The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  On the floor, rice is being cooked on a camping gas stove, while fizzy drinks in unhealthily lurid colours are being thinned down from the tap. The little girls have been made up especially lavishly, draped with lots of gold chains and their faces heavy with make-up. The children who are a bit older already look at this world through knowing, possibly even corrupted, eyes. They are old before their time. The hardening evident in their faces is just the next stage on from cunning, cynicism and greed, and finally even this emotion is no longer fresh in eyes whose gaze encounters the person they’re looking at with a dead stare.

  In the penultimate cubicle off the passageway sits the mother/ procuress on a dirty mattress. She’s like a queen on her throne there; after all, she’s offering something which in its own way is quite unique: her daughter. This mother, dressed in black, with black eyeliner and dripping with gold jewellery, still has the face of a girl. But something shifty has crept in too, and only when this face needs to exert its charm by making the smile linger just a bit too long, and the long earrings jingle coquettishly as she inclines her head, then, just for a fleeting moment, she’s a hard, enterprising woman who’s keen to get down to business. But her thickset eighteen-year-old with the greasy blue complexion is waiting all alone on her mattress in the last booth at the head of the corridor, where everything comes to an end. She sits there alone, playing with the ends of her hair and with a fixed, simple-minded stare. No, her daughter is among the youngest girls on this corridor, but not among the most attractive.

  But what about desire? Where does it enter the scene here, and what are its outlets? Where does it fling itself into the arms of extravagance, of excess? Yes, where is the superfluous, the circumlocutory? Where does desire open up the space here for its boundless promise? The world-weariness of whores is an invention of the cultural superstructure. In these catacombs, too, there is no gesture that is not professional, not tactical. And indeed, why should the woman want to be anything other than ‘the juice extractor’, that mocking term men use, a machine simply designed to generate secretions.

  Yet on the other hand, love in the West has evolved into its own unique sanitary realm. Suddenly, it’s all got to do with hygiene, and health puts Eros in the shade. But what if the true relief provided by sex consisted precisely in surmounting all these health-preserving caveats? In the moment of climax, at least. The scourge of AIDS has made the act of love more narrow-minded.

  The mother accompanies me to the end of the corridor and presents her daughter: Mumtaz, the stocky attraction under a tall room fan. She eyes me briefly, but it’s clear she’d rather stare at the fan. Mumtaz is not just HIV-positive, she’s got full-blown AIDS. You can tell that just by looking at her.

  With her hair tied back, and looking pale and a little hamster-cheeked, the girl keeps on masticating and staring blankly; it could be a piece of chewing gum that she’s chewing on, or perhaps she’s just sucking her own tongue. Then, abruptly, her mouth is still; there’s no further impulse reaching it. Now Mumtaz is just gawping. From a basic position of defiance, her facial expression transforms into one of annoyance. Mumtaz scratches her face, then the inside of her ears, and finally her hairline. Suddenly, she starts talking in a high-pitched voice, but her mother hushes her up.

  ‘Pay no attention,’ she says, ‘what she’s saying is all nonsense.’

  Mumtaz opens her mouth to reveal a forest of teeth, so higgledy-piggledy that she looks really quite crazed when she laughs. Then her eyes fix on something on the blue rug across her lap, and she puts her head to one side, stops her mindless chewing and furrows her brow, holding this gesture for effect: a woman running through her repertoire of facial expressions, but then things start to swim before her eyes. She inadvertently bites her bottom lip and instantly starts sobbing, and does this a couple of times, long enough until she’s evidently forgotten how to proceed. No, she won’t cry after all, no, she’s lost the thread and is already somewhere else entirely.

  While we’re still gazing at the girl’s face with interest, the mother takes the opportunity to begin her sales pitch again: of course, she says, anyone who’s already HIV-positive could have sex with Mumtaz without using any protection. If you stop to think about it, there’s no reason why not, and how wonderful it would be for those poor unfortunates to acquaint themselves once more with the joys of unprotected sex. Others, though, would be well advised to use protection, but then again, it might prove a fascinating experience – she actually uses the word ‘spellbinding’ – to sleep with someone who, as you can see for yourselves, is mentally disturbed.

