Monkeys in the Dark

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  ‘I would never have credited that you were a bad sailor, Anthony,’ he said, and compressed his small pink lips with satisfaction. ‘I thought you were taught sailing at school.’

  ‘No. Just that we were born to rule,’ Sinclaire shouted back. To Alex he added, ‘Rosebud thinks he’s discovered a weakness. But I’ve taken a sea-sick pill.’ He slipped into his safari jacket, adjusted his cuffs and, with his trousers folded carefully over his arm, tiptoed into the lagoon. ‘I’m lunching at the French Residence,’ he explained, and Thornton, who was never invited to lunch by the French Ambassador—although his French was more idiomatic than Sinclaire’s—looked even more annoyed.

  It was difficult for Alex and Sinclaire to sympathise with Thornton’s attitudes. Alex, however, made the effort and found she almost liked him; Sinclaire was merely amused.

  ‘Those epic stories about bread-and-margarine and his mother taking in ironing!’ Sinclaire used to say. ‘Their only point is to show how clever he is, how he’s come up in the world.’

  At the age of seven Sinclaire had inherited more money than Thornton’s whole family had gathered in a lifetime; Alex had not been forgotten in her grandfather’s will, but Sinclaire, being male, had had the lion’s share. They agreed this was ironic, for it had been a woman—their mutual grandmother—who had made them rich. She was a gold-rush heiress who had eloped with a nobody and had sold her jewels so he could open a shop. By 1900 the shop had become an emporium; by 1906 their grandfather had been a millionaire and, not too long afterwards, a knight.

  The sea was rough. As they cleared the reef the boatman opened the engines to full throttle. The boat lifted her bow and began the rhythmic, jarring plough southwards to port. Alex went forward alone.

  They passed atoll after atoll, miraculous oases in the sea. After a while she stared blankly at them. The islands blurred into one, as the days of escape had melted into a floating vision of coral and gorgeous fish, driving out the tensions of the city. But already the city was drawing her back; there was a kind of magic in that flat, hot sprawl. At times she saw faces so beautiful that her heart lurched. She thought of the bird-like cries of street vendors, the smiles people caressed her with, the coloured mounds of fruit on the pavements, the flowers that strangers in the street gave her, and how they said when she thanked them, ‘You speak Indonesian!’ and ‘Please come to my house’.

  For every delight there was, however, a dialetic, an outrage: the beggar children; the soldiers with their stupid, brutal faces; the detainees whose screams could be heard sometimes at night coming from the police stations; the blood that had gushed out of Java and Bali when the coup was being crushed. Its flow had already stopped and now the blood was dry, but it still defiled the countryside. When Alex sat in family living-rooms at first refusing, as politeness required, then accepting dainties to eat, she often wondered, How did this family escape? What treachery saved them?

  Old hands said, to cheer themselves up, ‘If the world were a horse, Djakarta would be its arsehole.’ At midday lighted candles were placed on restaurant tables to keep away the flies.

  It had been to such a restaurant, selling nasi Padang, that Maruli had taken her on their second meeting. She had come home for lunch to find him seated on her verandah, smoking a kretek.

  ‘You said you were interested in politics. Come to eat. We shall talk about the situation,’ he had said.

  But there had been a group of Army officers in the restaurant and he had talked, instead, of music and the theatre and holidaying in Bali. Once, however, he had dropped his voice and had tapped Alex on the wrist.

  ‘Do you know what happened in Bali?’ She nodded, but he had continued, speaking in English, ‘I saw it with my own eyes. Primary school children, who are taught to love their teachers as they love their mothers, stoned their teacher to death. She rotted in the sun for days because nobody would cremate her—even the priests were coerced.’

  It was nine months since some communists, with a wink from the President, had launched an abortive coup against the right-wing Army élite and had been put down: the third biggest communist party in the world had been crushed. Alex doubted Maruli had in fact seen the children’s courts and she had wondered, momentarily, if his sudden reversal of fortune had made him slightly crazy.

  ‘That’s all over now,’ she had replied evenly.

  ‘Of course,’ he had agreed. ‘Now it’s just mopping-up operations.’

