by Vicki Baum
“There is a good wind for kite-flying today,” Raka said. “We will go on to the stubble fields later on and fly them.” Beasts of various shapes and colors lay scattered about his feet, great long-tailed fishes, birds and legendary creatures, for Raka was a welcome visitor in many villages and could construct kites of strange shapes, not only the square ones of Taman Sari.
“Yes, that will be grand,” Teragia said.
“Will you come with us?” Raka asked. She looked at him in surprise. “Perhaps——” she faltered. It scarcely seemed possible for her to go out kite-flying with a herd of children. It was all right for Raka. She stood there beside him a moment longer and then went back to the pedanda. No sooner had she turned her back than the laughter burst out again.
Ida Bagus Rai, as soon as his last prayer was ended, flung himself on the sirih he had resisted for so long. He smiled at Teragia, but it took a little time before the solemn expression left his eyes. The first supplicants for his counsel were already collecting in front of the house. Teragia saw Pak’s father and rich Wajan among them. “Where has Raka gone?” she asked his mother. “To the palms,” the old lady replied. Teragia followed her husband there, for she wanted to be with him as long as he was at home.
She could not find him at first. It was only when the cry of a betitja bird came from the top of a tree that she discovered him. He was up there, gripping the trunk with his feet as though he were part of the tree, imitating the bird’s note. A young and unpractised betitja, who had not yet learnt to sing properly, answered with a false note or two. “Come up, Teragia,” Raka called down jokingly. She clasped the trunk in her arms—it was always something—and waited. Raka took his knife from his girdle and cut the large palm-leaves which were used in the household. They fell down with a loud rustling noise. When he had got enough he came down. Teragia let go of the tree and bent to pick up the heavy leaves and put them over her shoulders. Raka watched her for a moment, then took her load from her—it was no load for him. “Pity,” he said suddenly. “What is a pity, my brother?” she asked. “That you aren’t a man,” Raka said, smiling. “It would be fun to have you for a friend if you were a man.” Teragia smiled too. “But then I could bear you no sons,” she said with bent head. He was silent for a moment and then began to whistle like a betitja and went off with the leaves. It is true, Teragia thought, letting her hands fall to her sides, I have let two children escape too soon from my impatient womb. But this time she felt safe, for her father, who was a great doctor, had uttered powerful blessings over her.
The morning was taken up with work in house and garden. Everything was bright and radiant, for Raka was at home. She felt his presence everywhere, even when she did not actually see him. In the kitchen the servant girls squealed with delight over everything he said and did. Later she saw him sitting with his father and eagerly telling him something. Next he ran across the courtyard, taking his mother a fresh skein of yarn. Then he was up on the roof of the balé in which the offerings were got ready, mending the thatch, accompanied by two children, and a moment later the rope of the well near the house altars rattled and ran. He played with the wild pigeons, which he had taught to curtsy to him. Then she saw him busied with leaves of lontar palm as though he were going to write a book, as his father did. It was not that, however. When she bent over him to see, he was cutting beautiful fishes out of the leaves; then the children came back from the beach bringing a particular variety of mussel which they heaped up at his feet. Raka looked up at Teragia and stopped in his work. “I am making a chime for the temple,” he said almost defiantly. “It will be used for the New Year’s Festival.” “That is right,” she said. There were still three months until the festival of the Galangan Nadi. She left him to his task of tying the tinkling mussel shells to the leaves. Why do I always seem to be interrupting him? she wondered. She went away, but stopped in the next courtyard and looked at him over the bamboo fence; her eyes could never have enough of him. He did not know she was watching him, but he shook his head as though an ant had been annoying him. Teragia walked quickly away. She felt uneasy and, asking the old mother’s leave, took a basket and went into the village. She paid her father, the doctor, a visit, went to the market to make purchases and looked in at several houses where there were old or sick people to attend to. The whole time she felt restless and knew that it was only strength of will that kept her away from Raka. His hand rested on my heart at night, she thought, but she did not believe it all the same.
On the way home she heard from a distance shouts and jubilations coming over the walls. There was a miscellaneous crowd at the gate looking through, and they, too, held their sides for laughing, and more and more people came up to see what was going on. Teragia pushed her way through and entered the yard. There she found a circle of people who might have been watching a play. In the centre was Raka walking to and fro, giving a performance. He had folded up his head-dress into a little cushion, as women do to carry loads on their heads, and on the top he was balancing a flat basket of the kind used for offerings, piled up with indiscriminate articles as offerings and covered with a red cover. His loin-cloth was bound round his chest, and he was obviously imitating a woman who was very proud of her beautiful offerings and walked with mincing steps to the temple. His face beamed with delight over his performance. From top to toe he was a woman: his hips rolled, his hands fluttered with refined affectation, his half-closed eyes expressed unashamed depths of feminine self-consciousness.
