by Vicki Baum
It was Teragia, the only wife of the beautiful Raka; she was greatly revered in the village, though she was still young and awaiting the birth of her first child. The good powers were so strong in her that many could feel them radiating from her. She had the gift of healing and of finding springs, and sometimes the divinity entered into her and spoke through her mouth. She was of high caste, as Raka, too, was, and the doctor of the village was her father and had taught her many formulas and magic prayers. She wiped the blood away from the young man’s forehead with the corner of her sarong and looking round murmured a few words to her servant who knelt beside her. The girl folded her hands in token of obedience and ran off. She quickly returned with a small basket out of which Teragia took a number of large leaves. She put them on the wounded man’s forehead, whereupon the bleeding ceased and the man opened his eyes and sighed. The women uttered exclamations of astonishment and admiration and pressed closer.
Meanwhile Njo Tok Suey had taken charge of the other newcomers. They had brought a few saturated cases with them which they put down on the beach. One of them was a Chinaman too, and he gave a few brief orders in Malay. He was clearly the master of the ship, although he was in a wretched state; his clothes were torn to rags and his chin trembled. Njo Tok Suey supported him and conducted him to the punggawa. The men of Sanur and Taman Sari crowded round, eager not to miss a word. Unfortunately the interview between the punggawa and the two Chinese was carried on in Malay. Krkek pressed forward as near as he could, and even put his hand to his ear to hear better. He translated bit by bit what the three men said for the benefit of his fellows.
“He says his name is Kwe Tik Tjiang. He says he is a merchant from Bandjarmasin. He says his ship is called Sri Kumala.”
There was some laughter at this, for they thought it funny that a ship should have a name like a person. Krkek motioned to them to keep silent so that he could hear.
“He says they anchored yesterday off Bijaung. The storm came up and beat against the ship and broke the anchor cable. He says the ship was tossed to and fro like the shell of a coconut. He says they have been in great terror. They did not think they would ever reach land alive.”
Krkek paused to listen attentively as the Chinaman raised his voice and embarked on a long sentence.
“The Chinese Kwe Tik Tjiang thanks the men for rescuing him and begs leave to retire. He is in pain and very tired,” Krkek then went on.
The crowd murmured its sympathy. The Chinaman stood a moment longer in silence, and looked at the people round him with inflamed and swollen eyes. They stared back at him, for it was not every day that they saw a shipwrecked merchant from Bandjarmasin. The Chinaman tottered as he turned to go, and Njo Tok Suey quickly gave him his support and led him away in the direction of his house.
“He looks like a dead sea-urchin,” the wag Rib said as soon as their backs were turned. There was some laughter at this and the punggawa turned round in annoyance.
“Men of Sanur and Taman Sari,” he said, “I order you to mount a guard to see that nothing is taken from the ship. Whatever is thrown up on the shore is to be stacked up here, so that the Chinese, Kwe Tik Tjiang, loses nothing. Any man who acts contrary to my orders will be severely punished and fined a heavy penalty.”
“So be it!” the men murmured obediently.
The punggawa searched the crowd with his eyes. “Where is Raka?”
he asked. Everyone turned round to look for him.
Raka was standing behind Meru, Pak’s brother, the carver, with his arms affectionately about his shoulders, resting after his exertion. The water ran from his long hair, and though he laughed he looked exhausted. The punggawa stepped up to him, followed by his servant with the indispensable umbrella. “Raka,” he said in a loud voice for all to hear, “I shall inform your exalted friend, the lord of Badung, of your gallantry and readiness. His heart will rejoice to hear a good report of you.”
The men again expressed their assent. Raka raised his clasped hands to his shoulder to thank the punggawa, who then left the beach. The crowd was already dispersing. Some had followed the Chinese to Njo Tok Suey’s house, where they now stood gaping inquisitively over the wall. Others followed the women, who took the young Javanese into the village. Pak stood irresolute. He was proud of Meru for the part he played in the rescue and for the friendly way Raka had leant upon him. Nevertheless, he resolved to warn his younger brother as soon as he got home.
“What we want now, brother,” Raka said to Meru, “is a big jar of palm wine.”
