Love and Death in Bali

by Vicki Baum

  “The Lord only knows,” the Resident sighed as he vanished indoors. Visser sighed, too, and withdrew to his own quarters. The Resident stood irresolute in his room: twelve chairs stood in a row against the wall in a way that looked to him positively feeble-minded. He was in a temper and his head throbbed. But at the same time he felt a familiar tingling in his veins, like the pricking of millions of needlepoints. So that is it, he thought. Malaria. In a state of exasperation, he threw himself on his bed, which was provided with clean lace curtains and a new mosquito net. He reached for a tin box, which served to protect his personal belongings from ants, and took out two quinine tablets. “Idiotic—a pack of children. They want a good whacking, with those guns of theirs.” He held his breath and shut his eyes. Now his head began to ache. “That Molog with his great snout,” he said aloud. “It’s people like that who are to blame if things get serious.” Suddenly a cheering thought occurred to him. They have their Molog, he thought, and we have our Boomsmer. In the first onset of fever he saw the two of them letting loose at each other with peas out of toy cannon. He pulled his travelling rug over him, as the first feverish shudder ran down his spine. Taking a look round at his bed he found that Badung hospitality had provided even a Dutch wife and pulling the customary kapok quilt in its white cover over him, waited for the quinine to lull him to sleep.

  “I want to be told as soon as Raka comes,” Alit said to the boy Oka. “Stay here and wait for him.” He had taken off all his clothing except a thin kain, and walked quickly away followed by a servant. The sun was setting and the sky was unusually clear after the rain. Alit distended his chest and took a deep breath. He was pleased with himself and his heart was light. With his jacket and kris he had cast aside the day’s anxieties and everything now was good.

  The way to the bath led past the pond and he paused a moment to watch two marabus, male and female, which were playing together in a grave and dignified fashion. He looked forward to the night and its festivities. Even before he reached the bath the kain slipped down over his hips.

  The bathing-pool, crowned by a small temple, was of remarkable beauty. The water flowed into a deep stone basin from the mouths of seven bronze serpents and as it was brought to the puri from far away in the mountains it was cool and clear. It also had a peculiar power in it of which Alit was often aware when weary or sad. He stood naked under the falling water and let the coolness flow over him long and luxuriously. It washed from him those last hours and the insult he had suffered at the hands of the white man.

  A strong smell of flowers hovered over the pool, for lavish offerings had been placed in the little temple in honor of the day. High above, the pigeons wheeled with a tinkle of their silver bells, and though the dusk already enfolded the puri their white plumage reflected the sun.

  The prince wrung the water from his long hair and put on the clean kain which a servant held out for him. As he left the bathing pool he saw Oka running towards him. He did not wait to hear the message but hastened back to the house. Raka was waiting at the foot of the steps. He bowed himself with clasped hands and Alit put his arm round his shoulders and led him into the, portico.

  “I have brought you a present,” Raka said as they went up the steps together. It was a sign of the sympathy between them that neither said a word of the Resident’s visit. Oka squatted beside a finely woven hamper out of which from time to time a cock’s head with a valiant red rose-comb bobbed up and disappeared again.

  “He’s a djambul and he will win you many a fight,” Raka said, holding the present out to his friend; with the full sense of its worth Alit let out a shout of joy. “You knew how I envied you him, Brother,” he said enchanted. Raka laughed as he took the bird out and held it up tenderly in his hands. “It is a djambul, as you say—and he comes from Bedulua,” Alit said with his whole mind absorbed in examining its plumage and feeling the muscles of its thighs. The cock extended its neck and crowed a challenge. The two friends laughed.

  “In seven days you shall fight, my friend,” the lord said to console him. He stroked the bird’s neck feathers and swayed it up and down in the air to excite it. A bevy of wives passed by, twittering like birds and arrayed in all their finery. Raka dropped his eyes, for it was not permitted to look at the prince’s wives. Alit called out to them, “Mercy—your beauty blinds me!” and they giggled as they vanished round the corner.

  “You are happy, my brother?” Raka said when their gleaming hair, naked shoulders and glimmering trains had gone by.