  Alex sat up with a jerk in the bow of the launch. She had been dozing for an hour or more. They had passed the last group of islands and were on an empty sea. The engines had stopped and they were drifting. The swell was heavy.

  In the stern Sinclaire was pouring gin for Meredith, who was singing. Julie Ashby’s plain little freckled face was greenish; The General had already succumbed and was lying with her head over the gunwale, making loud noises. Greaves, hunched and silent, was staring at a can of San Miguel beer he was hiding in his hand. It was fearfully hot. The sky was a white haze of heat which had no particular source—it came from everywhere.

  Alex stared at her companions of the past three days. On Friday, when they had been escaping from the city together they had talked excitedly and made jokes. The General had offered around her apple turnover and Meredith had produced scones from an Arnott’s Biscuits tin. They had all been dressed in freshly-ironed beach clothes and had been hung with cameras.

  The men, apart from Anthony, were now wearing dirty shorts; their eyes were bloodshot from sun. They looked already drunk, as they lurched in counter-movement to the boat. Sweat dripped from their noses. Alex felt revolted as she looked at the reddened, hairy bodies. She remembered the bickering on the island over dinner times and mosquito nets and how she had pleaded with Colonel James not to shoot a turtle. Its shell, with withered pieces of dark meat still sticking to it, was stowed with the other baggage.

  In the stern the engine blurted a cloud of hot, black smoke. They all turned to look at it. It still refused to start. Julie whimpered, then burst into tears. Meredith and Greaves tried to comfort her, but she flailed them away with large, flapping hands.

  Sinclaire disengaged himself from the group and sauntered forward to join Alex in the bow.

  ‘We’ll be in Sumatra in a week,’ he said. He folded his arms and gazed at the sea: in the far distance, several miles away, a brownish smudge indicated the north coast of Java. He smiled to himself, then turned to Alex. ‘We’ll eat Itji first, you know. And then the boatman.’

  ‘Shut up,’ she said.

  ‘I think the infant Ashby should be next. And then we’ll start on Meredith’s bum. First, the left buttock …’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Anthony!’ Alex said. ‘It’s not funny. We haven’t got much water. You can’t blame Julie for being in a panic—babies get dehydrated and die, just like that.’

  Sinclaire hummed. ‘You haven’t got 20-20 vision, have you?’

  ‘Almost.’

  ‘Well, darling girl, why can’t you see the dashing Indonesian naval patrol boat that is heading straight for us and has been for the past four minutes? I could see it from the stern.’

  There was some difficulty in getting Meredith up the rope ladder and when she reached the deck she insisted on kissing two of the young sailors.

  When they were all assembled on board they stood smiling foolishly at each other, even Greaves, who showed a perfect expanse of the dental mechanic’s art. Colonel James was in a state of delight. He repeatedly clapped the captain on the back, muttering, ‘Fine work. Fine piece of seamanship,’ jerking his head and letting out small grunts of pleasure.

  The patrol boat could cruise at seventeen knots and they arrived in port earlier than they would have if their own craft had not broken down. As they stepped ashore Julie caught Alex by the arm and whispered, ‘Did you see the captain’s wrist watch? It was one of those thin gold Piagets. Must have cost three hundred dollars. I bet he makes a packet out of smuggling.’

  Alex shrugged. �
�He maybe saved our lives.’

  Julie replied in a rapid undertone, her face close to Alex’s. ‘Yes, he did. But he had to, only because the rest of them are so hopeless and dishonest. You think you can just shrug it off. You think because they smile so much they’re friendly. But what about the black pamphlets they’re circulating, saying we’re the South Africans of South East Asia? Saying Australia is a neo-colonialist power? They could turn on us any minute. Underneath, they hate us.’

  Thornton was glaring at Julie. Last night he had made the mistake of mentioning the pamphlets to Greaves in Julie’s hearing and Colonel James had looked daggers at him. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Now, darling, the New Order is very pro-West. Those pamphlets are coming from communists …’

  Both women ignored him.

