THE BUTCHERBIRD, or shrike, of Indonesia, is known to kill other birds. It will hang its victims on thorns or even wire hooks. Once the victim is hanging there, the butcherbird can use its beak, its feet not being strong enough to break up the meat. The butcher-1 4 4
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bird is forgetful, though. It will leave its victim hanging there for days sometimes, and you may come upon the sight if you are on your way up toward your new home in Sindanglaja. Years later you may learn that if you say Bouchardon, over and over again, you could be saying, really, instead, Butcherbird, butcherbird, butcherbird, and you are reminded all over again how a dead bird hanging from a sharp broken branch made your daughter scream, which at first you thought was the sound of a shaggy macaque, the one you had just seen, or the long-tailed crested langur, which you had never seen but heard lived nearby.
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T H E G I B B O N
THE TRAIL WE TOOK crossed wide muddy rice paddies that shimmered in the morning sunlight and behind the muddy rice paddies rose the looming shapes of lavender mountains. Underfoot, lizards raced through the underbrush and up and up one of the lavender mountains we climbed until MacLeod stopped in front of us.
We’re here, he said. So this was Sindanglaja. First MacLeod checked the house while Non and Hijau and I waited outside in a light bath of pink from a sunset that had just slipped below the horizon. In the house we could hear MacLeod. He was turning over the furniture that came with the house, he was turning over a couch, he was flipping over a mattress, he was pulling out drawers, searching, I knew, for what might be there, crawling or slithering or lying in wait for us.
Non wanted to go in. I want to see the new house, she cried.
MacLeod stuck his head out the window. Not yet, wait, he said, I’m still searching. He lit a lantern. We could see him as he went, the lantern’s light traveling from room to room like a restless spirit or a ghost, as if the house were haunted, yet it was the one thing MacLeod could not stomp on and squish with his 1 4 6
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heel or swat with a rolled-up newspaper or carry outdoors at arm’s length on the end of a stick and protect us from because he himself was the ghost.
I did not want to go in. I could have stayed outdoors forever in the cool evening watching the pink sky fade to black, because then the stars seemed to come in, and I felt that was the right way to say it, that the stars came in instead of came out. Like guests coming in through the door, they came in, first slowly, one at a time, and then suddenly all at once they seemed to be there, filling up the room that once was just empty sky.
Finally, MacLeod let us in. The house looked ransacked. It looked as though gibbons had gone through everything. The mattresses he had flipped were half lying on the floor, the drawers were pulled out all the way and lay stacked unevenly on the kitchen countertops, the cupboard doors were flung open, furniture was pushed away from the walls, and it looked as if tables and chairs and the couch were all gravitating together by some unseen force toward the center of the room, where they would do what? Converse? Recount the news of the week?
You clean it up, MacLeod said to me. I’ll check the garden, he said.
After I put everything back in its place and Hijau put Non to bed, I hunted through one of my trunks and found one of our hammocks. I went outside and strung it between two trees that had gray spikes growing up and down their trunks, shaped, I thought, like the horns of a rhino. I thought the spikes might protect me, they might just stop a wild babi or a rat or a snake from making its way up to me in my sleep. Before I went to sleep in the hammock, I passed by MacLeod’s room. He slept on a 1 4 7
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bed he had not bothered to make and lay on the striped ticking, still clothed, with a gun by his side, its barrel running down the length of his leg.
In the morning, when the stars were gone, there was nothing to see but mist and I thought for a moment maybe it wasn’t mist, but smoke from a fire raging down the hillside and it would be only a matter of time before we would all be burnt alive. When the mist disappeared I could see down below, I could see everywhere. Was that Dr. VanVoort’s plantation? I thought. Was that him, even, walking a little sideways, walking as if the ground beneath him were tilted?
When I heard the shot I ran into the house and while I was running I thought, This is it, MacLeod has killed himself because he’s realized how depressing it is to be retired. I ran first to Non and told Hijau to keep her in her room. But when I got to the bedroom where MacLeod was, he was grinning.
I got one! he said.
I could see the gibbon from where I was. It was still alive. It held its white hand over its wound on its shoulder and then took its white hand away and looked at the blood that had stained it.
Then it looked up into the trees, it looked all around. It looked up at us standing in the window. Its gaze was on me, not on MacLeod.
Kill him, I said. He’s in pain.
That was a damn good shot I made, MacLeod said, still
grinning.
I grabbed the gun from him. He let me have it easily. He knew I was a bad shot. I was. I shot things by mistake. I shot the trees.
I shot the dirt. I shot holes through huge banana leaves and I shot flower blossoms whose petals exploded after the bullets struck 1 4 8
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and the petals floated in the air before falling to the ground or they sailed off, some sailing in the direction of the gibbon who now had one white hand holding its wound and the other hand on its head, protecting itself, I thought, from the flower petals that were falling from the sky.
MacLeod then took the gun from me and reloaded. He lifted the gun and aimed with one shot to the head, which killed the gibbon.
If you’re such a good shot, I said, why didn’t your first bullet do what this bullet did?
