their crowns lying in the water. There was nobody about.
Nor was there anyone on our side of the river. All was silent under the sun. I saw no sign of any crocodile, and wondered what it would feel like to shoot one. Now that my system was functioning again, and the last whiskers of Black Tartan Wombat vanquished, I recalled Hendrick’s statement of the previous evening – ‘It’s just like shooting people.’
In the clearing, some way ahead of us, stood a concrete go-down. Near it was a concrete ramp with a jetty which stood out into the dark waters of the river. Ernst Sontrop put two fingers to his mouth and whistled.
An old brown man in a sarong appeared, smoking a cheroot. He gave a single gesture.
‘He’s Iwa,’ said Sontrop. ‘We can trust Iwa. He works as foreman on my father estates since many years.’
We went forward. Each of us shook hands with the old man, who performed the ceremony awkwardly, bowing as he did so. Little was said. We walked towards the jetty. The general air of desolation was emphasised by a small boat which had sunk or had been sunk against the jetty. The river was so shallow by the bank that the superstructure of the boat remained above water. Weeds grew on its roof and deck.
Moored at the jetty was another smaller boat, a worn but still serviceable launch, its peeling grey paint lending it a military air. A muttered consultation with Iwa, then we climbed in. Jan de Zwaan bent over the engine and tugged the starter cord. After a couple of tries, the motor caught, purring silently. Iwa unhitched a rope from an iron peg and we began to move downstream. The native stood on the bank, motionless as he watched us go.
Our situation appeared very exposed. I copied the others in crouching low in the boat. The river wound and we turned with it, Jan steering and keeping us close to the left bank. We passed a riverside village on the opposite bank, where pigs rooted under the houses while naked brown kids splashed and yelled in the shallows. Gradually, the character of our surroundings changed. The jungle gave way to mangrove; the river became more labyrinthine, the banks mere stretches of mud, and the water a dull grey colour.
Hendrick pointed to three crocodiles lying dormant on a nearby bank. I made to lift my carbine, but he restrained me.
‘All the coast is swampy,’ said Sontrop. ‘The tide comes up here, but we have now the low tide. Our Sumatra crocodiles like to swim sometimes in the sea. Before the war, they have been almost extinct, but now they breed more. The Japs give them some human bodies to eat, I think.’
Assuming that this was merely a rather unpleasant pleasantry, I smiled and said, ‘How many are we going to shoot?’
Sontrop held up two fingers.
‘We shoot only two. That’s sufficient. The sound of our shots will make people interested who should not be interested. We pick up the bodies if we can, because of their value, and then we hurry fast back to the go-down and to safety.’ He gave a grunt of laughter.
I asked the obvious question.
‘You shoot one, Horatio, because you are our guest to Sumatra and our honoured friend. Jan also shoots one because this afternoon he must leave on the Van Heutsz. Who knows, he may never get the chance to come back to the tropics. It’s sort of his farewell. Okay?
‘Listen, you shoot just into the eye of the beast – between the eye is no good, because the skull is so thick. You can have one shot only. If you miss, then Hendrick may have a quick shot. If he misses, then I may have a quick shot. But it must be immediate. After, we have to get home fast. You understand? Bandits about …’
‘Bandits’ I liked.
Nothing more needed to be said. As the launch chugged quietly forward, the grandeur of the forest gave way to a meaner growth of mangroves, and the confusions of a mangrove swamp, where birds darted for cover among the exposed roots. Dark water gargled round the base of every tree. Occasionally, we moved past long strips of land covered with flowers. Somewhere not too far ahead was the strait. We were already at its margins; the transition from land to sea was a stealthy one.
Through the mangrove maze we moved. De Zwaan crouched over the wheel, alert in his absurd helmet. He pointed ahead towards a more considerable island emerging among the trees. On it stood a hut with curving eaves, balanced on stilts. Some banana trees grew beside it. As we drew nearer, I saw that there was also a timber wharf or pier, which had collapsed into the water.