  “Yes, I am glad,” the prince replied. “I have some dark and unpleasant hours behind me, but now I know the path I shall tread and I am happy.” He signed to Oka and the boy took the cock and put it back in the hamper.

  “We will take him ourselves to the other cocks,” Alit said. “I want to see what he has to say to my Buvik.” He picked the cock up again with the firm and gentle grasp of the fancier, feeling as he did so the hard and taut thigh-muscles beneath his fingers. It was a moment of complete contentment, warmed by Raka’s presence and cooled by the light breeze of approaching night.

  Just as they were leaving the house to go to the cocks, one or two persons made their appearance, bending low as they came. “What is it?” Alit asked, recognizing his cousin, the anak Agung Bima among them.

  “The women have been awaiting you for a long time in the eastern balé, my brother,” Bima announced. “It would be as well if you would allow yourself to be married to them before the moon rises and the feast begins. The pedanda, too, has been waiting for a long time.”

  Alit looked at Raka in dismay. “I had quite forgotten the women, I had indeed,” he said, laughing at himself.

  “What women?” Raka asked.

  “The ones I am to marry,” the prince replied. He stood irresolute for a moment on the steps with the cock clasped to him. The bird stretched out its neck and crowed impatiently. Alit give him to Raka and went quickly up the steps and into the house to the kris-holder in the corner of his room. He took the kris in its scabbard from the grasp of the wooden figure and put it into Bima’s hand.

  “Here,” he said. “It will do if the women are married to my kris.” Without another glance he took the cock from Raka, delighted to feel its warmth and strength and buoyancy within his grasp again, and hurried Raka along with him to the balé where the cocks were kept. Servants with torches and lamps passed through the courtyard, for night had fallen.

  The anak Agung Bima carried the kris in his arms as if it were a child. The pedanda, Ida Bagus Rai, sat in the eastern balé on his cushions, with his tall crown on his gray head, and prayed. The balé was draped with rich hangings and filled with all the special offerings that are proper to the marriage ceremony of a raja. Behind the pedanda the six girls who were to wed the prince knelt in a row. Lambon was the youngest of them and they all looked at once excited and weary, for they had been waiting since noon. The other wives sat in a circle and the slave-girls crowded inquisitively behind them. The six girls were magnificently dressed and adorned and scarcely dared to move in their gilded robes.

  Bima bent his head to the priest’s ear and he in turn nodded without interrupting his prayer. Now the anak Agung drew the kris from its scabbard and held it for a moment upright before him— the sacred kris Singa Braga on which were the Lion and the Snake, The girls’ heads stirred like flowers swept by a wind. Bernis, who sat with the rest, said aloud, “It is too boring for our lord to come himself.” Someone laughed and an old woman enjoined silence. Bima stuck the kris in the wickered bamboo of the wall and that was all. The weapon stood for the man who meanwhile amused himself with the cocks.

  The six girls, pushed forward by a few experienced old women of the palace, took their places before the priest and the ceremony began. The pedanda called on the gods, sprinkled the backs and palms of the girls’ hands with holy water, strewed shavings of sandalwood on their bent heads, blessed them and—with his eyes on the kris—gave them to the Lord Alit of Badung.

  When it wa
s all over they still waited, uncertain what else to do, until the pedanda rose and left the balé. Whereupon all the women began talking at once and filled the court with their cries and laughter. The anak Agung Bima took the kris from the wall, returned it to the scabbard and bore it away. Lambon was the last to be left standing there, stiff and motionless as a gilded statue. “What happens next?” she asked in astonishment. “Now there are lovely things to eat. Come quickly to the big house and Ida Katut will tell us stories,” Tumun called to her. Lambon was still at a loss. “Am I the raja’s wife now?” she asked the vacant air. But no one answered. The slave-girl Muna flitted past and after her came Bernis crying out, “The moon will be up in a moment.”

  Lambon sighed and, picking up her trailing kain in her fingertips, followed the other women.

