Love and Death in Bali

by Vicki Baum

  “How do you know that?” the Controller asked quickly.

  “I know their boats. They are built rather differently from ours in Badung,” he replied huskily. After pausing a moment longer he retreated again into the crowd. The men showed their relief by whispering together. What Bengek had said was good and to the point. The only pity was that they had not had a better spokesman.

  The Controller spoke in a low voice to the punggawa—this time in Malay. Krkek pricked his ears.

  “You can go to your homes, I need you no more,” the Controller said to the people.

  They drifted slowly out of the courtyard; they went unwillingly, for at that moment the Chinese, Njo Tok Suey, made his appearance and with him the other one, the one to whom the ship belonged, and whom Raka had carried from the wreck on his own shoulders. There was a third Chinese with them, and the white man looked at the three with an unfriendly eye.

  The men hung about the road in knots discussing the situation. “Are we to be called thieves, and threatened?” many of them asked, shaking their fists. Krkek, always level-headed, went from group to group, calming them down. “The white man was displeased with the punggawa,” he told them. “I heard what they said in Malay. He said it was true that copper from the ship had been found in Gianjar. He called the punggawa dishonest and double-tongued.

  And he does not love the Chinamen.”

  Some of them collected round the husky man, who as a rule was avoided, and asked him about the men he had seen. Pak had his own reasons for preferring to keep out of his way; also he was as limp and weary as after hard labor in the fields, and wanted to get home as soon as he could to tell the news. He carefully avoided the road, for he saw Dasni there with her wares beckoning to him, and set off for home across the fields as fast as he could go.

  But when he got back, bursting with excitement and the news he had to tell, he found they knew it already. Puglug, in her unpleasant way, had heard all about it at the market and as usual knew more than he did.

  “... and the gamelan played as he entered the puri, for he is a great friend of the lord of Badung and he must have the truth,” she was saying, and Pak found that all his juicy bits about the white man were forestalled. “He only had to give the Chinaman, Tan Suey Hin, a look and he confessed at once that he had been paid two and a half ringits for accusing in a letter the people of Badung of taking copper from the ship. He was promised two hundred ringits for giving false witness, but the white man can see through your bones to the bottom of your heart, where the truth lies—”

  “The truth is in the liver, not in the heart,” Pak said in ill-humor, for the sake of getting a word in.

  “Then I advise you to keep your liver out of sight,” Puglug said with ready wit, and everyone laughed. Women, Pak thought sadly, have quick tongues like serpents. And he put on another head-dress and went to the river to bathe. On the way he bought fragrant oil from a woman vendor and smeared it behind his ears and over his shoulders and then waited for Sarna.

  The western fields had lain fallow long enough and, next morning, Pak went out and dug in as manure the ashes of the burnt straw and offered up the first offering and let in the water, thus starting afresh on the cycle of ploughing, planting and harvesting. It did him good to be hard at work again and to feel the sun beat on him and the sweat run down his body. Nevertheless, a new care was added to those he had already. He stayed out in the sawah long after the kulkul had called the men home to eat and rest; and he had a particular reason for this.

  The field next to his belonged to Bengek, the fisherman, and his ill-famed mother, and ever since hearing the white man’s threat Pak had been haunted by the thought of speaking to the husky man about the plates. But Bengek was a lazy cultivator, and though it was high time he got to work on his sawah nothing was to be seen of him.

  Pak went to the river and washed his cow and then drove her in the direction of Sanur, for he was resolved to run Bengek to earth in his home. His cow was refractory, for she knew it was time to go home. “Come, my mother, we must go to Sanur,” Pak explained to her as he urged her on in the way she had to go. “I am tired too, my sister, and we will not stay there long.”

  He tied the beast to a tree outside Bengek’s yard and went cautiously in. It was the house nearest the sea and a little way outside the village, not far from the Temple of the Dead, where an enchanted and sacred frangipani tree stood in a bright light of its own. The walls were not built of baked mud but of rough gray coral, in which here and there a piece of red coral was embedded and looked like a sore place. The yard was large and clean and had an almost opulent air. Bengek was there mending his nets and his mother, the witch, was busy in the kitchen.