Teragia put her basket down and stopped in the gateway. She observed Raka’s father among the spectators, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. His mother was there too; she could not see but was being told all that went on by a neighbor. “Now he is twisting his neck,” she announced, almost weeping with laughter; “now he’s afraid the offerings will fall down as he goes up the steps; now he’s wobbling his hips just like old Dadong, who thinks she’s so beautiful; now he’s stumbled, but he only puts on a sweeter expression.” Raka was utterly absorbed in his impersonation and the more people laughed the more new turns occurred to him. Just as he was about to take the basket from his head and give it to his father, who often took the offerings from the women at high festivals, and just as the pedanda was entering good-naturedly and heartily into the joke, Raka suddenly saw his wife.
Teragia stood on the top of the steps leading up from the road watching him. Her mouth was open with amazement. She thought she was smiling, but not a smile crossed her face. Raka went on for a moment and then stopped abruptly. He pulled the loin-cloth from his chest, gave the make-believe pile of offerings a kick that sent them flying, and became a man again. The laughter ceased. The pedanda, as though he had forgotten something, took up his chisel with an almost embarrassed air and turned again to the figure he was at work upon. The gathering dispersed and in a moment the courtyard was empty. Only from the kitchen at the back there were still sounds of tittering.
Raka stood in the middle of the yard putting on his headdress, and it seemed he was waiting for Teragia to speak to him. “How long have you been here?” he asked at last, just as though she was a visitor. And like a visitor she replied, “I have only just come.”
“Why did you not laugh?” he asked. Teragia said quietly, “I did laugh. I laughed a lot, it was very funny.” Raka looked at her with annoyance. Suddenly she caught sight of a flower under his turban above his forehead and she went quickly up to him. “Oh, Raka,” she said softly, “what have you got there?”
It was a large-flowered orchid, seven blooms on one spray, fluttering like butterflies over his forehead.
“Isn’t it a beauty?” he asked. “I found it in the garden. Would you like it? If you’ll only laugh I’ll give it you perhaps.”
“Oh, Raka,” Teragia repeated, “you ought not to have taken it——”
He pouted like a scolded child. “Aren’t you pleased when I adorn myself?” he asked, but then taking the spray from his head he held it out to her. Teragia did not take it.
Raka’s head hung down sorrowfully, but the next moment he looked up defiantly.
“You are a pedanda yourself——” he said. “Much too holy for me.”
He looked down in her face, hoping to see some response there to his joke But Teragia looked grave and upset and only repeated, “Oh, Raka——”
He still held the white orchid in his hand and at last he forced her to take it.
“How is it you cannot even laugh?” he asked abruptly.
Teragia stared at him. “Can I not laugh?” she said incredulously. He shook his head. “Forgive me,” she said slowly. When he looked at her he saw that her eyes were shining, but she was not crying.
“Has your father never told you what happened to me?” she asked.
“Did someone hurt you?” he asked impulsively.
“Oh no,” Teragia said. “Oh no, no one has hurt me, my brother——”
He drew her down beside him on the steps and held her hand in his. Warmth flowed in and over her. She let her eyes fall to the white orchid in her hand and began to speak hesitatingly.
“We lived far from here then, at Abeanbase in Gianjar,” she said. “And that is why you have never heard about it. I was a child, eight years old perhaps. My grandmother fell sick and then my mother, and in a short time they both died. Then I fell sick, and for all his prayers my father could not cure me. He could cure all the people in the village, but not me. My skin broke out into hideous sores which ate my flesh away to the bone——”
She felt Raka’s hand draw back involuntarily, and this hurt her, but she had to go on. “My father put himself into a trance, but no god appeared to him to give him advice and he remained hollow and vacant. The months went on and I only got worse, until there was not a healthy spot left on my body; my blood burned with the poison and my strength was wasted away; at last my heart grew weak and scarcely beat any more. Again my father put himself into a trance and this time Durga, the goddess of death, entered into him and told him he ought to take me to the Temple of the Dead and leave me there to die, alone and in her protection only.
“My father did so. Before sundown he carried me in his own arms to the Temple of the Dead, and he has often told me that I weighed no more than a fowl that he might have been taking as a sacrifice. He took offerings with him too, and the few women of my family who were still alive mad offerings. My father sat with me holding my hand—as you are holding it now, my brother—and waited till the sun had gone down. He called once more to the goddess to take me to herself, and he listened for my heart and it beat no longer. Then he said farewell to me and went away.
“They had laid me in the balé where the offerings were prepared and had spread a white kain over me. I was so weak that I saw my father only in a mist when he left me, and then I knew no more. In the middle of the night I woke up and the court of the temple was a blaze of light. I saw all the altars in a light brighter than sunlight, and the temple was full of forms. But no, I did not see them, but I felt their presence, and I knew that I was surrounded by many invisible beings. I had no fear, only joy, and then I lost consciousness again and fell asleep and knew no more.”
Teragia stopped for a moment and looked at the orchids in her lap. She noticed that Raka breathed uneasily.
“When I woke up,” she went on, “it was bright daylight. The birds sang and my heart was very light. A gray goat with two kids was scrambling about in the court of the temple, eating the flowers from the offering plates, and I looked at the kids and laughed, for they pleased me. Then I looked at my hands—and they were clean. All the sores had healed. They had healed so completely that I had forgotten the pain; and never since that day have I been able to remember what the pains and the sickness were like. When the sun rose above the trees my father came to bury me. And he found me healed and without a sore on my whole body, and I was playing with the two little kids.”
