Love and Death in Bali

by Vicki Baum

  Lambon sat in the dark and looked across at Raka. That is Raka, she thought. Raka, the beautiful, and he noticed me. Forgetful as she was, she had never been able to stop thinking of Raka all the time she had been in the puri. She had been docile and Tumun had found it easy to teach her how a wife of the lord should walk, and how she ought to lower her eyes and how answer her lord. She had learnt to dress herself with taste and to be pleasing to men. Nevertheless she had felt like a prisoner all through the time of probation. In her dreams she was often coming over the sawahs from Kesiman and bathing with Raka in the river. Now she was the wife of the lord. Every door was walled up. I am the raja’s wife, Lambon told herself. There sat Raka longing for her and she was the wife of the raja. Old Ranis had been put in charge of her and she sat behind in the darkness and let nothing escape her. Lambon put her hands to her hair. It was no longer hers but the prince’s. Her limbs were his, her face, her smile.

  Servants came with freshly filled and lighted lamps—now it was light again. Lambon did not venture any longer to look at Raka. Raka, too, turned his head aside after he had filled his eyes for one moment with the sight of her. The rain left off and the patter on the palm tops died away. Only the eaves dripped and the dancing arena was dark and wet.

  “The rain has stopped,” the raja said to his guests. “The dancing will begin again at once.”

  “Splendid,” the Resident replied with a great effort. The gamelan players set up their instruments once more. Ida Katut gave Raka a gentle nudge. “What’s that ?” Raka asked abstractedly. “You must join the other dancers,” the little man whispered. “Has it stopped raining?” Raka asked in surprise. “Where are your eyes, my son?” Ida Katut jeered, but then he bit his tongue as though he had guessed Raka’s perilous desire.

  “Have I leave to join the other dancers?” Raka asked with ceremony, facing Alit and his white guest with clasped hands. He tried to rouse himself from his trance. Alit smiled at him. “But I will see you after the dancing is over?” he said in a kind though distant tone. Raka rose to his feet and went across to the small bamboo-roofed balé where the dancers were assembled. The gamelan began playing. The narrator and his comic servant stepped on to the scene and made a few jokes about the rain and the wet ground. The spectators, who had now collected again, laughed loudly. Raka waited his turn. He waited for the blue veil to rise before his eyes and enclose him as it used to do. But that other world of thought would not take shape and he remained alert and wakeful. I must see Lambon, he thought, I must speak to her. I must have her. The gamelan called and with tightened sinews he stepped out from the balé. He drew himself up with head thrown back in an attitude of pride and virility as the Baris dance required, but he did not know he was dancing. He thought only of Lambon. It is dangerous, he thought, to love the wife of a raja. The penalty is death. I cannot help it, he thought again. Even though my life is at stake, I must see her and have her. It was to these thoughts that he danced.

  He was breathless when the dance was over and he began taking off his robes. “You are bleeding, Raka,” the narrator said, pointing to his cheek. Raka felt his cheek and looked at his fingers with astonishment. “Forgive me,” the other Baris dancer said. “It must have happened in the fight.”—“I don’t feel it at all,” Raka said with a laugh.

  Everyone left the balés. Of Lambon nothing was to be seen. Raka stood irresolute in his gleaming dress, for it had just occurred to him that his other clothes were in the prince’s house, and he did not know how he could meet the eyes of his friend with this new and perilous tempest in his heart. He wiped his cheek again and saw that his fingers were covered in blood. Suddenly he left the balé and pushed his way through the dispersing crowd. He had made up his mind to waylay the prince’s wives on their way back to their own quarters. He wanted to see Lambon again and make a sign to her. The balé where the prince’s wives had been sitting was already deserted.

  A small dim figure in a rain-soaked kain barred his way. “Highness,” she said politely, “my mistress sent me to you.”

  “Who is your mistress?” Raka asked quickly.