  “Peace on your work,” Pak said with exaggerated amiability. “Peace on your evening, old lady.” For he was afraid of her. She came close up to him, greeting him in a sing-song voice, and when he looked at her eyes he saw that they watered, which is a certain sign of a witch. “Sirih, my son?” she asked in a friendly way, offering him her own basket, but Pak prudently declined in case she cast a spell on him.

  “I looked for you on the sawah, but you didn’t come,” he said to open the conversation, and Bengek glanced inquiringly at him.

  “I am a poor peasant but a good fisherman,” he said casually. “Has anything gone wrong with the water that I am to blame for?” “No, nothing at all,” Pak said hurriedly. “It’s something else. I was quite astonished at what you told the white man about the men from Gianjar . . .”

  As the husky man neither answered nor looked up Pak had no choice but to proceed.

  “I don’t know if you remember our encounter that night—” “I don’t,” Bengek said.

  Pak’s next words stuck in his throat. “It is about the plates you gave me that night—” he stammered. Bengek threw down his net and looked him in the face. “What about them?” he asked.

  “They are very beautiful—but if they came from the Chinaman’s boat I shall have to hand them up to the punggawa,” Pak said uncomfortably.

  “They did not come from the boat and you must not hand them up. Nobody has asked about any plates. There was talk only of copper and iron and ringits.”

  “Where did you get the plates from?” Pak asked straight out. “Out of the sea. They got into my net instead of fish which I would much rather have caught,” the fisherman said. Pak breathed hard. “Why didn’t you keep them?” he asked.

  “What should I want with plates? I have no wife and want no toys for children.”

  “But they are valuable—” Pak said shyly.

  “No, they are not. Do you think I should be such a fool as to give them to you if they were?” Bengek asked. “They are worth just as much as the little kindnesses you do me as my neighbor on the land, and no more,” he added. Pak’s heart was at once lighter and heavier. “I buried them in my field and offered them up to the goddess. But they came new and beautiful out of the ground again in token that the goddess had taken her joy in them and that I might now make use of them—” he said, breathing more freely.

  “Well then, that is all right,” the husky man replied with indifference.

  “I mean—I wanted to ask you—if I now do what I like with the plates, will you tell people that you gave me them?” Pak asked, forcing himself to come to the point.

  “Who? I? No,” Bengek said tersely. Sometimes his hoarse voice ran on volubly, as he had shown in the presence of the white man, and sometimes his mouth seemed too lazy to open or shut. He laughed abruptly and it sounded like a cough. “Let’s leave it at that— the goddess gave you them,” he added .

  Pak stood irresolute. “I’ll gladly give you a hand any time on your sawah when you’re behind.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” the fisherman replied.

  Pak went politely across to the witch and took leave of her. He was afraid of her. “Peace on your way, my son,” she said with a titter. Pak took his cow by the rope and went off at a good pace so as to reach the vil
lage before dusk. “Sister,” he said confidentially, “we can be glad that’s over.”

  But it seemed that peace had departed from Pak’s life ever since the plates entered it; for a week later, it was the fifth day of the fourth month, the following incident occurred:

  On that day Pak was busy laying straw on his yard wall and there was silence in the yard. Puglug had gone to Badung to the big market, and the aunt to the next village to attend a funeral. The old man was asleep in his balé, wearied with the heat of the day. Pak was happy; he hummed softly to himself as he spread the straw and smoothed it down to give the wall protection and a good thatch. Then at the farthest side of his premises, where the garden ran on into a coconut palm plantation, he heard a peculiar noise. It sounded like someone crying, and after a moment or two he went to see whether his little daughter Rantun had perhaps hurt herself in some way. But there were no children to be seen, and then he remembered that they had all gone with Lantjar when he took the ducks out into the fields. Pak looked round about and felt a little uneasy, for it is not very pleasant to hear inexplicable noises and to see nothing. But suddenly he caught sight of something yellow thrown down or crouching on the ground among the palm trees; his heart stopped and then raced and he bounded to the spot, for he had recognized Sarna’s yellow kain with the blue butterflies.