  ‘The reason I don’t get upset is that I know what post-colonial history is,’ Alex said. ‘I studied it for three years.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t go to university, but I know Indonesia,’ Julie retorted. Thornton caught her by the arm and began steering her towards the car that had been awaiting them.

  ‘God, I don’t know why women are called the weaker sex,’ he said loudly to nobody in particular.

  Amanda was a docile baby and they rode in silence back to town. It became hotter as the pot-holed streets became more cluttered with bicycles, betjaks and jeeps. There were no traffic lights or give-way signs and the rules of the road were mainly ‘give way to a larger vehicle’ and always ‘give way to the Army’. At some intersections there were policemen dressed in khaki, with black sunglasses and thin black moustaches. They wore guns in white holsters on each hip. Sometimes, when the shoals of betjaks and bicycle riders would not obey their whistle calls they took out their pistols and fired into the air.

  As the car entered Djalan Hajam Wuruk Alex watched the street dwellers squatting on the edge of the canal, shitting into it. The Presidential Palace was close by and soldiers in their tight-crotched trousers and high black boots lounged on every corner. They were only boys, not long out of the villages, and they strolled hand-in-hand or with arms around each others’ waists, for comfort and from custom. It shocked some Westerners. Others, whose taste for incongruity had been developed by the city, enjoyed the spectacle of cuddling troops, who held their sub-machine guns casually and yelled at girls, ‘Susu!’, ‘Tits!’ The bolder girls replied ‘Bidji!’, ‘Balls!’ in high, catlike voices and the young soldiers fell about laughing. Alex liked the way the city masses flirted. Sex was in the air, like the clove-fragrant smell of kretek smoke. It was part of Djakarta, as were the peeling buildings and iron-grilled shop fronts, the armoured cars and the students’ wall writings, the street dwellers in their grey rags, and the mad people who wore black and had their hair matted with filth. People said there were many more madmen since the coup.

  Outside shops scribes typed letters for the illiterate; in the markets raucous gypsies in weird clothes sold cures for infertility, cancer and kidney stones, in two sizes of bottle. And in the slums, the sprawling kampongs, there were stranger people—women who spoke to the spirits and men who could turn themselves into tigers. By day they worked as government clerks and rode on bicycles. The place seemed half-real, half-fantasy, like a nightmare. And, like a dream, it inflamed the imagination. In its disorder, everything was possible.

  On her first day at work Alex had been called in by one of the embassy consular officers. ‘I’m the money man,’ he had said. ‘The black, dearie. The black. It’s almost double the official rate.’ Currency dealing was an offence punishable by death or, for diplomats, expulsion; but each week the diplomatic cars of fifty nations could be seen outside a house in Menteng, which was guarded by soldiers and which was the black market bank. Nobody in any embassy would admit to living off black market currency; no foreigner calculated local prices on anything but the black market rate, except for official auditors. Embassy officials on low salaries bought large Mercedes cars after a year or so in Djakarta.

  Julie broke the silence to wonder what her servants would have stolen this time.

  As they drove down Djalan Sabang, where the street boys touted for dollars and sold diamond rings made of glass, packets of local gandja and something they called morphine (which might have been Johnson’s Baby Powder, except that this was such a luxury), Alex stared out from the safety of the car. The nasi Padang restaurant Maruli had taken her to was in Djalan Sabang. She remembered how confidently he had strolled past the riff-raff of the street. He had been polite and pleasant to them, and they had dropped back. When Alex went alone to Djalan Sabang, or even with Anthony, who jeered sarcastically back at the boys, she would be reduced to tearful rage as they laughed and shouted at her, waving their bogus merchandise in her face. She thought now, while she observed it all, Maruli is the key.

  2

  The Pusat Kesenian was on the southern outskirts of the city, an uncertain area of small houses and yam fields wedged between the expensive new residential suburb, Kebajoran Baru, and the ricefields that stretched inland to the volcanoes. The main house was four small rooms, whitewashed, with dusty teak chairs and tin ashtrays in the sitting-room, sleeping mats and rickety wardrobes in the bedrooms. The house was shaded by tall fruit trees. In the two acres of ground that surrounded it, banana palms, citrus and papaja trees and bean vines were planted; a flock of small brown goats kept the grass down; chickens and a pair of geese searched endlessly over the red earth around the kitchen pavilion.