  “It is better to name no names,” the slave-girl Muna replied in a low voice. “She comes from your village and that is why she sends me to you. She begs you to tell her family that all is well with her. And that she has not forgotten those in Taman Sari who were dear to her.”

  Raka received the message in silence. Then he replied, “Tell your mistress that she is missed in Taman Sari. And tell her—”

  “What shall I tell her?” Muna asked when Raka paused. “Nothing else,” he said. “Tell her that I have received her message. And tell her this too: The bud has become a flower. Will the flower be plucked or will it fade?”

  Muna laughed softly from delight at sharing the secret. “The flower will be plucked, Raka, if I know anything of flowers,” she sang. Suddenly she held out her open hand with a flower in the palm. Raka recognized it. It was one of the orchids entwined with Lambon’s hair. He seized it. It had a sweet and secret scent. Raka closed his eyes and drank in the perfume as though it were Lambon herself. When he opened his eyes the little slave-girl had vanished. He stood dazed a moment and then laughed aloud for joy and excitement. Beckoning to a servant as he returned to the outer court he told him to fetch his clothes from the raja’s house. By the time he had rejoined the other dancers and changed his clothes it was beginning to rain again. But Raka did not wish to see the raja again that night. He took the road for Taman Sari, feeling as though drunk with palm wine. He had stuck the orchid under his head-dress and its smell was laden with a secret and a promise and a threat.

  That night Teragia woke to hear her husband crying out in his sleep, and when she held the oil lamp above him she saw that his cheek rested on a crumpled flower.

  That night the old lord of Pametjutan was in such pain that he had a mind to die. But his mother, who was a hundred years old, watched by his bed and held him as if he were a child and forced him to live.

  That night the captain, the warrior Dewa Gdé Molog, dreamt he had twelve cannon and that he discharged them all at once, and that the white man was shot to pieces, but so were he himself and all his warriors.

  And the Resident, half-delirious with malaria, sat for his examination in navigation and was ploughed because he could not solve an elementary nautical problem, for the gamelan never stopped playing and distracted his mind.

  That night the young lord waited long for Raka to come to him after the dancing ended, and his opium pipe was ready and his heart open for an intimate talk. But Raka did not come. And as the raja was lonely and disappointed, he sent his boy, Oka, to fetch the youngest and loveliest of his wives to beguile the sleepless hours,— Lambon, the dancer, with faded orchids in her smooth hair, in the hour before the first cock crowed.

  The Bad Time

  THE misfortune that came to Pak’s house began almost unnoticeably with sickness among his fowls. At first it was only two or three of the young black ones and then it spread to his whole flock. They sat with open beaks and would neither eat nor drink. His old father blew down their throats and pulled at their tongues, and his aunt compounded a medicine of poultry droppings and powdered chalk. But the fowls refused to swallow it, and after a few days their limp, dead bodies were found here and there in the corners of the yard.

  Pak skinned one of the dead fowls and nailed it up with wings outspread on the outside of the wall in order to keep the spirits from further mischief. But the sickness spread, and at last attacked even his lusty fighting-cocks in their bamboo basketwork cages, and this was indeed a cause for sorrow and alarm.

  Pak’s head hung down and even Meru was grievously afflicted, for he had set his heart on the white short-tailed cock which his brother had given him when he executed the carving for the new house. But Sarna, who did not like to see long, sorrowful faces around her, did her best to cheer her husband up, and she only needed to put her little son on Pak’s hip to see him laugh again. Also she begged t
hree young cockerels of her father and brought them home with her, and when Pak came in from his labor there was crowing to be heard once more from the baskets in front of his wall and he was happy. And Meru carved a beautiful little cock as a toy for Siang, and the child carried it about with him wherever he went and bit at it, for his first teeth made a very early appearance.

