by Vicki Baum
To calm himself he went to see Alit, for he sometimes thought that his joylessness and weariness were due to his having been compelled to betray his dearest friend. They smoked much opium together and for hours Raka forgot his cares. He had his pipe filled again so often that Alit smiled and took it from him. Yet as soon as the cheering effect of the opium passed off Raka felt as disconsolate as before. When they bathed together he was careful to hide the bad place on his breast with his arm, and when he bathed with the young men of Taman Sari in the river he concealed it too. He now wore his saput wound high up round his chest and, as the handsome Raka wore it so, it soon became the fashion with the young men of Taman Sari and the villages round about.
Raka was waiting for the diseased skin to heal. But it did not heal. At about the same time as he fell into a trance at the barong dance at Taman Sari, his ears began to be affected. They were of remarkable beauty and now they began to swell at the edges. Raka made little of this symptom too. A poisonous spider has bitten me while I was asleep, he said to comfort himself. When no one was looking he felt them and they seemed his own ears no longer. They did not throb or pain him, but it was as if the coarse clumsy ears of a slave had been conjured on to his fine Brahman skull. At the thought that he might be the victim of an evil spell he felt more cheerful, for spells could be broken.
Without a word to anyone he went to the balian to ask his advice. He did not directly mention his ailments but said that he believed some sickness had been given him by enchantment.
“What sort of sickness?” Teragia’s father asked him.
“I don’t know,” Raka said, looking at the balian with weary eyes. “I feel I am sick. I have pain now here and now there, and neither food nor sleep nor play with women are any pleasure to me.”
At this his father-in-law looked earnestly in silence, for he was a good doctor. Raka had put on a short, black-and-white checked coat for this interview so as to conceal the sore spot on his breast and two heavily-stamened hibiscus flowers hung down over his ears. The balian asked him several more questions and then told Raka to have certain offerings placed on his house altar next morning and to return to him with other offerings for the ceremony that was required for the breaking of this difficult and indefinable spell.
Raka went home deep in thought and the people in the village street were surprised he did not call out to them or stop to have a word with them as he usually did. At home he avoided his father— why, he scarcely knew—and sat beside his mother in silence playing with the edge of her kain as he used when a child. When her hands wandered over his face to see why he did not speak he turned his head so that she should not touch his ears. But her hearing was keen for unspoken thoughts. “Why are you sad, son?” she asked.
“I believe a poisonous spider must have bitten me while I was asleep,” Raka said, “and ever since I have been sick and weary.”
“It will soon be over,” his mother said to comfort him. “Teragia can make you a drink from roots that will drive the poison out of your body.”
“I will ask her,” Raka said and got up to go and look for his wife. He found her in the yard behind, sieving the unhusked rice in the big sieves with her servants, making the chaff fly. “I want to speak to you, mother,” he said. He often called Teragia mother since she had borne him a son. She left her work at once and followed him into the garden, where she found him sitting on a block of unhewn stone, of which his father was going to chisel the image of Cinthia for the throne of Suria in the rice temple.
“I have been speaking to your father,” he said, “and he wants you to take him early tomorrow morning all the offerings required for breaking a sickness spell. Your father said you would know just what offerings were required.”
“There are five different rice offerings and I shall also want a new jar for my father to break over your head,” Teragia said obediently. She looked closely at her husband and gave a start. He was altered in some indefinable way. She could not have said which of his features had altered, but he no longer looked himself—he was no longer Raka, the most beautiful dancer of all Badung. As soon as he looked at her, she quickly turned her pained and anxious eyes away.
“My mother thinks you might make me a drink from roots to drive the poison out of me,” Raka said. His hands hung down slackly and his eyelids were inflamed, as though he read too much, as his friend Alit did.
“I can make you a drink from roots,” she said shortly. She was sitting on her heels and now she got up and left the garden. Then she stopped and came back and squatted down again at a distance from Raka.
“I know that you have been love-sick for a long time, brother,” she said gently. “Do you think the sickness comes from longing after a woman who belongs to another man?”
Raka gazed at her in silence. He marvelled, as he often had before, at Teragia’s mysterious knowledge of hidden things. “ Go into the house, mother,” he said. “I think I can hear Putuh crying.” Teragia went at once as he bade, and a little later he saw her standing beside his father with the boy on her hip. During the last months, ever since he had been distracted by his passion for Lambon, he had paid little attention to his son. Too little attention, he felt suddenly. The child had grown and begun to take notice of things. He had strong little legs and loved to stand on his mother’s hips whenever he could. Raka looked on from a distance as Teragia put the boy down on the ground; he crowed for joy as he tried to walk with her hands under his plump little shoulders. When at last he fell over and tried to crawl, she quickly picked him up again, for it was not befitting the dignity of children as human beings to go on all fours, and it was never allowed. Putuh with exultant cries grasped his mother’s firm, small breasts. Raka felt he would like to take his little son in his arms and rejoice in the warmth of his body. I must spend more time at home, he thought. I will play with my son and teach him his first words. Perhaps it would lift the oppression for a moment from his spirit. He got up and went across to him. The child stared at him as though he was a stranger; then a smile spread over his chubby face and he held out his arms to his father, and Raka held out his arms to his son.