  ‘Disturbed?’

  Well, she continues, disturbed in the sense that she can sometimes pounce on a man and give him a right good seeing-to. She’s got amazing stamina, so when she’s like that you can take her long and hard. But at other times, it can happen that she’ll just push a man away and won’t let him lay a finger on her under any circumstances.

  ‘I can’t fathom it,’ she says, ‘but that’s just the way she is. Spellbinding!’

  Saying this, the mother looks at her own daughter with disgust. Mumtaz is sweating. Her movements now appear to have no causation whatsoever. She’ll grab a face cloth without glancing at it first. When she rubs her face, it’s like she didn’t even know she had one. Her fingers, short and fat as they are, keep flying up and landing somewhere on her body and immediately start scratching, kneading, pinching or rubbing. Mumtaz isn’t wearing any make-up except for the thick deposits of kajal lining her eyes. Her skin is covered with a patina of grease, her earrings are tiny and in all likelihood the only pieces of jewellery she possesses. They dangle down on either side of her yokelish face, with its look of blank incomprehension, like a malicious gag by someone who was deliberately trying to draw attention to this face, of all faces.

  ‘Look,’ says her mother, ‘she’s well put together’. She proceeds to demonstrate on her own body. ‘Here, her heart’s below her head, so her feelings can never be stronger than her brain. Right, Mumtaz?’

  The girl just scratches her belly through her black blouse.

  ‘But the least important thing for her is sex. It’s in the lowest position. Even eating’s more important than that. Right, Mumtaz?’

  The question reaches her fine, but takes a long time to sink in:

  ‘Nah,’ says Mumtaz after a while, baring her collection of teeth, ‘nah,’ and actually manages to shrug her shoulders like a girl, smiling coyly, but grotesquely. Her mother responds by snatching everything from her – the words from her mouth, the cloth from her hand.

  ‘You’re being a real pain in the neck again!’ she shouts.

  In the background, there’s the high tremolo sound of a song from a Bollywood movie, the raucous cry of a querulous old woman, a telephone ringing, the clatter of pots and pans, and cars honking. Now a tug of war’s begun between the mother and daughter over the cloth. They take turns pushing the grubby red flannel into each other’s faces, wiping off the sweat and the spittle round their mouths, and a faint smile plays across Mumtaz’s face all the while, a look of superiority, like she’s recalling some incredibly abstruse thought.

  Then she yawns, without actually yawning; it looks more like an attempt to take the weight off her jaw. When the mother decides it’s time she made light of this all and attempts a joke Mumtaz doesn’t laugh, but instead takes the rag and uses it to wipe the dirt from the curve of her neck and the crook of her arm. She rubs and rubs until finally her mother slaps the back of her hand, whereupon Mumtaz starts using the flannel as a fan, but clumsily hits herself in the face several times.

  Mumtaz: the serenely self-contained. Her face was surely never that of a woman, in any event it’s become mannish and puffy, picking up dirt and sweat and exuding it again like a man’s. It has a narrow range of expressions, and Mumtaz is even reluctant to utter her own name. She’s not happy being herself; rather she’s content at least to have the capacity to express what she doesn’t want to be. Nor does her tongue sit eas
ily in her mouth, lolling about sullenly from one corner to the other; whenever she pokes the tip out, she wipes it away with the cloth.

  So there she sits ensconced, at the end of a long corridor called the Descent into Hell, behind her the wall, and in front of her the pimps, the procurers, the sick people and the animals, surrounded by an empty existence and accompanied by the soundtrack of the twenty-first century. All wrapped up in herself along with her impulses, her emotions, her reflexes – ill but still just about useful, the princess of the lowest class of humanity.