“My belly feels as cold as if I had drunk the whole sea between Bali and Lombok,” Meru replied as they went off hand in hand. Just as Pak was about to follow them, he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“You, with a few more, had better mount guard here,” Krkek said. “You are honest and sensible and I can trust you. I will send you food and firing, and perhaps I can pick out a few friends of yours to join you, and then you won’t need to be afraid of the darkness. You shall be relieved at the first hour of the day.”
Pak’s heart sank as he heard this, but Krkek was the most important man of his village and president of the water committee. He was not a man to gainsay. Even the raja had no power over the subak and had to accept its distribution of irrigation water. Nevertheless, Pak attempted a feeble excuse. “I am too tired to stay here as watchman,” he said. “My eyes will shut whether I like it or not. I was at work in the sawah since sunrise. A tired man makes a poor watchman.”
But Krkek would not listen, for it would have compromised his authority if he had revoked his order. “We have all worked in the sawah, brother,” he said mildly as he walked away. “My wall has a hole in it, big enough to let in all the demons, if I don’t mend it up before night,” Pak muttered in an aggrieved tone, but Krkek shut his ears and vanished behind the palm trees that bordered the village. Pak looked round about him. He was almost alone on the beach. There was only Sarda, and a few more with him, crouching beside his boat and chewing sirih. But they were fishermen of Sanur and used to the sea. A few of the ship’s crew were lying down about two hundred paces away. They looked strange and ill-disposed. The natives called out to the foreigners and invited them to join them, but they shook their heads and a little later got up and went away. Pak sighed. He was horribly afraid of the night. Already the sun was sinking in the west. The tide had gone out and the sand extended nearly as far as the wreck and only tiny wavelets nibbled at the shore. A group of children had waded out to the wreck, where they frolicked about with a great show of daring and kicked the water up with their feet. No more hides were floated ashore, but the smell of them pervaded the air and made the watch still more unpleasant.
Pak now felt for the first time how tired he really was. His thighs ached as he squatted beside Sarda. His eyes were haunted by all he had seen and whenever he closed them he saw the ship being battered against the reef. The sky was as green as a ripening rice-field and then as red as the gums of a child at the breast, and then darkness fell. The kulkuls in the villages announced the beginning of the night with short rapid beats.
Pak chewed sirih. His mind wandered, and his head felt empty. A long time passed in this way. Then the women, whom Krkek had sent from the village, arrived with ample supplies of food—rice and vegetables and meat roasted on spits. The light of torches shone out behind them among the palm trunks, and men came with palm wine in hollow bamboo stems. Pak was glad to drink the sweet tuak, for his throat was dry. Dasni, a Sanur girl, squatted in front of him. She had looked at him more than once at the Temple festival and the last rice harvest. She was not exactly ugly, but she had a dark dirty complexion and her breasts were too heavy. She crouched submissively before him and handed him food, gazing attentively while he chewed to see whether he enjoyed it. “I hear you have got a child,” she said. “I hope it will be strong and beautiful and like its father.”
Pak muttered a word or two in acknowledgment and after wiping his fingers threw away the empty pisang leaves. Dasni
remained where she was while the other women got ready to go. At the last moment she took something from her girdle and thrust it into Pak’s hand. Then she vanished with the others. Pak looked to see what she had given him. It was a bulb of reddish garlic. He smiled. So Dasni was anxious about him and wanted to be sure that he would be safe during his watch.