It was at this moment that the full horror of his frightful disease came on him for the first time. I am unclean, he thought, and a cold shudder shook him to the depths of his being. He let his arms fall before they had touched the child, and turning round he went back into the garden and sat down on the stone. Teragia followed him with her eyes and then carried her son indoors.
Next day the offerings were offered up and Raka went to the balian and stayed with him for a long time. He was rather more cheerful when he returned, for the intricate ceremony with all its sprinkling and praying and the purification by water, fire and smoke had had a slightly intoxicating effect like that of the opium he smoked in the puri. There was a cock-fight at Sanur and he went, hoping to distract his mind. The oldest of his cocks won, but the triumph gave him little pleasure. Again he wore the short blackand-white checked jacket to hide the sore on his chest. On the way he stopped and felt his ears. They seemed to be rather less swollen than before. The sense of an improvement in his condition lasted for four days.
Then his hands became affected.
His fingers started hurting, not badly; it was only a dull and distant ache that lasted for a few hours and then went away and came back, went away and came back. The pain had gone altogether in a week, but it left his fingers stiff and curiously numb. Raka sat down on the stone in the garden; this was now his favorite haunt, for he could be sure of being unobserved there. He looked at his fingers and moved them to and fro. He practised movements of the fingers as he used to do as a child when he was being brought up as a dancer. They moved, but it was no longer the tumble movement of a dancer’s fingers, that amazingly controlled vibration, bending and stretching and fluttering to order, that had made him the best dancer in Badung. They moved as the fingers of a man who had been ploughing all day in the sawah. Raka gazed at his fingers for hours together. In spite of
their long nails they were his fingers no longer. Their shape was different—thicker and clumsier. He gazed at them and as he gazed he moved them about. Teragia went by with lowered eyes to pick flowers for the offerings.
She pretended not to see him so as not to disturb him and he hid his hands in his lap. When she had gone he began moving them about again. Then the pain returned.
Yet it was just at this time that hope was renewed. It seemed to him that the sinister and baneful bright red blotch on his breast was disappearing again. Whenever he looked at it there seemed less to be seen of it and its edges, which for weeks had been sharply marked off, became scarcely noticeable. Raka remembered having heard that hundreds of people in the villages about had had the first signs of the Great Sickness on them and that these had vanished again—a passing spell of no importance and no abiding force. His breast was healed, his ears no longer swelled and he no longer worried about them. But he practised his fingers in desperation and forced them to move freely, for the festival of the full moon was approaching when many dances took place.
It was at this time, too, that his lack of zest and joy gave way to an insatiable hunger for life. Although he lied to himself and would not let the hideous truth take possession of his thoughts, yet deep within there was the terror and the consciousness of being sick and unclean and shut off from all the joys in which other men took delight. It was as though he clung to all he had soon to surrender, to devour and drink in all the pleasures which would be taken from him. He went daily to meet Lambon and almost crushed her in his arms. He had no sense or discretion and would not see that she had to leave him for her hours of duty with the lord. He threw prudence to the winds and forgot that death was the penalty of love. When he was with Alit he smoked opium to excess and, as soon as its stimulus cleared his brain, he talked without end in a fevered rush of wit and fancy, to the astonishment of Alit, who often asked, “Do you want to drive Ida Katut from the puri in despair at finding you a better story-teller than himself?”
It was Lambon who first openly alluded to his malady. One hot and sunny afternoon on their island, when they were playing together like enamoured butterflies, she suddenly stopped short in a caress and ran her finger-tips over his breast. “What is the matter with your skin?” she asked, frowning. Raka pulled up his saput and tied it tight. The light was dim in the room, but the door was ajar to let in the air and there were also two openings in the wall behind which admitted a little daylight. Lambon gave the door a kick and the sunshine flooded the warm dusk within. Her fingers still toyed with the muscles of his chest. “Your skin was always as fair as the god Arjuna’s,” she said. “That is why I love you. I will not have it red as it is now. What have you been doing to your skin?”
Raka pushed Lambon away and got up and shut the door again. “It is the heat,” he said hoarsely. “The blood is trying to get through my skin to cool itself.”
“I want your skin to be beautiful and white,” Lambon repeated obstinately. The air in the closed room throbbed with terror. “ Muna has an ointment which makes any skin beautiful—I will get some from her,” Lambon said. “Shut your eyes and don’t say another word,” Raka said in desperation. He would have liked to drink her up as he would drink a ripening coconut and throw away the empty shell when he had done with it.
He left the puri and went back to Taman Sari. He stopped at the edge of a sawah which just been freshly irrigated and looked about him. There was no one to be seen. Only two white herons stood fishing for eels at the farther edge. He untied his saput and bent over the water. He saw the sky reflected there and its pearly clouds; he saw himself, clearly yet darkly and in sombre colors. He could not make out what his skin looked like. He washed his numbed fingers and walked on.