  It happened that evening that Raka and Lambon saw each other again for the first time since she had been taken into the puri, and the sight changed both their lives, and everything grew radiant and yet overcast as though by an evil enchantment.

  Just before Raka began to dance his eyes fell on Lambon; or, rather, Lambon unknowingly had been gazing at him for a long while without once turning her eyes aside or the least concealment.

  She sat with the other wives of the lord on the mats of a low balé and Raka did not at first recognize her. He only knew that he had never seen a woman so beautiful as she. His breath failed him and his heart stopped and then sprang up like a wild beast and carried him away. He forgot where he was and what was going on around him; he merely stared at the raja’s wife, seeing only her among them all. She wore her hair dressed with art and entwined with orchids. Her face was lightly tinted with yellow powder and a deep pool of dark sweetness stood in her eyes. Her head was gracefully poised and erect on the stem of her neck. Her parted lips were arched and expectant and seemed to breathe a promise. She was closely enveloped in a purple kain, painted with very large gold flowers and an ivory-colored zone, interwoven with gold, encircled her. The lines of her shoulders, her arms, the tender rise and fall of her breast as she breathed—all this seemed to Raka utterly and incomprehensibly beautiful. She shone out among the other women, who were also beautiful, as a ruby among pebbles. Her eyes met Raka’s eyes with a strange and undeviating earnestness. And it was only now he realized that this beauty was Lambon, the child of Taman Sari, the little dancer with the girlish legs and arms who wore a dirty sarong, the hard green unopened bud of which he had thought so little. The bud is in flower, he thought, and the thought inspired a wild excitement that rent his being. He stared at Lambon and never had he known such tempest in his feelings. His muscles contracted, his breath came in gasps and his mouth was filled with saliva as though he had been chewing sirih. Someone gave him a nudge and he pulled himself together. The gamelan called.

  He walked out from the bamboo roof beneath which he had been awaiting his dance and, tearing his eyes from Lambon, began to dance. It seemed to him that he had never danced before. He felt strong and young and beautiful in every limb because he knew that Lambon’s eyes were on him. He had never been so happy before, so torn and tense with excitement as during these moments while he danced. He saw Lambon and saw nothing but her, even when his eyelids drooped and his eyes closed.

  Teragia, who sat among the spectators, bent forward as Raka stepped out into the light. She held her sleeping infant son in her arms, born three months before. Since his birth she had grown even more lean than before, and two fine wrinkles had appeared at the corners of her mouth. She looked at her husband with a searching, almost anxious look. He is not himself, she thought. The child felt for her breast in his sleep and she smiled. Raka seemed to dance endlessly on and on with the reflection of the lamps in his lost and dreaming face, and the gamelan repeated again and again the music of his dance. Teragia looked about to see if no one else marked the alteration in her husband. But though many followed the movements of the dancer with delighted and even enchanted eyes, everything went on about her as it always did. People chewed and drank and talked during the performance as usual. The stranger, the White Man, sat as guest of honor on his uncomfortable chair and looked down with heavy eyes. Teragia observed that he was suffering from the heat sickness and felt a fleeting pity for him. She could tell people’s thoughts and was aware of all they felt. His high collar constricted the stranger’s blood, his head ached and he would gladly have closed his eyes, but politeness compelled him to sit erect and smile. Her glance travelled on over the courtiers, many of whom had fallen asleep, for it was long past midnight. She looked at the lord and her glance rested on him. Alit, too, had bent forward—he, alone of them all—and he was gazing at Raka who still occupied the stage, now gliding, now retreating, now poised with tremulous hands stretched out above his head.

  At this moment a murmur ran through the palm tops that hung down over the walls of the court and the first drops of a downpour came pelting from the sky. There was consternation and laughter. Teragia drew her little son under a fold of the cloth wound about her breast to protect him from the colder air. Those who were in balés or under cover could laugh as they looked out at the rain, which now came down in a torrent, but the simple folk from Badung who had been squatting in a circle round the arena with their children about them began talking and shouting; they took the cloths from their heads and wrapped them round their shoulders, crowding together and at last running for shelter to the watch-towers and any cover they could find. The gamelan, too, stopped playing and the men carried their precious instruments into the shelter of a balé. Raka alone, with visionary, unseeing eyes danced on, as though all things had already dissolved away—until, suddenly stopping, he looked about him in astonishment and down at his rain-drenched limbs, and then in a leap or two left the stage.