The island broke the canopy of mangroves. Sun shone in, lighting the water, bathing the small island. It bathed, too, the bodies of half a dozen crocodiles, which lay basking on the strip of shore like war canoes, ready for launch.
De Zwaan cut the engine.
We drifted forward slowly and silently. Apart from a slight watery accompaniment, we moved to the buzz of a million flies. Sontrop clutched my arm and spoke into my ear.
‘Wait to shoot. I will make a sign. First shot for Jan. Then you, immediately next, understand. Fine beast, the Sumatran crocodile of the estuaries.’
Nodding sternly and pointing, he levelled the muzzle of his gun over the prow. I followed suit, aware of my heart hammering inside my sweaty shirt. It’s just like shooting people. The crocodiles looked more like six turds than six people.
I estimated that de Zwaan would aim for the nearest beast. I marked out the second in line, but was too experienced to aim before necessary; in the tropics, sweat and heat blur a marksman’s sight almost at once.
The croc was perhaps twice the length of a man. It was hard to judge size from where we crouched. Staring at it across a decreasing stretch of water, in which the sunlit banana trees and hut were darkly reflected, I saw its eyes open. My grip on the carbine tightened. The croc’s eyes were yellow like a cat’s, the colour of fresh-fallen jungle leaves.
We were gliding, not directly at the bank, but tangentially, so that – I presumed – we would not be directly in their path if they launched themselves into the water.
Birds hopped about the crocodiles, perching cheekily on their long skulls. The distance between us and them narrowed still further. Flies buzzed. The mud gave off a sickly sweet stench like dying hyacinths.
Jan fired. The surprise of it paralysed me. ‘Now!’ yelled Sontrop. I was immobilised.
The crocs were already on the move. I fired at them at random, twice. Sontrop and Nieuwenhuis both stood up in the boat and blazed away. Full of excitement and some fury at myself, I took careful aim. My sights followed the second reptile as he scuttled down his stretch of shore. I fired, carrying through the movement. I hit him just behind his right eye as he struck the water. He jerked upwards, then disappeared beneath the surface.
A terrible thrashing took place. More than one croc had been hit. The water churned madly, blood and leaves being thrown up paraboli
cally, in the path of lashing tails. On the mudflat, one croc lay unmoving.
The racket of our shooting filled the whole world. Birds and waterfowl rose up everywhere, screaming in protest, wheeling about and breaking free into the upper air beyond the trees, even before the last reverberations of our fire had rattled into the distance.
Jan was standing up calling in excitement, hugging Ernst. Hendrick had the steering wheel. He started the engine, cut it again, and we glided in. The bottom of the launch bumped against mud. We all jumped ashore. I got a boot full of cold black ooze. Ahead stood the hut, utterly deserted. A patch of maize grew by its broken steps. A large crab scuttled away and sank under the water, bubbling.
Putting his carbine to the unmoving croc’s skull, Jan squeezed the trigger. The reptile gave an enormous heave and lay still. I was amazed to find myself so close to the creature. Hendrick unwound his rope and started to secure the beast behind its front legs.
‘Do we tow it?’ I asked.
‘No. Other crocs eat him. Put him in the boat with us.’
As we tied it up, I looked across the black waters behind us, listening to their endless slurp among the mangroves. The surface was still. Silence returned.
With some effort, we heaved the poor bloody thing, broken skull and all, into the boat. It lay belly upwards. We sat on it, and Jan passed round a flask of genever from which we all swigged heartily, grinning at each other in triumph.
Hendrick clapped me on the back. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good fun!’
‘Great,’ I said. I laughed, feeling my heart bound in my chest.
We were wet and filthy. The crocodile was covered with mud, and so was the old grey boat. Jan went over to the engine, starting it as Hendrick and I jumped out and pushed the bow free of the mud-spit. Once we were aboard again, the boat made a wide curve and started back among the mangroves. The island with its derelict hut fell away behind.