When the women had gone, the men continued discussing the day’s events as they sat on their heels round the nearly burnt-out torches and at last they began to yawn. Sarda collected broken coconut shells and driftwood and made a fire. The night was lonely, cold and perilous. Pak crossed his arms and put his hands round his shoulders to warm himself. Some of the watch had vanished and others fallen asleep. Pak stared into the darkness and his fears gained on him. He drew nearer to Sarda. After a time the fisherman fell asleep with his head on his knees and Pak succumbed also. If lejaks or evil spirits emerged now from the darkness he was defenceless. He quickly felt for the garlic in his girdle which Dasni had given him and rubbed himself all over with it, so that the smell should keep away the evil spirits, and finally stuck the rest in the bored lobe of his ear. Now he felt safer, for it was well known that the demons could not endure the smell of garlic. He gave Sarda a cautious shake, but it did not wake him, so he left him alone; it was not right to be too tough with people when they were asleep, for then their souls might not have time to return to their bodies. He felt a great longing for his sleeping bench safe within the walls of his house and for the warmth of his wife Puglug, who was good even though not beautiful, and for the little girls on the other bench. Nobody came stealing stinking fish or going off with the stranded wreck. I told Krkek, thought Pak, that my eyes would refuse to stay open; and he let them close. He dreamt of the gap in his wall and saw it mended again and better than before. He heard a great noise in his dream coming from the battered ship. He also saw men going by in the light of the watch fire and the face of the Chinese, Kwe Tik Tjiang, bent over him and his foot in a black shoe kicked against him. Pak turned unwillingly on to the other side and ceased dreaming. He heard the cocks crow and opened his eyes. The kulkul beat the last hour of the night. He thought he was at home and groped about him, but the things he touched were unfamiliar. He was chilled to the marrow and biting cold nipped his feet. It was this that woke him and he sat up. Now he recognized Sanur beach where he had been when he fell asleep. It was still dark but for a strip of greenish light where sky and water met. This was the herald of Suria, the sun-god, who would soon leave his house bringing the day with him. The tide was high again and sang with a loud voice and flung the waves up to Pak’s feet. He jumped up in terror, and looking round for the others saw that they had vanished. The fire had burnt out; there were only a few embers in which Pak warmed his hands. His limbs ached, his stomach was empty and his heart had gone small. He pondered for a minute or two and then decided to go home. Even Sarda had gone. He had his sawah to see to; that was his job—not watching over the battered ship of a Chinaman who looked like a dead fish and left the smell of dead fish behind him on the shore. The spirits had already retreated and all wandering souls had returned to every sleeper’s body. Pak felt full of courage again as he set off on his way home.
But his heart stood still when he saw a light coming over the water. His feet became as heavy as stone and he could no more move them than if he had been bewitched. He tried to remember the incantation his father had taught him when he was a child to protect him if he encountered lejaks or spirits. But his head was as empty as a pot with a hole in the bottom. The light came nearer and he heard the sound of a laden boat grating on the sand. Pak was relieved to see a man get out of the boat and come towards him with a light in his hand: it was at least nothing supernatural. It was just an ordinary lantern, a wick in the hollow of a bamboo stem, covered with a dried pisang leaf. Pak waited. At first he thought it was Sarda, but when he recognized who it was he began to feel afraid once more.
The man with the light was Bengek, the husky fisherman. He was a hideous man with a bad throat which prevented him speaking out loud, though he was not dumb. On the contrary he had a quick and bitter tongue. His mother was reputed to be a witch, with the power of turning herself into a lejak, and for that reason people avoided her son as far as possible. Yet no one dared to offend Bengek, for all feared him and his mother.
“Peace on your coming,” Pak therefore said with trembling lips, and Bengek stood still and shading the light with his hand peered into the darkness.
“Is that you, Pak?” he asked in a hoarse whisper. “Are you not on your sawah yet, you industrious neighbor?” he asked again. Pak decided not to notice the sarcasm, but to behave as though this encounter at the edge of the sea in the last hour of the night was nothing out of the common.
“Where are you coming from?” he asked therefore—the usual question on meeting anybody.
“From my mother’s house,” Bengek replied.
“Were you not on the sea? I saw your light on the water,” Pak said.
“Why do you ask, then, you clever Pak?” Bengek said.
“I was told to keep watch over the ship,” Pak said. It sounded more imposing than he had meant it to. Bengek came close up to him and shone the light in his face.
“And have you kept good watch to see that no one stole the ship and went off with it in his sirih pouch?” he asked hoarsely. Pak stood his ground in the odor of garlic and felt fairly safe.
“Had you been to the Chinaman’s ship?” he asked.
The fisherman made no answer. He turned back to the shore, where the outline of his boat grew slowly more distinct. Soon he returned with a wet box on his head as though he were a woman. As he passed Pak he remarked casually, “And if I had been to the Chinaman’s boat, what would you do then?”
Pak caught him up, for he felt his liver grow hot with anger.