  And all that she’s capable of doing on her mattress-throne is to be that oracle which occasionally holds audiences with men, yielding to them with squeals of joy or driving them away and rejecting them. Who knows whether the men come to her for her bizarre desires or just out of curiosity, or whether they’re making fun of her or wanting to submit themselves to an oracle?

  But as for this visitor, this fine young man in his beige- coloured union suit, he’s clearly visiting her with the best of intentions, and as he stretches his slim hand out to touch her cheek, she responds straight away by trustingly resting this plump cheek in his palm.

  With a groan, the mother stands up and gestures to me to do likewise. The curtain is closed again. There is no reason to distrust the look of contentment on Mumtaz’s face, no reason at all except for that moment when, as I’m making my way out of the building and have almost reached the start of the corridor again, I hear a human voice begin to drone, then rise to a bellow as if from the lowest registers, the deepest bass notes, of an organ – it’s unlike any noise I’ve ever heard before. When it reaches the high notes, the voice twitters hysterically, flapping down the dingy passage; no one can say whether lust, pain or death is at the root of a howl like this. But then it dissipates into the wail of a child, a desperate screech like a baby kicking and screaming. The oracle has spoken: the gentleness of a man, his cajoling and his courting, was all in vain and his attempt to be affectionate towards Mumtaz was all to no avail.

  No sooner have I made it out onto the street once more and taken a few steps than someone seizes my right hand from behind. But as I try to pull it away impulsively, the street kid who’s been sitting on the low wall opposite waiting, shouts out:

  ‘Leave him be!’

  It was one of the eunuchs; he draws my hand up to his lips and then disappears.

  ‘Congratulations,’ says the boy, ‘there’s nothing luckier than having a eunuch kiss your hand.’

  Involuntarily, I glance down at my hand.

  ‘So,’ the boys asks me, ‘how was it?’

  I can still hear Mumtaz’s scream reverberating in my head. But the kid shoots me a reproachful look.

  ‘Nicht schlecht, Herr Specht?’

  Tangkiling

  The Road to Nowhere

  When you’re swimming through the clouds at such altitude and so steadily over the desert, you lose the elemental feeling for movement. Down at ground level, all increases in velocity are accompanied by a visual sensation of speed. But this swooping through the air, this gliding over distant chequerboards and cross-hatchings, vaultings and distensions, planes and hollows deprives the eye of its capacity to perceive the normal speed indicators of the external world, the change in proportions and the dwindling and formation of its colourfulness.

  During the stopover in Bahrain, I walked the length of the terminal building, just once up and back down again, through all the lavish mascarpone marble, passing pillars and columns, feeling dwarfed by the towering, blind caryatids of aviation, colossi supporting the great arches, past the lifeless counters and the line of sleepers, who lay slumped on polished benches with their heads buried in black cloths beneath the pictures of palm trees and presidents. In front of the airport mosque, there was a pile of fifty pairs of plastic sandals, though no sounds emerged from inside. But when the plane was airborne over the desert again, even the images of the marble, the pillars and the caryatids paled against its radiance.

  ‘Did you see the mosque?’ I asked the Swiss German in the seat next to me.

  He kept staring straight ahead and answered:

  ‘Yesyesyes.’

  He seemed to reflect for a moment, then glanced in quick succession down the gangway, at his other neighbour’s mouth, out of the window, at the title page of a magazine in the seat pouch in front of him, out of the window once more, and finally at my right leg.

  ‘Yesyesyes. Interesting, interesting.’

  By the time another hour had passed he’d drunk himself into a state of good-natured tipsiness, clearly in order to take the edge off his anxiety. He also amused himself by harassing the flight attendant, who came from Singapore and who was wearing a red uniform. She was just about to spend three days’ leave with her boyfriend. The Swiss guy kept winking at her, which she ignored. For the summer, she planned to go on a cycling tour in Brittany for three weeks with her ‘darling’, as she now made a point of calling him. Did I know if you could hire bikes in Brittany? My neighbour chimed in to say that yes, you could. She left.