I didn’t shoot to kill, he said.
You meant to watch him die? I said, but I already knew that the answer was yes. It was sport to MacLeod and he took aim again, looking for something else to shoot. He moved the gun from tree to tree, from place to place, from ground to sky, and if the gun were a pen, I thought, the writing would look like Ns and Ws and Ms, written on top of one another, crisscrossing and overlapping, the written language my husband spoke.
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T H E N E ST S O F T H E S W I F T S
THE NEXT TIME I saw Dr. VanVoort was when I went back to our old house to pick up the rest of our belongings. A servant named Kulon from Sindanglaja came with me to help. Kulon was walking in and out of the house, taking trips to load what was left.
I heard footsteps behind me, and I said, Kulon, take those next, and I pointed to a stack of my folded eyelet linen. There was no voice that answered, only an embrace from behind, and I knew who it was by the smell of his cigarettes and his hair that smelled like the sun was in it, and the faint smell of gin and coffee on his skin. I turned to face him and we kissed and then pulled away.
Kulon had come into the room. Kulon took the eyelet linen and Dr. VanVoort said to me, It’s time to go.
Where are we going? I asked.
The sea.
But MacLeod is expecting me back tonight.
Will he really be there when you get back tonight? Dr. VanVoort said.
No, I thought to myself. Since we’d been at Sindanglaja, he had quickly found the local brothel, and his days of retirement seemed to stretch out long before him, filled only with lazing 1 5 0
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about during the day in the cooler air of the mountains and some visits at night with whores to warm his blood.
I told Kulon to wait. I told him if I did not return in a few hours, then he was to meet me at the house in the morning, and that’s when we would head back up the lav
ender mountain and return to Sindanglaja.
Mengerti? I said, wanting to be sure Kulon understood the plan.
Mengerti, Kulon answered, and he nodded and sat against the trunk of a kapok tree, between the roots, which were as high as his shoulders and looked like great gray arms folding around him.
Dr. VanVoort and I took a trail that at first was thin and then it widened and it led over rocky beaches to where rough waves and jagged cliffs raked the sky. On the cliff faces, black flocks of swifts flew in and out over the spray of the pitching waves. Dr.
VanVoort told me how the swifts’ nests were made, how they were formed by a glutinous mixture of swifts’ saliva and hung on the sheer walls of the caves in the cliffs. If one were able to search the bottom of the sea and sift through the sand, one might find the bones of men who had tried to climb the cliffs and enter the caves to capture the nests. Sold for a high price at the market, the nests were a delicacy used to make soup. But some men failed to pick the nests off the cliffs, and they lost their footing, falling into the sea amid the crashing waves.
We walked to a sandy stretch of beach rimmed by coves where angelfish and parrotfish swam in the water but seemed to cease the gentle fluttering of their tails and fins when we came close to watch them. On the smooth shoreline we came across a dead 1 5 1
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sea snake that had washed up on the sand, its body banded and its head marked with a horseshoe shape on the crown. It didn’t bring him much luck, Dr. VanVoort said, meaning the horseshoe on his head, and he picked up the dead sea snake and tossed it into the water.
Have you thought about what we’re going to do? Dr. VanVoort said, brushing his hands together, wiping them of sand. Will you come back to Holland with me?
I don’t know about Holland, I said. I was thinking about places I hadn’t been. I was thinking about France, about Paris, which was supposed to be beautiful. Non would love it there too.
The ballet was there. Artists lived there. Great thinkers had come from there. It seemed like a magical place. Even though it didn’t have the natural beauty of Java, it had the natural beauty of its architecture and its people, whose minds dashed and darted from one idea to the next, unlike here where the only things that dashed and darted were things underfoot and the people’s minds seemed to move as slowly as the fog that hung continually to the base of the mountains.
So you’ll do it then, you’ll leave him? he asked.
No, I don’t think so, I said. I was scared to leave him. Scared that if I did, then he’d never let me have Non, he’d want to keep her from me. He’d arrange it legally so that I’d never see her again, and he would take custody of her, and that was a nightmare I had had one too many times, where I woke in such a sweat that I swear I could have floated away in the salty bath of myself as it pooled beneath my body on the sheets.
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A ST E W
IF YOU WANT to be a good wife to a bad husband, you sleep with your lover, Dr. VanVoort, one last time and make love on the sand in the dying light while overhead bats as large as foxes fly by. In the morning you wake your servant, Kulon, who has fallen asleep exactly where you left him in the gray roots like arms of the kapok tree and you go on back up the trail to your lavender mountain carting your eyelet linen behind you and two silver salt and pepper shakers, dome-shaped on top, and a fleur-de-lis-framed watercolor painting of a sandy brown castle somewhere on a hill in a Western world. You get back to your husband and you ask him if he’s ever been to Paris, and you ask him if he’d like to go. You tell him your daughter would have the best teachers there. You tell him they could drink fine wine instead of the island wine they drink here, which he would sometimes throw across the room in disgust so that it would splash in an arc on the woven mats on the floor. You tell him he’s too young to spend the rest of his days in a fog-ridden mountain surrounded by shriek-ing monyets and hairy-chested white-handed gibbons. You wear him down.