  The rain now came down in such torrents that the lamps were extinguished. Everyone talked and laughed at once, taking it all as a huge joke. The anak Agung Bima summoned servants and sent them off in all directions. Torches appeared and slaves brought great vessels full of palm wine. The dancers were offered young coconuts to quench their thirst after their exertions.

  “I suppose we can go to bed at last,” the Resident said to Visser. “I scarcely know where I am with this damned malaria in my bones.” “It will go on a long time yet, I’m afraid,” Visser said. “This is only a little interlude and the show will go on for hours.”

  “They have a remarkable notion of time, these Balinese,” Berginck sighed and leant back in his chair again. Visser drank his palm wine. The rain beat its ceaseless tattoo on the grass-thatched roofs.

  Lord Alit would have liked to go and join the dancers, but he could not desert his guests. He sat on for the sake of politeness, keeping an eye out in the hope that Raka would see him. He beckoned twice to him, but Raka was standing under the bamboo shelter, from which the dancers came on, and he did not appear to see. Alit signed to Ida Katut and the old story-teller trotted away through the rain and brought Raka back with him. The prince introduced him to his guests and Raka politely sat on his heels and smiled as though in a trance at the white tuan Besar’s compliments. Then he remained squatting there a little below the prince and with his face averted. The rain kept on. The lord, seeing his guests talking together, gently touched Raka’s shoulder. Raka turned and looked at him. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “It seems to be raining.”

  Alit could not help laughing. “It has that appearance,” he said. “But your father says it will soon be over and then the dance must go on.”

  Raka continued to look at him but with eyes that took nothing in. Alit shook him gently by the shoulder. “What is the matter, Raka?” “What is the matter? Nothing,” Raka said. He had only just realized that Lambon had become the wife of his closest friend, unapproachable and forbidden even to his sight.

  “Are you sick?” Alit asked with a more vigorous shake.

  “Sick? I? No, I am not sick, my friend,” Raka said in the same absent-minded way.

  The rain came down more violen
tly than ever and the leaves of the palms bent before the wind.

  “Will the festivities be continued?” the Resident asked the prince in Javanese. He felt wretched and was afraid he might even become delirious. His mind was dazed and he could not imagine how he should get through a conference in the morning.

  “The rain will soon be over and the dancing will go on. I beg your forgiveness for the interruption. North Bali is dry and has better weather, I have been told,” the prince said politely.

  “No earthly hope,” the Resident said to Visser. The Controller shrugged his shoulders in sympathetic resignation. Alit bent again to Raka.

  “Would you like to spend the night in the puri?” he asked. “You will be tired and the roads are wet. There is a lot I want to discuss with you. Tomorrow is a decisive day.”

  “I will stay with pleasure,” Raka replied. “But I shall not be tired …”

  The lord turned to his guests again, and Raka’s eyes wandered to the balé where the wives were seated. He could not see Lambon, for the rain had put out the lamps and the torches gave only a fitful light. Raka heard someone address him, but he could not understand what was said, and the Resident gave up his attempt at amiability when he observed the deaf and dumb expression in the dancer’s face.

  Raka wanted to go to Lambon. He wanted to go to Lambon. There she sat in the darkness within ear-shot, yet he might not call or speak to her—he might not even look at her, for she was the raja’s wife. His longing for her was something such as he had never felt for anyone or anything in his whole life before. The rain murmured on. The balé in which were the prince’s wives was dark and echoing with laughter. He could not go and pull Lambon out and carry her off.

  He did not understand what had come to him. He had often heard that this kind of madness existed, and that men went out of their senses from the longing for a woman. You could read of it, too, in the old books. But he did not understand how it could happen to him—to him for whom life was all play, and whose lightest wishes had always found fulfilment.