  But this tribulation was scarcely over before the cow calved and died. She was a young beast and very good on the sawah and with the plough. Pak heard her mooing in the night; it was so loud and long-drawn-out that it waked him, though he was in a sound sleep. When he got to the shed he found his father already there, trying to help her. He had a torch stuck in one of the posts and by the light of it he was doing his best for the animal, who stood with trembling flanks in the litter of dried leaves. The old man was stroking and pressing her sides with all his strength and the sweat ran down his face. “Her calf lies wrong in her,” he said, for he knew everything. “It will come with its hind legs first and will tear the mother if we can’t manage to turn it round.”

  Pak’s uncle came, too, on thin crooked shanks, with his kain girt up, and gave much agitated advice. The women kept at a distance, for this was the men’s business; but the aunt, as always, was very sure she knew best. “You had better go to the sawah and catch an eel and give it her to eat as they do with women to lighten their travail,” she said. “I never heard such nonsense,” Puglug replied; she had got up in the middle of the night to pound leaves so that the cow could gain strength for the labor of calving. Whereupon a brief battle of words raged round the pots and pans in the kitchen.

  The three men worked hard to help the beast. “Have patience, mother,” they said to her, “you will have a fine child; you are young and strong and you must help your calf now that it wants to come out of you, dear mother.” The cow looked at the men with her large brown eyes; they were her friends with whom she worked on the sawah, and her breath came fast and sometimes she stretched out her head and bellowed. The uncle’s old buffalo grew restless and answered with strange sounds as he rubbed his sides against one of the posts of the shed. The women, Puglug and the aunt, lit a fire in the yard to ward off evil spirits, but Sarna slept through all the commotion within the walls of her house, her little son in her arms. In the sixth hour of the night the calf, with the old man’s assistance, came from the cow and he dried it with leaves. But the cow rested her head on Pak’s arm, who was squatting beside her in the litter to support her, and died without uttering another sound.

  For two days the women tried to keep the calf alive with the milk of young coconuts and a brew made from pisangs, as they did with babies when their mothers died in giving birth to them, but by the third day the calf was dead too.

  Pak went about in deep despondence, for he had ploughed the western sawahs once, and it was time to plough them a second time and the cow was dead. His uncle’s old buffalo had no longer the strength to do the work on all the sawahs belonging to the family.

  Once more it was Sarna who bestirred herself to seek help. She spoke to her father. “Our cow has died,” she said, “but I am sure my father would lend my husband his buffaloes, so that we shall not get behindhand with the work on the sawahs.”

  The rich Wajan, however, who had become rich by never putting himself out for others without some return, replied by asking, “How much rice will Siang’s father pay me if I let my buffaloes work on his fields?” Although he paid his son-in-law a compliment in calling him Siang’s father, his answer was churlish enough to put Sarna in a rage. “The father of Siang is now your son,” she said in a loud voice, “and I would be ashamed to take him back such an answer. If you won’t help him, his friends will.”

  “I will lend him the buffaloes,” the rich Wajan replied to this, “if, for every day they are at work on his sawah, he works for two in mine. That is a good bargain for him, for two buffaloes are not twice but eight times as strong as a man.” Sarna indignantly put her little son on her hip and took him away with her, for she knew that Wajan would have liked to play with him. She delivered this churlish message when she got home and Pak sighed deeply at hearing it. “The gods did not make men that they might work till they dropped, but that they might enjoy life and have time to keep the feast days and have enough rest.”

  “That is so,” his father agreed. Puglug received Sarna’s report with a mocking smile and went on with her work in silence. She was consumed with jealousy because the younger wife, useless though she was in the house, assumed great importance on the score of the help to be derived from her rich father. And when next Pak spent the night with her, as he did from politeness and for the sake of peace every week, she went to the back wall of the house and produced two strings of kepengs which she held out to him in the palms of her hands, a thousand pierced coins to each string, without a word issuing from her tightly closed lips.

  “What is that for? Where did you get all that money?” Pak asked, taken aback.