You show him pictures from newspapers you’ve clipped and 1 5 3
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traded with other wives of retired officers whose homes dot this side of the lavender mountains.
Point to the Arc de Triomphe, tap your finger on the flying buttresses of Notre Dame, have him picture himself and their daughter playing hide-and-seek behind trees in the chestnut groves in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Show him pictures of beautiful women, ask him if he’s seen the likes of any such women here, on the island, where all the women’s skin exudes the cloy-ing smell of nasi goreng and not the smell of fine perfume. Tell him there are conversations with intellectuals he could have there but that he’ll never have here if he stays. Tell him how impressed those intellectuals would be with his own clever thoughts, that here they simply fall on the wooden ears of servants and other aging officers falling asleep over their meals, upsetting their soup bowls and staining their shirtfronts.
Ask him to listen for a moment. Ask if he hears the sound of other children, because you know he doesn’t. There’s no one here for Non to play with. She’s in the kitchen again, helping the Hunchback of Java, Hijau, the servant. They’re plucking feathers off a freshly killed hen.
Then like the tide, recede a bit. Don’t talk of Paris for days.
Talk only of the rains that have come. Ask if he can see his hand in front of his face. Ask if his head doesn’t hurt from the pounding drops. Ask if his toes and his soles are not itching, his skin waterlogged and flaking, his heels spotted with angry red sores that at night drive him to scratching so hard flecks of blood are left on the sheets in the morning at the foot of the bed. Say you notice he’s taken to not wearing shoes. Ask if that’s because with the rains his shoes are never dry and every time he puts them on it’s like putting on a shoe he’s pulled up from the sea. Say he now 1 5 4
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reminds you of an islander and some day you won’t be surprised to catch him in a sarong, eating with his fingers, sitting cross-legged on the floor and dangling a wayang kulit puppet from his fingers, casting a shadow play on a sheet nailed to a bamboo wall. When he tells you to shut up, then shut up. Remind yourself that his head is like a cooking pot and all that you’ve said is like meat and vegetables and spices, a pinch of this, a pinch of that.
He will simmer. He will stew in his own good time. Remember that a watched MacLeod never boils, and walk away.
Don’t be surprised when days later, when it is of course still raining, when the dirt at the mountaintop is so loose and drenched that the weight of each raindrop is sending dirt down in great slides, and you think how your house will be next to careen down the lavender mountain, leaving a swath of a slippery trail, when Non is still in the kitchen helping Hijau pound rice, when what could be the sounds of other children playing outdoors is the sound of the monyets and gibbons, a long-tailed lemur — don’t be surprised when MacLeod, standing at a window with his back to you, tells you to pack your goddamned things, that you’ve gotten your way, you bitch.
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S O U V E N I R S F R O M T H E I S L A N D
My dear sister Louise, wrote MacLeod.
It is with great pleasure that I inform you that we are leaving Java for good and going back home. It will be best for Non. She will be able to have a quality education and playmates her age. If only her brother were going with us too.
We, of course, will stay with you, if that’s all right, before we find a place of our own. Margaretha has not been able to keep quiet about moving to Paris and she thinks that’s where we will eventually move. I have not told her yet that it is very unlikely I will raise my daughter there and that growing up in The Hague, close to you, is the more ideal and practical solution.
Let me know if there are any souvenirs you desire from the island. We set sail in six weeks.
Sincerely,
Your brother Rudolph
&n
bsp; My dear brother,
This is most heartening news! I knew that you would someday come home. I am very much looking forward to 1 5 6
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seeing Non. I promise you that I will take care of her as if she were my own daughter. You may stay with me as long as you’d like, you have an open invitation. I know that your pension is not a generous one and it would only be prudent of you to try and save money first before renting a place of your own.
As for your wife, I will not whisper a word to her of what your true intentions are. I will play along with your ruse of someday moving to Paris because I know how the-atrical and difficult she can be if she doesn’t think she is having her way.
As for a souvenir, there is nothing I want from that primitive island that I don’t already have here. You and Non will be my souvenirs, so crate and pad yourselves with plenty of straw for the voyage so that you may return to me safely!
Your sister,
Louise
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SHE WAS HOT in Bouchardon’s office because all of Paris was hot. The Seine, some said, was steaming with the heat, and cats were seen panting, their eyes closed to slits, their chests working hard as they lay trying to keep cool in stone-floored doorways. Bakers cursed, the doughs contrary in the weather, and sunken loaves were thrown out back doors, where gatherings of birds fought for turns pecking. The palm reader was busy. It seemed all that people had the energy to do was sit, but their palms were wet and the palm reader kept a cloth at the ready to keep customers’ lines dry and to keep their futures from filling with sweat.
Bouchardon’s window was open, but it was the only win-
dow in the office and no cross breeze came through. The pigeon wasn’t there and she wished it was, thinking its sudden bursts of fluttering wings would create at least some kind of stir in the air.
Signed, Mata Hari Page 11