A mynah bird stared at us from a branch and then flew off and a kingfisher soon took its place. MacLeod pointed out a footprint and then pointed to the wooded shadows. Jungle cat, he said, spotted and black leopards and civets abound here, he said.
They’ll attack a human without a moment’s hesitation, he said, especially a young boy. Isn’t that right, Tekul? he said to one of the Javanese men holding our water. Tekul nodded and smiled.
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Yes, sir, he said, and then he handed MacLeod the skin of water again.
No, I’m finished with the goddamned water, you idiot, he said. The cats, I’m talking about the cats, he said. They’ll kill you, won’t they? Tell my wife how they’ll kill you in an instant, MacLeod said.
Tekul nodded again. Yes, ma’am, he said. If you ever see a cat, you run, he said.
Have you ever seen one? I asked him.
No, no one ever sees the cats, he said. They see you first, they run first, Tekul said.
Then I guess I don’t have much to worry about with the cats, I said.
Don’t listen to him, MacLeod said. What does he know, the locals are imbeciles, that’s the first thing you should learn. The cats are probably watching us right now, getting ready to attack.
Let’s get to the hut already, he said.
IT DIDN’T take me long before I loved the hut we called home but that MacLeod always referred to as the hut. I would take my shoes off before climbing the steps made of cleaved bamboo shafts and I would walk across the cool straw mats whose faint smell of straw was warm and rich and I would breathe in deeply, smelling also the spicy sambal and nasi goreng that Tekul’s wife, Kidul, would be cooking in the kitchen.
Norman was with Kidul. He was playing with a leather wayang puppet on the floor one day while Kidul fried rice for the nasi goreng and said to Norman, I will now tell you the story of the ogre who made the volcano. I stood in the doorway of the kitchen, watching my son and listening to Kidul’s story too.
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The ogre lived in the central plateau, which was ruled by a king who had a beautiful daughter. When the ogre set eyes on the daughter, he fell deeply in love. The king did not want his daughter to marry the horrible creature. But what could he do? If he said no to the terrible ogre, the ogre might destroy his kingdom.
The king decided to challenge the ogre to see how strong he was and to see if he was worthy of his daughter. I challenge you to carve a deep valley by dawn with only half a coconut shell, the king told the ogre. The king imagined the task would be too hard for the ogre to complete, but the ogre was a fast worker, and as the night progressed it looked as though the ogre would complete the task. What can I do? said the king to himself.
The king became very worried. I will not have my daughter marry that terrible ogre! He called together his servants at mid-night. Pound the rice now! he ordered, which is what the servants always did each morning at sunrise. The king knew that the sound of the servants pounding the rice would excite the roosters and make them crow, because they knew that when the sound of the rice being pounded began, then the sun would soon rise.
The ogre, busy at work with his half a coconut shell, heard the roosters crowing. It must be dawn. I have failed! I will never marry the king’s beautiful daughter now! he cried in anger and then stormed off, throwing down his coconut shell on the ground, whose shape became a volcano, and then he jumped into the flames blazing from its crater.
Look out the window, Kidul said, and what you see is his coconut shell turned upside down. That is our volcano, she said. And the foul smell at the top of the volcano comes from the ogre’s body that continues to burn in the crater.
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B E T W E E N L I N E S
NO REPLY CAME from the Dutch consulate or from her daughter. But she was used to her daughter not responding. She knew MacLeod had never shown her daughter the letters she sent. Here in prison, though, she was left to believe that her letters were never mailed, that they were sitting opened on Bouchardon’s desk. He now knew the tale of the ogre too, because that is what she wrote to her daughter about, asking her if she remembered the tale, and she told it to her again in case she didn’t only because she liked the tale and she liked thinking about her daughter and Norman before Norman died, and she wanted her daughter to remember her brother the way she remembered him, playing with a wayang kulit puppet and casting shadows on the wall with it while he told Kidul’s stories from the island or stories he would make up himself. Bouchardon most likely held the letters up to the lamp, looking between the lines for signs of secret ink she might have used. Perhaps there was something in tears that could act like invisible ink, because all that ended up between the lines on the pages to her daughter were tears she did not catch in time after they fell from her eyes and onto a page about an ogre, a king, and a beautiful daughter.
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N OT A N E W B E G I N N I N G
MAc L EOD WAS HARDLY HOME and when he was home he was busy searching the house. He was out on the balcony, moving aside great potted plants of bougainvillea and lotus and rubber trees whose paddle-shaped leaves draped heavily over his balding head as he knelt and slid the pot aside, searching for hidden scorpions or a poisonous naga curled at the ceramic base.
