Love and Death in Bali

by Vicki Baum

  “Are you in pain?” Dekker asked in Dutch.

  The boy opened his eyes, smiled and raised his clasped hands to his shoulder. There were cuts on his chest and arms, and his right hand was grazed by Dekker’s bullet. He answered in a low voice in Balinese.

  “Are you in pain?” Dekker repeated in Malay. “No, tuan,” the boy answered.

  Dekker could not take his eyes from the boy’s face. It was the first time he had seen a Balinese face at close quarters and he was astonished and almost dismayed by its beauty.

  “What is your name?” “Oka is my name, tuan.”

  “Oka,” Dekker repeated. Feeling slightly ill again he closed his eyes quickly. The bread-fruit trees above were beginning to turn round when he sank back and looked up.

  “Water?” the pastor said, holding a water-bottle to his lips. It brought Dekker round.

  “Is there actually water?” he asked in astonishment.

  “Yes, the ration party seems to have discovered where Badung is at last,” Schimmelpennick said cheerfully. Dekker drank eagerly and then held the bottle out to Oka. The boy shook his head. “The Balinese won’t drink after anyone else,” said a Javanese soldier who was sitting on the grass with a sprained foot. Dekker longed to show Oka some little attention and he saw the look he gave the Javanese soldier’s cigarette.

  “Smoke?” he said in Malay. Oka nodded. The pastor produced a large cigarette-case. “The last one, unfortunately,” he said as he offered it to Dekker. Dekker lit it and after one eager puff he handed it to the boy. Oka took it thankfully and then shyly offered it to Dekker again.

  “Little friend—Oka—friends we two,” he said in the little Malay he knew. He put his arm cautiously round the boy’s shoulders and felt a warmth of tenderness he had never known before. His own shoulder hurt him, but he was happy. They smoked their cigarette turn and turn about while waiting for the doctor—the second-lieutenant of the 11th Battalion, and Oka, the boy from the puri of Badung.

  The fighting was over. The puri was burnt almost to the ground. The staff stood on the watch-tower on which was the kulkul of Tian Siap. General Veldte looked down the road through his field-glasses at the heaps of dead. Stretcher-bearers were turning the bodies over to see if there was still life in them and carrying away the wounded. “They don’t utter a sound,” the General said thoughtfully, without taking the glasses from his eyes.

  Van Tilema was on a chair behind him, smoking hard and looking very white. “They have a sort of bravery and pride we shall never be able to understand,” he said wearily.

  “No pleasure to us to have to fire on such fellows,” the General said, “but if we hadn’t they’d have made short work of our men. They were mad.”

  “The holy madness,” Visser said from behind. He had been promised the post of Assistant Resident of Bali for his services and because his native spies had done such good work. He felt sick at heart.

  “Do you remember taking me to that kris dance, Visser?” Van Tilema asked. “I believe they were in a trance today, too, to behave as they did. I even believe they were glad to die.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Visser said curtly. Boomsmer, who was near the General, cleared his throat. “I shall never be able to understand it,” he said, “women and children—and old men, it’s too horrible to be believed.”

  Van Tilema turned to him. “It’s a lesson to us all, Resident, how we ought to treat the Balinese. Hats off to such a death as theirs.”

  An adjutant came up the bamboo ladder and saluted. He carried something in a blood-stained white cloth.

  “The body of the raja has been found, your Excellency. Here is his kris.”

  The General took the kris out of its wrappings, and they all bent over to look at it as Veldte drew the blade from the scabbard. It was a beautiful serpentine blade, with a keen edge. A lion and a snake were engraved one on each side of Singa Braga, hair and scales inlaid in gold. The hilt, too, was of gold and set with Indian gems of many colors and irregular shape.

  “That is Singa Braga,” Visser said. “The holy kris.”

  “Bullet holes,” the General said, stroking the blade which had been pierced in three places by bullets. “A fine trophy.” “We’ll put it in the museum at Batavia to commemorate a gallant enemy,” Van Tilema said, pushing the blade back into the scabbard. The General took off his hat and bowed his head. Boomsmer turned quickly away, tears started to his eyes.

  The last shots fired in Badung were those fired over the graves of the four fusiliers who had fallen on the Dutch side. The bands played a funeral march; the General made a speech, and afterwards Pastor Schimmelpennick took his turn and exhorted the troops to honor the memory of their dead comrades and to serve the Dutch Government as loyally as they had done.

  The Balinese collected their dead on the afternoon of their last assault, and burnt them all at the same time so that their souls should enter heaven together. There were many dead—no one could say how many. Puglug brought home the news that there were over two thousand, but Dasni contradicted her and said that there were six hundred at most, according to the account she had heard. Sarna rebuked her, for in her opinion it was rude of her to imply that Puglug was a liar and a story-teller. Dasni begged pardon and admitted that there were two thousand, or at any rate a thousand. Sarna insisted on Puglug’s being treated for the time with particular respect and consideration, because she had lost her two little daughters in such a heart-rending way. She even went so far as to ask Pak to sleep with her more often so that she might have another child and forget her loss. And Pak, who was himself still upset and sorrowful, went that night to pay his first wife a visit in the big house.