  “Earned and saved—not stolen,” Puglug said. “You can buy buffaloes with it, father of Siang, instead of depending on the churlishness of the rich Wajan. You do not eat his rice and he has no say in what you do. But do not buy any cows, buy young buffaloes. Rib, I know, has two strong two-year-old animals to sell, and he will sell you them cheap as he is a friend of yours.”

  Pak marvelled at his first wife, as he did at women all his life, for the way they always did and said the unexpected thing. But two days later when Puglug had gone to market with her produce he dug about in the wall to find more of her savings. He did find the hollow in the wall, but there was nothing there but the little linen bag containing the dried navel strings of his two elder daughters, which Puglug had kept, as was only right, as mascots to ward off evil.

  Pak was overdone with work at this time. There were not only his own five sawahs, and his uncle’s two fields, with which he had to help. He was also a member of two guilds, one for the rice harvest and one for the care of the village coconut plantations, and the members had to give mutual help. He had besides to attend the meetings of the village council, on pain of a penalty for absence, and the gamelan runner was scouring the village almost daily to summon him and the other players for rehearsals and performances. Moreover, the rainy season had brought down the outer wall of the Temple of the Dead and the village had decided to rebuild it from the foundations. Two new gateways rose behind bamboo scaffoldings and skilled carvers and stone masons were to be seen at all hours of the day busily employed on the work. Pak, who was no hand at the fine arts of decoration, was told off, with many others, to collect fresh coral stone, carry it to the site, dress and put it in position. He did this gladly. But he resented it, for it deprived him of his last remaining hours of leisure, when the punggawas and officers of the court rounded up all the men to whom the prince had given sawahs and enlisted them for work in the puri of Badung.

  New outer walls were being erected round the puri too; and trenches were being dug and water being conducted to the palace in a complicated manner, so that the trenches could be filled at a few hours’ notice. An extraordinary activity and excitement reigned throughout the territory of Badung. At all hours, Molog, the captain of the warriors, could be seen drilling his men and the rattle of musketry practice often alarmed the peasants, until they got accustomed to it and even delighted in the noise, as though it had been Chinese crackers.

  The job that more than once fell to the lot of Pak and several more men was to load the wooden pack-saddles of the lord’s little horses with rice and coconuts and conduct the whole train by side-tracks to Tabanan. Each journey took several days, during which work on his sawahs was at a standstill. But there was no help for it, for Pak was a subject and servant of the lord, as his father and grandfather had been before him.

  At the same period a fresh disaster befell. Pak’s twelve coconut palms, and all the plantations of the village, were so overrun with squirrels that there was no getting the upper hand of them. They ate their way into the
ripening nuts until these fell to the ground and were nothing but empty shells. The children collected them for firing and Meru found some in which the squirrels had gnawed two deep eye-sockets and carved funny masks of them. But Pak was annoyed: it did not seem to him an occasion for joking. He was up all night with the other members of the guild, trying to drive the animals away with torches and shouting and the clatter of bamboo sticks. But they did not have much success. As soon as the squirrels were chased away from the Taman Sari gardens they made off for the palms of Sanocr and the men there drove them back again. This led to bad feeling between the villages, and even between different parts of one village, and the young men got quarrelsome and the children fought in the streets. The pedanda, Ida Bagus Rai, intervened in person and begged the people to make up their differences; it was no time for disunion. Not only had a comet appeared in the sky, which from the earliest times had always signified war, as the older men observed every night as they gazed at its dull red trailing glow among the other stars; but, what was worse, the two Dutch ships, which had been seen one day off Sanur, had cast anchor and looked like remaining there for ever. The fishermen, Sarda and Bengek, and others who had keen sight, could see guns mounted on their decks with their round black muzzles trained on the shore. And then a little later three large, flat-bottomed boats put off, with a gun in each. Soldiers in blue uniforms and with scowling faces mounted them on the beach after making an emplacement of stones for each, and left them there as a threat and a warning. The people of the coast found it hard to get used to the sight of them—many avoided looking out to sea where the two great ships were to be seen day and night at anchor.