After he had decided the house was safe, he would play with Norman. He liked showing Norman how to march and how to hold a gun. You can be just like Papa, he told Norman. But once Norman pulled, from the back of his pants, a kris dagger Tekul had carved for him out of the root of a mangrove. This is much better than a gun, Norman told MacLeod. My kris dagger is magic and can kill thieves without me. It can even stop giant waves from forming in the sea and it can stop lava flowing from volcanoes! MacLeod took the carved dagger from Norm’s hands and broke it on the balcony’s wooden railing. He then threw the pieces off into the garden, where they fell on jasmine flowers, snapping off their blossoms. Their scent drifted up to where we stood on the balcony and where MacLeod was now telling me it was all my fault and that I never should have let the servants tell the boy such stories. Poor Norman cried at the sight of his 3 5
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broken kris dagger and so I tried to glue it back together for him, but the glue would not hold and I cursed it and held Norman in my arms and told him I could do what the kris dagger could do.
I would kill thieves for him, I would stop giant waves for him, and I would stop lava from flowing, and Norman asked me how I could do all that and I told him that when you love someone as much as I loved him, these things were possible, and he laughed and said I could not do all that and I said that I felt that I could.
From the other room, MacLeod called out, Don’t listen to your mother’s stories, son, she can’t do all those things.
One day I walked into the shops in town that sold dresses made in the Netherlands. They hung in solid dark colors on their hangers and I looked through all of them, but what caught my eye wasn’t hanging in a shop. It was what I saw on the island women walking down the street. Their bright silk sarongs, covered in designs of flowers whose petals seemed to burst from the cloth, were more beautiful than any dresses I had ever seen. Wearing a sarong got looks from other officers’ wives, who told me they could not imagine wearing something so garish and loud. I wore the sarongs every day and the silk cloth whispered as I walked and a quiet breeze stirred and reached up, awakening something between my legs.
When I walked down the path, the silver leaf monkeys shrieked loudly and swung from vine to vine, following me as I went.
Kidul showed me how she could tear the skin off a mango with her teeth and took me to a cave where bats hung upside down and covered the rock wall and ceiling so that the cave seemed to be made of bats and not of stone at all. When rats crossed our path, Kidul pointed out that they were not a
s fat and their tails 3 6
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not as long as the twenty-five rats Tekul had caught and given to Kidul’s father on the day of their marriage.
Rats were your dowry? I said, and when I told Kidul that there had been no dowry for my father at my marriage, Kidul lowered her eyes and shook her head and then she suddenly lifted up her head and her dark eyes shone, and she said, Tekul is still a good rat catcher and I know he can catch at least twenty-five again and he could give them to your father! And then I made Kidul laugh, telling her how the officers’ wives would shriek like the silver leaf monkeys if they had to sail back home with twenty-five fat, long-tailed island rats. Then Kidul showed me how to braid my hair and weave in the pink and white blossoms that lay on the forest floor.
MacLeod sometimes came to me late at night after he had been at the officers’ club or with island women he bought by the hour. I sat up in bed, ready when he came, but I think he would have liked it better if I were asleep or if I were angry at him or if I at least told him no or tried to push him off. I tried to enjoy myself, I tried to please MacLeod. Fat, old Heer Wybrandus from the school in the Netherlands had been a good teacher. I knew what to do, but afterward MacLeod would say that I was no more than a whore. Sometimes he would take my sarong and rip it in half and then in quarters and throw it at me while I lay in bed after our exertions, not being able to tell if it was my sweat drying on my skin or his. Then he would go into the living room and sleep on the bamboo couch, which was too short for him, and in the early morning hours I could hear the creak of bamboo as he pushed his feet against the couch’s arm, trying to make himself fit. Then, in the heat of the dark-3 7
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ness with a lotus as large as the moon growing out my window, I thought of my walk across the cold sand sea to Ameland, and I knew that Java was not the new beginning for MacLeod and me that I had dreamed it could be.
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B E I N G S I VA
THERE WAS a mirror in my room where I could see the length of my body. I could see my long legs and my firm arms and my flat belly and my small breasts. Sometimes Kidul came in to help me tie my sarong and I stood with her in front of the mirror and she stood hidden behind me and with all our four arms we pretended we were Siva and she showed me how to dance with flattened palms uplifted toward the sun. Then we used the tips of our fingers to eat and Norman said he would tell on us, he would tell Papa I was behaving like a savage girl. He came at me with his little fists and hit my head and pulled my hair and the pink and white flower petals fell from the braids. I held him tight and would not let him hit me anymore and he rolled back and forth in my arms, trying to set himself free while flower petals still fell from my hair and onto his face and into his eyes.
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C R O S S I N G T H R O U G H P U D D L E S
THE MORE M ACL EOD DRANK, the more she learned what there was to learn from the island and the more she wore her sarongs, drank jasmine tea, and ate nasi goreng with her fingertips, the more MacLeod was found on the sides of dusty roads with his uniform dirty and his hat on the ground beside him and butterflies landing and spreading flat their wings and sunning themselves on his bald head beaded with sweat and smelling of bourbon.
Not unlike, she thought, her visits with Bouchardon. The more he didn’t talk, the more she did. The more he tapped his pencil on his pad of paper, the more she rattled off names of Germans she knew, the more he bit his nails and chewed them between his front teeth, then swallowed them, the more she told him about the lovers she had had. She told him the color of their hair and the cologne they used and the gifts they had given her, rings they bought off other women in restaurants if in passing she mentioned she liked them. She knew the make of her lovers’
overcoats, which they took off their own backs and threw over puddles so she could cross streets without wetting her shoes. She knew Bouchardon would think these were all clues to prove her guilt and she fed them to him, wondering when he would real-4 0
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ize that what she was telling him were just the memories of a middle-aged woman who once had many lovers, and they were not the memories of some coldhearted spy intent on the defeat of the Allied forces.