  She lay crouching close to the ground with her hands pressed to her left ear, sobbing as though in great pain, while blood welled out between her fingers and trickled down. Pak went cold with distress as she sat up. “What have they done to you?” he asked in horror. But Sarna only pressed her head against his breast and the blood ran warm and sticky down his body, and when he tried to tear her hands from her face she held them there as tight as steel.

  “No one has done anything to me,” she sobbed. “Oh, Pak, can I hide in your house?”

  He looked round about him; he knew that Puglug was not at home and he would not have cared if she had been. So he helped Sarna to her feet, and supporting her firmly with both his arms, led her past the house altar to his house. “What has happened to you? Who has hurt you?” he asked again and again, while at the same time, not wishing to forget the rudiments of good manners, he muttered that his cabin was wretched and dirty and no place to receive so great a beauty as Sarna. As he spoke he could feel how his heart turned over for pity and fear on her account.

  It was not until he had pulled her on to the sleeping bench, and was nursing her in his arms as he did little Klepon, that she consented to remove her hands from her face. They were covered in blood and more blood streamed from her ear and down her neck.

  Now Pak saw what had happened. The round hole which Sarna’s vanity delighted in adorning with pretty earrings was torn right through the lobe, which was in two bleeding fragments and could never serve for adornment again.

  “What does it mean?” he whispered in horror, for his throat was parched. Pak could not bear even to kill a fowl and to see Sarna bleed was an agony to him.

  “It means that I refuse to lie in the bed of an ugly old man,” she said, sitting bolt upright; and her eyes flashed through their tears. “No, never will I do it,” she said. “The mere thought sickens me and I will be disfigured for the rest of my days rather than submit to it.” “Come,” Pak whispered, “let me stop the bleeding—shall I run to Teragia?—she has medicine. What did you do, my Sarna—did you do it yourself? Who is the old man you won’t give yourself to? I don’t understand. Tell me all about it.”

  Sarna took her head-dress and held it to her torn ear, and although she still sobbed she began to smile and the blood ceased to flow by degrees.

  “Do not run about like a chicken after its head is cut off, Pak,” she said. “Just hold me tight and I will tell you everything. I am glad I did it and you ought to be glad too.”

  In the nick of time Pak remembered that there was holy water on the premises, and he ran off to his uncle’s balé to get the pitcher. He brought it back and sprinkled the wound with it; he took Sarna in his arms, and then he could feel that she stopped trembling, but still he did not understand.

  “Don’t you know that the raja’s people go round the villages looking for girls for his bed?” Sarna said with more composure. “But I have done enough to make it impossible for them to drag me to the puri and hand me over to the raja.”

  “The raja—” Pak stammered, staring at her. He had heard tales now and then of girls mutilating themselves in this way when they did not want to be taken into the puri, for it was impossible for a raja to have a woman near him who was disfigured in any way. But they were always girls who had done it out of desperation, because they were in love with a man of the village and could not bear to be parted from him. His heart swelled within him until he felt it in his throat.

  “Why did you do it? Tell me,” he asked her breathlessly. And it seemed to him incredible that a girl of Sarna’s radiance and charm had wounded herself with a knife for his sake and rejected a raja. “Did you do it for my sake?” he whispered, feeling that he was uncouth and dirty from labor and reeking like a swine. Sarna looked at him and laughed softly.

  “For your sake?” she said. “Yes, for your sake—”

  At this moment the old man came from his balé, for his sleep was light and he had heard Sarna’s sobbing. Pak said nothing. He only took his arms away from the girl quickly and squatted down at a distance from her, as propriety demanded. And the old man said nothing either, and, although he saw it all, he did not look but just picked up a basket and disappeared again behind the house.