  Next, he tried to engage her in a discussion about politics, but his English wasn’t up to it. I found myself becoming more and more repelled by the faint smile that played over his face as he persisted in trying to chat up and touch up the stewardess, and when he finally started to tell me all about the Love of Jesus, I really began to feel hemmed in at my window seat, and stared ever more fixedly out of it.

  Behind us already lay the industries of Balikpapan, the quaysides of the great oil-producing city on the east coast of Borneo, with its chimneys belching smoke and the refinery installations rapidly rusting in the tropical humidity.

  The streets end at rivers, and the rivers end at other rivers. They determine the irregular pattern that has been created from the remains of a six-million-year-old primeval rainforest and the clear-felled areas in which the new settlers have erected their brightly painted barracks. Some way off in the jungle you can still make out the old scattered villages and even the odd longhouse; but everything is shrouded in dense smoke from smouldering open fires.

  In former times, Dutch colonial officials, Filipino corsairs and missionaries and Chinese and Malaysian merchants all ventured from the river estuaries into this wilderness, the second largest jungle in the world. Nowadays, only very few white people travel to central Kalimantan or Borneo, but every month thousands of Javanese, Balinese and Madurans, in smaller or larger family groups, land at the harbour of the southern metropolis of Banjarmasin or at the airport at the capital Palangkaraya.

  For several centuries now, Indonesia’s population has been clustering on Java, the island with the most fertile soil; it’s now the most densely populated area in the entire world. Two-thirds of all Indonesians live either here, on the offshore island of Madura, or on neighbouring Bali. Even on the largest of these three islands, the population density is still twice that of Germany.

  As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, the region’s Dutch colonial masters began relocating the Javanese to the wilder island of Sumatra. By the outbreak of the Second World War, some two hundred thousand people had left Java. According to the Indonesian regime, by the end of this century, that figure will have increased to around seven million people, who will have decamped from Java in the course of the world’s greatest relocation programme, the so-called ‘Transmigration’. They have been assured that a secure future awaits them, above all on Kalimantan and in the jungles of Borneo.

  The people who arrive at the airports on those islands still sport their traditional garb: the prosperous Javanese – administrators, medics, or lawyers – in their garments with embroidered hems, the Balinese in their sarongs, or shorts, with batik shirts or T-shirts, and some of the women veiled. Those hanging around the airport here, stressed out and brimming with exhausted expectation, can barely understand one another. Indonesian is a recently-developed, synthetic official language that has been designed to replace 250 or more regional tongues, plus as many dialects a
gain.

  The only thing that the new arrivals have in common is anticipation, nothing else, and instead of receiving any proper preparation for their migration, they are given a promise. They will all be supplied with: a roof over their head, farmland, seeds and a photo of the president. In addition, they will receive some rudimentary training in farming and hygiene. But one fact they’re already well aware of: after all, on Java too, any settlement of any size has its own monument to family planning, the symbol of a happy, small-sized family, and in the villages as well there is at least a traffic sign to the same effect: a hand with two outstretched fingers and the legend ‘dua anak cukup’ – ‘two children is enough!’

  The washrooms in the airport at Banjamarsin have a pictorial sign in them, explaining how to use a Western-style toilet: ‘Don’t squat with your feet on the rim of the bowl, don’t scoop any water from the pan, and don’t put your head in it either!’ And next to the mirror is a list of rules for personal hygiene: ‘Don’t forget to clean your ears, your nose, and even your elbows!’ The walls of the main departure lounge are covered with fading pictures showing rainforest animals and plants, alongside the beaming faces of people on ‘Lifebuoy’ posters, and black and white advertisements for ABC Drinks and Ultra Milk. No other pictures are in evidence.

  At the washbasins, I once again found myself in the company of my Swiss neighbour from the plane. He was scooping up water with both hands from the basin and splashing it on his face, over and over again. As he did so, he kept talking to his own image in the mirror:

  ‘Wake up, will you? Wake up!’

  ‘Is someone collecting you?’ I asked.

  He rotated the whole of his upper body towards me and looked at me for a moment like I’d said something obscene.