The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  Around a year ago, Gugah was admitted to one of the rooms in the health clinic with a respiratory disease. The town doctor recommended that she tie a handkerchief over her nose and mouth when she rode to and from school in future. She followed his advice. Whenever she cycled past, the men clearing the forest would laugh at her. But nowadays, they’re all wearing face masks too.

  On some days, Gugah is accompanied by her friend Sri, who carries a basket filled with bottles on her back. In the town, where many people can’t afford to see a doctor, natural herbal tonics and medicines sell well. When I visited the clinic in Palangkaraya, there were only five patients. They were sleeping under stained mosquito nets, their relatives sometimes joining them in bed, or sleeping underneath it.

  But because the Javanese surgeon who was posted here has started demanding sums for treatment that only very few people can afford, in the interim many patients have turned once more to the Dukuns, the traditional men and women of medicine, who know a great deal about herbal medicine, to be sure, but who also use animistic or totemic healing techniques. They’ve also been known to deliberately frighten patients, or to massage pregnant women or people with fractures for so long that blood poisoning has set in. Little wonder, then, that the average life expectancy in Central Kalimantan is only around forty.

  In such circumstances, the kind of development that we call ‘progress’ only happens in a very asynchronous manner. Constantly, new fault lines keep appearing between layers of cultural knowledge, between traditions, between teachers, and between enlightenment and superstition.

  On both sides of the road are felled swathes of woodland, pineapple fields and little ponds where the settlers sit and fish with rods. People are also selling mangoes and eggs by the roadside, and petrol in red containers and even water in blue ones. You can get your bicycle repaired or buy a parasol to shade yourself from the sun. Whatever people hoard in their houses by the side of the highway finds its way to the verge to be sold.

  The small police station looks like it’s been transported here from a model railway set, and given the tiny number of vehicles that are registered in this area, one might well ask what traffic there is for the officers to control anyway? A few kilometres further on, another low building appears out of the smoke. This is the small jungle brothel, set a bit apart from the road and very inconspicuous. Here, five girls wait for clients, one in a rocking chair on the veranda and four on the single sofa in the parlour.

  The girl in the rocking chair is wearing a long, traditional robe with golden threads shot through a red fabric. It’s got a long slit up the skirt, a sign of sinfulness. As she’s dozed off, she doesn’t realize that the slit is gaping wide open, revealing the entire length of her brown leg. Indeed, it’s impossible to overlook a glimpse of eggshell-coloured panties. But when I make to slip past the building, the girl’s eyes open to narrow slits, and she awakens as a knowing woman who makes no move to straighten her garment, but rather basks in this moment of shamelessness.

  Inside the hut, the other four girls are huddled round a bamboo table. In the main, they spend a long time just waiting. They play patience, sell a dullard of a farmer who shuffles past their door a Diet Coke, and watch him as he plods off and crosses the road. One day he won’t come anymore. And one day also the little whorehouse between the dry rice and dwarf pineapple fields will go up in flames. Not many people will have experienced great passion here, but quite a few will probably have lost their virginity. They will count its demise as a loss, certainly.

  ‘Come in,’ the girls beckon to me as I stand in the doorway.

  I’m led into the building and given a Coke. Behind improvised screens, I can make out some stained bed sheets, and pillows in a faded red.

  I sit down in the far corner, which they’ve created by pushing several partitions together. We play cards and drink Cola. One by one, the girls leave the room and go off to do something somewhere, then drift back, rotating to make my choice easier.

  Somewhere in a corner on the far side of the building, someone’s crawling over the floor. It must be some kind of sex game, but it sounds like someone cleaning. The girl who emerges from there wipes the palms of her hands on her dress. The man involved doesn’t appear, though. We play another round of Mau Mau, compare the size of our hands, and put our forearms together to compare the colour of our skin.

  ‘Nice complexion!’

  The prettiest girl pulls a sad face when I make a move to get up and leave. No thanks, I say. She asks me whether I really don’t want to go with her. I shake my head. She says that actually she can’t comprehend how anyone could go to bed with any of the five of them. That almost persuades me to follow her. When I finally set off, she gives a long sigh like a sailor’s wife. Out on the street, there’s not a soul standing, walking or driving past. The sun is searing its way steamily through the haze. At least the brothel has good transport connections.

  The only place where there’s genuinely nothing is Tangkiling, that village at the end of the road from Palangkaraya; in fact, even the road doesn’t end properly here. It ends without really ending; rather it fizzles out like it’s too exhausted to go any further. It’s mustered all the energy it can manage, and now it’s all played out like the soil.