When he got home he rummaged about in the large basket in which he kept some of his dancing robes. He was looking for a Chinese mirror which Alit had once given him, so that he could see to put on his Baris crown. As soon as he had found it he held it up to his chest. The round mark had vanished and now he knew why. All the skin up to his shoulders had become red and inflamed. The sickness and uncleanness had spread from within. Raka, after this discovery sat for a time with drooping shoulders and limp arms. Then he lifted the glass and looked at his face. His eyelids were slightly swollen, but otherwise it was the same as ever. He stroked his thick, arched eyebrows with the tips of his fingers and caught his breath; a few of the hairs came out and were left on his fingers. He stared at them for a long time and then puffed them away. Why does this happen to me, he thought, why to me, in the name of the gods, why to me?
At the festival of the full moon he led the village Baris dancers. It was fortunate that they all had to wear white jackets with long closely fitting sleeves. He brandished his spear in his right hand and a scarf in his left and made his stiff fingers move and quiver. It was a torture and he suffered an agony of dread because he was sick and unclean and ought never to have entered the court of the temple. But he still lied to himself without conviction and hoped against hope. Perhaps, too, he even had the childish thought that he might soften the hearts of the gods, who punished him so grievously, by dancing before them at the cost of such agonizing pain in his hands.
No one in the village noticed anything, so far as he could see. The days of the full moon were celebrated in the temple of the puri too, and on the following night a play was given there, in which he had to dance as Arjuna, the most beautiful of all the gods.
Raka avoided Lambon that day, but he spent a long time with Alit, smoking opium. So he was light of heart and almost without a care when the time for his dance drew near. He dressed in Alit’s room in the old, intimate way and he took care not to let the lord see his chest.
It seemed to him that he danced better that night than he had ever danced in his life. He was alone with himself, enclosed in the blue veils that shut him off from the real world. He saw nothing— not even Lambon in her place among the rest of the wives. Those “other thoughts” took possession of him; his arms were like wings and his fingers were supple and he forgot his cares and laughed to think he had had the fear of being attacked by the Great Sickness.
This was the last time Raka danced. After this he danced no more.
The nails fell from his fingers and his fingers contracted. At first it was the left hand only and then the right went the same gruesome way. He slept no longer in the big house, where his son’s cradle was, but in an empty balé near the rice barn. He had heard that the children of parents who were taken with the Great Sickness inherited the uncleanness in some mysterious way and so he kept away from his child, although he felt a great longing during these very weeks to hold his little son in his arms and to press him to his heart and to be consoled and comforted by his baby talk. When he went to Lambon—and the flame of his love still burned within him—he did not dare to be with her except at night and in utter darkness. He held her so tightly in his arms that it hurt her, but his fingers could no longer feel the sweetness of her body. By day he now always wore a black jacket with long sleeves in which he could conceal his hands and if anyone spoke to him he hid them in the folds of his kain.
But if people did not see his hands they saw his face. Even from the day of the temple festival the village had begun to whisper and the rumour went from mouth to mouth and spread from house to house. There were old people in Taman Sari who could recognize the Great Sickness even before the victims themselves were aware of it. It was as though they were alive to the peril of leprosy in advance and no least sign of it could escape them. Raka’s eyebrows had not yet gone thin, but they had lost their glory and glamour. They were the eyebrows of a man marked down. His face was not yet swollen, but the fairness of his skin had taken on a reddish shimmer and no longer lay close and comelily over the bones, but loosely, with a gleam as though of sweat Raka was still beautiful, but he was not himself. He looked like a man marked down for the severest punishment the gods can visit on humanity.
When Bengek, the husky
fisherman, was taken with the Great Sickness, the men stoned him out of the village and they burnt his mother’s corpse without allowing him to take any part in it. They hunted and stoned him from village to village, and now he lived in the scrub on the lagoon where the river entered the sea—the uncleanest spot on the coast, where his own uncleanness could do no more harm. No one gave a thought to his fate or cared if he starved there or was devoured by rats, for the sooner he died the better. But when Raka showed the first symptoms of the sickness the whole village was seized with sorrow and no open mention was made of it. They loved Raka and could not believe that he could be punished in this way, any more than he himself could believe it. He was a Brahman and the son and the grandson of priests and it was inconceivable that he had to pay for the sin of a forefather. And his own life lay open before their eyes, unshadowed and kindly; and since the gods could not be unjust, the people of Taman Sari clung to the hope that it was a mistake and that the old men were deceived in their knowing whispers. The village reserved judgment and held its breath and waited. It was a reprieve they felt was owed to their love of Raka.
One night in the first week of the fourth month when Raka lay in great pain in his lonely balé—for now the toes of his right foot were beginning to contract—it happened that Teragia came to him. He saw her coming with the little coconut shell lamp in her hand, which she put down on the ground a little way off, as though she knew he did not want her to see him. Raka held his breath, rolled himself up in his kain and pretended to be asleep. Teragia came into the balé without making a sound and knelt down near him. He was sleeping on a mat on the bare rammed earth, not on a bamboo couch. For a while she said nothing and he heard only her quick, constrained breathing.