“I should denounce you to the punggawa,” he said breathlessly. “No, no, my brother, you would not do that,” Bengek replied. Pak felt for the knife in his girdle, and standing in the husky fisherman’s path he commanded, “Put the box down. I must see what is in it.” “Fish I have caught,” Bengek whispered in a sing-song. He put the box down at Pak’s feet contemptuously, as though to say: I dare you to open it. Pak did in fact feel that poisonous sea-serpents and things with prickles might bite his hands as soon as he groped under the lid. “Take up the box and follow me to the punggawa,” he said all the same, trying to speak in Krkek’s authoritative manner. Bengek caught sight of the knife in Pak’s hand and squatted down beside the box. “Come, brother, let us consider the matter,” he said. “I tell you it would be very mistaken if you denounced me to the punggawa. And you know why, too.”
“Why?” Pak asked with a tremor, for he knew the answer already. “Because it would do you and your family no good. If I choose, your cow will fall sick, your fields will dry up and your children die.”
Pak raised his hands in horror and shut his eyes. He knew how Bengek and his mother got power over people and money from them by such threats and how some who had not given way had suffered for it. He did not know what to say and he wished his father was there, for he had the wisdom of the evening of life.
“You have seen me come from the sea with a basketful of fish I have caught,” Bengek said. Pak considered this and said nothing. What were the Chinese foreigner and his miserable ship to him that he should put his family in peril?
“I have seen you come from the sea with a basket of fish you have caught,” he said obediently.
Bengek laughed and caught hold of his hand to pull him down to the ground beside him. “Wait a moment,” he said. “As you are my friend I’ll show you what I have caught in my net.”
Pak could not resist his curiosity. He crouched down and watched open-mouthed while the fisherman opened the case. Bengek lifted out three bundles of seaweed from which he slowly and carefully unwrapped three plates. Then he held his lantern close to them and let Pak see the treasure in all its splendor and beauty.
What he saw was white plates with a garland of roses on them, so life-like that you felt you could take hold of them. Pak put out his forefinger and touched the flowers timidly. The plate was cold and smooth and the roses were painted or rather, in some magic way, united with the white porcelain.
Pak had seen plates before. The Chinese, Njo Tok Suey, had two hanging on the wall of his house and it was said in the village that they were worth more ringits than could be counted a thousand times over on the fingers of one hand. Plates like these were let into the base of two shrines of gods in the Temple of the Sacred Wood. And the lord of Badung had had the back wall of the large balé, where he received important guests, adorned with them. Pak had heard of them first from Meru, and then he had himself gone with many other men from Taman Sari to Badung to marvel with open mouth and round eyes at this priceless treasure. But plates like these three had never been seen by anyone in Bali.
“Have you any more?” he asked incredulously as he looked into the box.
“No,” Bengek answered, and shut down the lid. But with that one fleeting glimpse Pak had seen the gleam of silver, as though of fishes’ scales or of many ringits. Bengek lifted the case on to his head and turned to go. “The plates,” Pak called out. The fisherman did not look round or pause.
“The plates are for you because you are such a good watchman. And the fish I caught are for me,” he said, and his hoarse whisper mingled with the sound of his bare feet on the sand.
Pak stayed crouching over the plates. My soul is wandering in a dream and sees things that are not real, he thought. Then—how long after he did not know—the kulkul beat the first hour of day. Daylight had come without his knowing. He cautiously put his hand out to the plates. He was wide awake and they were real. The birds sang and soon the road would be full of the people of Sanur. Pak snatched up his treasure in a panic and hid it within his dew-soaked kain and then took the nearest path that led to the rice-fields. It skirted the village and not a soul was to be seen. It seemed to him that a whole year had passed since he left his sawah the day before. He did not know yet what Bengek’s present portended. Squatting down at the edge of his sawah he took the plates carefully from his kain and breathed on them and polished them. The rising sun was reflected in them and the roses looked like real flowers. Only the raja possessed anything like it. His chest throbbed and thudded like a gong, as he turned the plates about in his hands. There were some marks on the back which he examined closely, straining his eyes and wrinkling his forehead. They had no resemblance to the letters in the lontar books he had learned to read. Probably they were characters of great magic power. Otherwise how could such delicate and fragile ware have come whole and unbroken to Bengek’s net, when a great ship like the Chinaman’s burst asunder and broke up? He did not know whether the powers of good or of evil dwelt in the plates. Pak considered this and looked about him. His eye fell on a mound in the corner of his sawah on which some offerings lay, dried by the sun. He had heaped up the mound the day he let the water into his field, bringing shovelfuls of earth from three points of the compass in turn to form an altar for his offerings and prayers.