  In the mornings the air vibrated with the harmony of gamelan music and the voices of the students practising their opera parts, speaking in the slow, elaborate phrases of high Javanese. But at this time it was still and heavy with afternoon heat.

  Maruli lay on his mat on the floor, twiddling the dials of a transistor radio. He had already listened to the news from Voice of America, but the voice of Peking was elusive, or unintelligible from static. He turned back to Radio Australia: more troops were to be sent to Vietnam. There was nothing about Indonesia, except a short item on further student demonstrations against the President and a description of wall-scribblings which called the Foreign Minister ‘the Peking dog’. There was no mention of the clash between pro- and anti-Sukarno students in Bandung the day before. The omission was good, for it showed the Army was nervous, and bad, for broadcasting of the event would have boosted morale in the cultural centre. Six anti-Sukarno students had been killed. This evening there would be a cell meeting to discuss tactics. Afterwards, Maruli planned to go to Alex’s house.

  It was months, almost a year, since he had been with a woman, and a decade—not since the fifties, in Amsterdam—since he had been with a foreign one. He wondered if he had misread the signs. And suddenly, if she took any contraceptive. There was a pill that women could buy in Singapore. He found it exciting to imagine what must be possible when a child did not lie in each embrace.

  She was so large and pale, and she had the immodest Western habit of looking directly into the eyes. He began to feel a little timid. When he had first seen her he had thought ‘Dutch social worker’. There was something proper about her, puritanical. And she was very bourgeois. The enmity he felt for her and for what she represented made his blood thicken: he wanted to copulate with her like a dog on a street corner.

  There was a light tapping at Maruli’s door. ‘Father,’ a girl student called. ‘It is time.’ He waited until he was calm and still, then adjusted his sarong and went outside.

  The students, about fifty of them, were gathered on the edge of the bare strip of earth at the rear of the house, standing close to the banana trees. In front a little goat was tethered, rubbing its head against the girl’s bare legs. She had been stroking it and crooning to it for some time, and its eyes were dreamy. Maruli gestured to Usman, who ran forward. The boy worried Maruli: he was overanxious to please. Maruli gave him more tasks than the others, to boost his self-confidence, but Usman remained foolish and was boastful with his fellow students.

  Maruli shut
out these problems and concentrated on his immediate duty as leader, as father to them. He took the parang another boy handed to him. ‘Be calm, be still,’ he said quietly. The goat was very dainty, a pet; Maruli stroked its softly-budding head. ‘We thank you for your flesh,’ he said.

  There was only an instant of realisation in the goat’s eye as he cut its throat, murmuring the formula for forgiveness as he did so. The students sighed in appreciation of his deftness; Usman, grinning, held a bucket to catch the spout of blood.

  In the six weeks I’ve been here I have attended 25 cocktail and buffet parties. Anthony says that the parties are a form of tribal rite: we give them, and go to them, to affirm our solidarity. A whisky-soda or a tinned asparagus sandwich, taken in company is, he says, a polite way of shouting Advance, Australia Fair’ at the nig-nogs. I wish he wouldn’t call them that, even as an irony. Most people here use the expression in earnest—at the Ramayana Bar, a place I detest, some foreigners call the waiters ‘Piss Monkey’ to their faces. A kind of desperation, mingled distaste and boredom, overtakes me when I have to listen …

  Itji, staggering through the bedroom with a tin tub of boiling water for Alex’s bath, interrupted her letter-writing. It was time to get ready for Meredith’s party. Fortunately, Alex would not have to dress in the dark: when night had come at six o’clock, the lights, after a few minutes’ brightness, had turned brown, then died, and the guard had started the generator. Alex welcomed the convenience of a private source of electricity, but her bright house in an inky street reminded her again that she was an outsider: nobody but foreigners and very important Indonesians had generators. Maruli, at this moment, would have only candlelight.

  Before she set out for Meredith’s drinks-and-buffet party she repeated her instructions: if a visitor should come Itji was to call in the guard, who knew how to dial the telephone, and he was to ring her.