  “The raja is as old as the hills and has been sick for years, as you know. Now they are going to put girls in his bed to warm the marrow in his bones, for his inside is going cold and his entrails are slothful within him and his breath stinks with his sickness,” Sarna said. “But they will not have me as medicine for a corpse even if it’s the lord of Pametjutan a thousand times over. I am young and I will not be buried alive.”

  Pak began now to understand. If it was not a question of the young lord Alit, but of the old tjokorda of Pametjutan, and if it was as Sarna said, then her crazed action seemed comprehensible. Sarna took the cloth from the wound now that it had stopped bleeding, and Pak shuddered slightly when he saw the limp, torn lobe. Sarna looked closely in his face. “Now I can never wear earrings again,” she said, smiling, while her eyes filled again with tears.

  “That is nothing, my little bird—” Pak said, clumsily comforting her. “You are beautiful without any adornment.”

  “There were little rubies set in them, they cost seven ringits,” Sarna lamented. But Pak took her in his arms and said, “And when you marry you will in any case have to give up your earrings, sister.”

  Sarna nestled up to him and said no more, and after a while the cooing in her throat that always made his pulses beat was to be heard again. “My father will beat me when I get home,” she said. Pak, too, feared the wealthy Wajan.

  “My father thinks it an honor to be chosen out for the raja of Pametjutan, to be a woman of the palace with lovely kains and no more work to do.”

  “And all that you have thrown away?” Pak said in a transport. He was prouder of what Sarna had done for him than of anything that had ever happened to him in his whole life. He felt dazed as he thought that he had never known her, never known anything about her until that day. Sarna, the pretty Sarna, had destroyed her own beauty with a knife.

  “I will not be shut up as a raja’s wife,” she said, thinking aloud. “They are hidden away and are no better than prisoners. And the raja is old—he will die soon and then his wives will have to be burned—and I don’t want that. But my father will beat me—”

  “And so you came to me?” Pak said.

  “To whom else could I go?” Sarna asked. Never had he heard words like these. To whom else? To whom, indeed? He stretched to his full height and two fingers’ breadth more, and his muscles grew tense. “Your father will not beat you—he has me to reckon with,” he said proudly. A happ
y thought came to him and he jumped up. “Wait, I will show you something no one has seen yet,” he said, and ran for his spade.

  He had buried the plates near the house altar two days before, and now he took Sarna with him and quickly dug them up with a strength in his arms he had never known before. The pig came up and routed in the earth with his snout. Pak kicked him aside. Sarna squatted on the ground and from time to time she was shaken with a sob, but she was inquisitive and did not cry any more. At last the plates were unearthed and the roses were as fresh as on the first day; the soil could not obscure or hurt them. Pak wiped the plates on his kain and they shone at once. “There—they will be yours when you are my wife,” he said, rather out of breath, and laid them at Sarna’s feet. She gazed at the treasure open-mouthed and then at Pak and then back at the plates. She said nothing. She stroked the flowers tentatively with her finger-tips and then started back as though afraid. Then she looked again at Pak. He laughed aloud, for it was clear that the plates made a great impression; he began to brag and handled the plates carelessly, clapping one over the other, as though a man like him was quite used to such things. “Take them, they are a present,” he said, but Sarna shook her head. “I am afraid of my father,” she said again. Pak buried the plates and the pig went disappointedly away. Pak, too, began to be afraid, not only of Sarna’s father, but also of Puglug and the noise she would make or, what was worse, her silence, when she came home and found Sarna in her own house. A happy thought struck him. “I will take you to Teragia,” he said. “She will see to your wound and make it heal quickly and leave no scar. And Teragia will take you home to your father and speak to him. She is good and has power over people and he will do nothing to you.” Sarna looked at him once more, searchingly this time, as though she detected the lurking fear in his heart, and at last she nodded. “Do not come with me,” she said finally. “I will go to Teragia alone. Everyone in the village knows by now what I have done, and there must not be any gossip about us.”