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T H E R A I N S
I BECAME PREGNANT with Non when the lyang-lyang grass was at its highest, and what that meant, Kidul told me, was that the rains were about to begin. The rains were like the sound of ocean waves never ceasing, or the buzz of insects never ceasing, only worse because it was rain and walking in it you did not wear thongs that could splash the water back to you high up your leg and you went barefoot instead, wading ankle-deep through floating battered palm leaves over small rocks and pebbles that skated beneath you under the soles of your feet as you went from here to there, your sarong pasted to your legs, outlining the muscles in your thighs and the bone in your kneecap and the sarong’s colors running, so at night, before bed, when you took it off, you were mottled green or blue or red from the dye and looked as though you had come from the forest, and were in the process of changing, of shedding skin or growing fur, working yourself into a primitive state so that you were the ideal camouflage creature and could sit on the forest floor and never be seen.
WHEN M ACL EOD found out, he said, It’s a boy, it better be a boy.
Who knows, I said, and I shrugged my shoulders, and he asked 4 2
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me what that was, was it some kind of gesture Kidul had taught me? Was it to conjure the gods or keep back evil spirits or raise the dead or keep the dead dead?
I said, I’d like to go to the officers’ party tonight.
What I liked about the other officers was that each one danced differently. One danced as if he were constantly afraid I was going to fall and he held me tight. Another danced as if I were something sticky he could not shake off the ends of his fingers. Still another danced as if there were something as large as a column between us. One even danced as if the floor were on fire and one danced as if he were grinding out a cigar and one danced as if he had lost a gold coin and was searching for it. Another danced as if his knees hurt, and later I learned that they did. One danced as if he wanted to make love to me, and later I learned that he did. One danced as if he had made love to me before and I had to tell him he never had and he said I just didn’t remember. One danced like a boy, and he was my Norman. I held him up in my arms and twirled around the room and kissed the backs of his baby-fat hands as he waved to his papa, who sat at the table with his chin on his chest sound asleep.
At first I spent hours watching the rain come down. Kidul or Norman or MacLeod would have to pull me away from the balcony. I could not believe that Java did not just float away. I started to believe that indeed we were floating away. How would we not know it? What was there to anchor us to always one spot in the sea? I wanted to feel the dry earth, but there was none to feel. Even the soil in the houseplants was black and spongy, as wet as if it had been raining as hard inside the house as it was outside.
Once there was a different sound to the rain. It came like a 4 3
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knock at the door and I cocked my head to listen, thinking maybe it was changing its gears, getting ready to stop, but it was what it sounded like, a soft rap at the bamboo door of my home.
It was the officer who danced as though he wanted to make love to me. The rain dripped off his hat and the rain dripped off the ends of his fingers and I watched it slide in the changing shapes of continents and landmasses off the tops of his polished black shoes onto my straw mat. He was there to let me know I could think of him as a trade.
A trade for what? I said.
A Javanese girl I saw your husband with last night, he said.
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T H E FA I R T R A D E
HE SAT on my couch, his long legs partly open as he used the towel I had handed him to wipe his hair of the rain. His eyes were different shades of green and I spent time just looking at their colors, not trying to read what he was telling me with them.
There was even yellow in his eyes. He reached across and put his hand on my leg and his thumb seemed to lead the way, traveling up toward the inside of my thigh where he said he could feel a pulse. That’s where he put his lips first after he opened up wide the slit in my sarong. His lips still felt wet from the rain.
I’m not interested, I said. My son is sleeping in his room and his nurse is with him and she sleeps lightly, I said, she’s afraid of monkey spirits taking her up in their hands and their feet and carrying her away.
I showed him to the door while he told me his name was
Willem and that he would be back, because he knew that there would be plenty more Javanese girls and that I had a ways to go before settling the score with my husband.
In the dark, in my bed alone, with the sound of the falling rain, I remembered how his lips felt on my leg and I remembered how the weight of him felt, the warm crown of his head nudging toward my pubis.
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TEKUL SOMETIMES held an umbrella over my head as I walked, while he walked with the water cascading down his face. I told him to join me under the umbrella, but he shook his head, Master MacLeod would not like that. When we arrived at a shop, Tekul would wait outside for me, holding the umbrella closed and by his side. When I left the shop, he instantly popped the umbrella open again so that I would not feel a drop of rain. Once I told him no to the umbrella and we walked back toward the house with it closed and up under Tekul’s arm. Let’s pretend it’s not raining, I told him. The rain came down in bullets. It had a force that seemed to be able to bend the tops of Tekul’s ears downward. It loosened my bun and my black hair spun out from my head and any curl that my hair had was made flat and my hair stretched down long, covering my breasts.
Signed, Mata Hari Page 3