  Whatever the number of the dead in Badung, it was certain at least that scarcely a family had not someone to mourn for. Round the kitchen fire at night they told of the finding of the dead and how they had died—the lord and his uncle pierced with bullets, and all the retinue of both courts had fallen close behind their masters, covering the bodies of their lords with their own. The Dewa Gdé Molog with many other Ksatrias had been blown up by the bursting of the cannon when it was fired as the signal that the end had come. Very few of the women and children had bullet-wounds; they had killed themselves with their krisses or been killed by their husbands and fathers. The women as they whispered together in the kitchen spoke of Lambon and her beauty even after death. She and Tumun, the prostitute, and the slave, Muna, had all died by the same kris. Bijang had been found in the smoking ruins of the puri of Pametjutan, leaning against the wall and slain by her own hand.

  It had been hard to find the old man, Pak’s father, for he was merely one of the servants, and had not even had a white kain to put on. But he, too, was dead, run through by a bayonet. Pak would not rest until he had found him, and was sure his body was burnt and his soul free to enter heaven in company with the more exalted souls of the nobles. There was much mourning for the pedanda, Ida Bagus Rai, for he was a man of great holiness and Taman Sari was lost without him and his counsel. Not far from the pedanda were lying the bodies of the unclean ones, Raka and Teragia and Bengek. But this was spoken of only in a whisper. No one could understand how it came about that the lepers were permitted to take part in this holy sacrament of death and the End. But they were all pleased, since they had loved Raka and revered Teragia.

  “It was the gods’ will,” the people of Taman Sari said when they heard of it. “They carried Raka and his wife to the puri to cleanse them, and free their souls from the curse and the spell that came down to them from their forefathers.”

  “And as for the husky one,” the aunt said in a whisper to the other women, “we can be glad he was burnt with the rest. Now his soul cannot plague the village as an evil spirit and an unseen demon as it would if he had to die unclean.”

  All the women stood at their doors when the Dutch soldiers marched through again on their way to Sanur. They held out baskets of coconuts and fruit as a sign of submission and peace; and the soldiers ate and drank and
patted the children and laughed at the girls’ naked breasts.

  Slowly the villages forgot their fear. The peasants emerged again from their hiding-places and saw to their beasts and their houses. Krkek called a meeting of the subak, for the distribution of the water had fallen into utter confusion and the fields had to be cultivated.

  Pak took out the buffaloes and went to the sawah to resume his ploughing where he had left off when the Dutch landed.

  It was a fine day, sunny, but yet with a cool breeze blowing over the fields from the sea. The tjrorot called and the herons stood fishing for little eels at the edges of the sawahs. Birds sang in the bamboo thicket where Rantun and Klepon had met their death. The women bathed and washed and laughed in the river. Lantjar helped with a second team and Meru sat on a bank and made a show of herding the ducks. It was the second ploughing, and the earth was more obedient to the plough. The mud covered Pak’s legs to the knees in a cool crust. Blok, blok, blok, the soil said. He had made an offering to Sri, the rice goddess, and prayed for a good harvest. His children were dead and his father gone to heaven, but his sawahs were still there. It happened as the gods willed and what they willed was right.

  Madé, his second-born daughter, came out at midday with his food and he took her between his knees and stroked her head. He cut her a fine bamboo wand to catch dragon-flies with. Soon the time would come to make kites for his little boys. The ploughshare cleft the mud and the furrow was straight and good; the sun shone and ripened the western fields while he ploughed and planted the eastern ones.

  On the way home he gave the buffaloes into Lantjar’s charge and went once more into the rice temple. It was unhurt in spite of the shooting, for it was a holy place and the gods loved their new shrine and came there daily to rest unseen. Pak knelt and put his clasped hands to his forehead. He was only a simple man and too stupid to pray. He did not give thanks for anything and he did not pray for anything; he only felt that there was meaning in everything and that things happened as the gods ordained. He was glad of his rice for his evening meal, glad to have Siang and Lintang and Tanah to carry in his arms, glad to caress his cocks and to sleep with his wives. He was glad to beat the gong in the gamelan and to discuss the weighty village affairs with the other men, and to thatch his walls with fresh straw; and he was glad to rest and glad that the war was over. His children were dead and his father had been killed, but his heart was filled with a contentment the white man does not know.

  “Sign here,” Boomsmer, the Resident, told the Chinese, Kwe Tik Tjiang. The merchant of Bandjarmasin read through the receipt which the Resident had pushed towards him.

  “I, the Undersigned, hereby acknowledge the receipt of 7500 (seven thousand five hundred guilders) from the Dutch Indian Government as compensation for the loss of my ship the Sri Kumala, which was wrecked off the coast of Sanur on the 27th of May, 1904, and plundered and broken up by the inhabitants of the province of Badung.

  Buleleng, January 2nd, 1907.”

  The Chinaman dipped his brush in the Indian ink which the Assistant Resident, Visser, pushed towards him and carefully delineated the intricate signs which formed his name at the foot of the receipt.