“And then?” Raka asked when Teragia was silent for a time. She looked at him in surprise.
“What more shall I tell you, brother?” she asked softly. “Since then it has been granted to me to heal sick children, and sometimes the gods speak through my mouth. You say that I cannot laugh. But I know I am very happy. There is not a happier woman than I am, and you must forgive me if I am sometimes burdensome to you. Perhaps I am fashioned of stone and not of bamboos that float on the water . . .”
When Raka bent over his wife to look into her face he found that she was smiling after all. And it was, as she said, the smile to be seen sometimes on the stone statues in the temples, an enigmatic smile and quite without mirth.
She took the white orchid from her lap and put it back under Raka’s head-dress. “There,” she said, “you were quite right to pick it. It looks beautiful on your forehead and you shall wear it. There will be more of them in flower when your father needs them. Forgive me for troubling you . . .”
Pak was ploughing for the third time on the eastern sawahs, and now the soil was soft and kindly and replied with a light rustle when he went over it with the lampit to break it down. The labor had been heavy, and if his legs were weary they ached no longer. The sawah lay ready to receive the seedlings.
Pak had set aside the best of his sheaves, part for the temple dues and part for seed. Now at last the time had come when he could gather up in bundles the little green seedlings, which he had grown from seed in a corner of the sawah, and his brother Meru helped him with the planting.
While he planted Pak thought of Sarna and talked to her in his head all the time. My little pigeon, he said, my white roe, my young mangis fruit. He never knew before that such words existed, but they came into his mouth of themselves. When he met Sarna in secret and held her in his arms he said things like that to her. My little pigeon, my white roe, my young mangis fruit. Sarna did not laugh at him, although she loved to laugh and teased him a great deal.
She did not seem to dislike his strong brown body, for she met him as often as she could; but though she gladly gave him her bloom and fragrance she would hear nothing of marriage. “What should I do in your home?” she asked mockingly. “You have not even room for a second wife. Should I have to cook for Puglug and do her work, while she was at the market enjoying herself?” Or else she said, “How can you think of marrying me? Why, you have not even had your teeth filed.” And Pak was ashamed. Or else she said, “Where would you get the money from to buy me plenty of new sarongs? I’m vain, you know, and I like always to be beautifully dressed. Someone has promised me five foreign gold pieces to make five gold rings with.”
“And I can buy you ten gold pieces,” Pak bragged. “But perhaps you expect the raja to send for you and make you his wife.”
“And why not?” Sarna asked coquettishly, and Pak felt he was seething in boiling oil like the sinful souls in hell. He was not a very prudent lover and the whole village knew his secret. Puglug, in spite of her volubility, held her tongue and this weighed on him. He would have preferred hearing her rail at him when he had spent the night away from home, or decked himself out with new head-dress or loin-cloth. He always now wore hibiscus flowers behind his ear and the little bush beside the house altar was stripped bare.
“Brother, who eats our hibiscus flowers overnight?” Meru asked him, for Meru, too, wanted a flower behind his ear when he went to Badung to carve the temple door for the prince. “We have no more flowers left for the offerings,” Puglug said curtly. “It has come to this—that I have to pay money for them at the market or barter sirih for them.”
“Yes, it is a scandal that we haven’t flowers enough of our own for the offerings,” their aunt agreed, being for once of the same opinion as Puglug. “Look at him strutting about like a co
ck that has won twenty fights.”
The heavy field labors were done and Pak had nothing to do but wait while the western fields lay fallow and the young plants grew tall in the eastern ones. He only went out now and again to weed and look to the edges of the fields and see that the water was deep enough. At this stage no woman might set foot in the sawah, not even Sarna, who sometimes came along as though by accident. The sawah was now imbued with good, rich strong male force, which begot increase, and no woman might intrude.
“I will build you a house such as not even the wives of the raja have,” Pak said to Sarna one night under the shadow of the wairingin tree.
She let her fingers stray lightly and caressingly over his face. “How many ringits have you got buried under your house to make you talk like that?” she asked, laughing. Her laughter came from her throat like the coo of wild pigeons. It made Pak’s blood pulse in his veins whenever he heard this laugh. He bit her throat as young horses did when they had done with play and wanted to come together.
“If I had many ringits buried, would you like me better?” he asked breathlessly. But it was impossible to get Sarna to answer a serious question.
“You can’t be dearer to me than you are,” she said, and clasped her hands behind his neck in a warm, untiable knot.
Pak went and dug up the plates from his field and took them home and buried them in secret under his house where his ringits were. Puglug was at market and had no suspicions. But it did not escape the old man, who knew everything. “Son,” he said, “I have asked my friend the pedanda and he has given me some holy water to mix with your food. I have been to the balian, too, and given him eleven kepengs and a large offering and he will break the spell. But you keep grubbing about in the earth like a dung-beetle burying his ball of dung, and you are driven round in circles day and night. You know that your mother must be burnt soon so that her soul may be freed. What are you looking for in the earth under the house? Are you digging up your savings and taking them to the woman who has bewitched you instead of thinking of your mother’s soul?”