  And yet this place is the bridgehead into the jungle, into the nothing-but-jungle. Only here does the legendary land of the aboriginal inhabitants of this wilderness unfold – the ‘forest people’, as their name literally calls them, the Orang-utan, who nowadays are hunted and displaced, penned in by the encroachments of the transmigrants or abused as pets. In former times, by contrast, they were revered as a separate people. Among the Dayak, the indigenous people of Borneo, there is a taboo against incest with, or mockery of, animals. Anyone who transgresses puts their whole village at risk of being turned to stone.

  The first wild orang-utan I set eyes on is standing upright under the glistening midday sun, high up in the snow-white skeleton of a dead tree. He’s just torn out the aerial roots of a bromeliad to make a lining for his nest, and close by, soon after, he breaks two dead limbs off another tree and hurls them to the ground. Yet none of what orang-utans do – throwing down branches, hammering on rotten stumps, or felling trees – is done out of blind destructiveness. Rather, such noisy behaviour is used by the great apes as a way of communicating and marking out their territory. You can often recognize the domain of a particular orang-utan from the evidence left behind by the muscular force of his arms.

  It’s claimed that orang-utans are only just as sociable as a mammal needs to be. They’re certainly much more solitary creatures than chimpanzees or gorillas, and, I reckon, more melancholic too. Adult males especially are such loners that meetings between them are only observed about once a year. They use their long calls, signals that can be heard for kilometres, both to attract females that are in season and to demarcate their territory from that of rival males. Because the females stay largely silent, it’s clearly left up to them to decide whether to mate with the males. They, in turn, only accept females whose fertility they’ve assured themselves of beforehand.

  I make my way through Tangkiling, an untidy, improvised settlement, and in no time find myself leaving the far side of it. In the river, women are washing clothes and children are bathing. On the far side of the settlement, snapped branches and heavily damaged tree crowns and young plantations bear witness to the destructive fury – though others call it construction talent, the urge to build – of the orang-utan. Their domain, if they can still be said to have one, begins here, beyond the Palangkaraya Road, which ends like it’s just trickling away into a patch of dark jungle earth.

  Recently, the women who have left their washing to flock round me tell me, another foreigner came here, another European. This Swiss priest made no bones about the fact that his mission was to open up, even subjugate, Asia in general and Borneo in particular to ‘the one true faith’. Having learned a fair smattering of Chinese back home in Switzerland, enough at least –
or so he thought – to get by, he stood up to preach at an improvised pulpit somewhere in the vast expanse of China, and delivered his sermon in a horrible mishmash of Swiss German and Chinese. But in any event, he preached for about an hour and a half, and after giving the Blessing, he strode off with his head held high, until a couple of lads came running after him, calling out; ‘Mr Jesus, you’ve forgotten your hat!’ Throughout his sermon, they thought he’d been recounting his own life story!

  Deeply disillusioned, he’d quit China to come in his black cassock to spread the Gospel among the wild men of Borneo. Unfortunately, though, he got lost in the jungle and after several days, now emaciated and with a rough beard, arrived at the river, where he tried to hail passing boats for help. However, he looked so dishevelled, with his white skin and his black robes, that the locals took him for a ghost and wouldn’t dare go near him, and so the Good Lord let his servant die of hunger in a bush on the riverbank.

  ‘We laid him out in that hut over there,’ says a young man. ‘But what are we supposed to do with him? Apparently, his brother’s coming to take his body home. Wouldn’t you like to pay your last respects to him?’

  As I approach the bier where the unfortunate man is lying in his cassock, with a long beard, hollow cheeks and deeply sunken eyes, it suddenly dawns on me who this brother is who’s expected to arrive there, and whom I’d really rather not meet again. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ I vividly recall, ‘interesting, interesting.’ So I bow briefly to these mortal remains, turn around and make every effort to put as much distance between me and the deceased, this revenant, as fast as I can.

  The road to Palangkaraya lay before me once more.

  Kamchatka

  Ashes and Magma

  You wake up and realize you’re flying over a brain, red and deeply furrowed and bizarrely formed, with meandering nerve tracts; you’re cruising over it at 31,000 feet, and it looks like an organism. You’re on your way to a spot, 8,000 kilometres from home, across a geological formation consisting of loftily towering rocky massifs, deep chasms and tectonic stratifications laid bare. It’s picturesque. And alien. You feel like you ought to be singing sea shanties, feeling homesick and watching junks sail by.

  But on the in-flight television screen, the little symbol of the aircraft only proceeds infinitesimally slowly and jerkily along the dotted line of its simulated flight path, as it creeps through eleven different time zones. The Russian government plans to reduce these to eight soon. On another channel, a group of Polish female sumo wrestlers suddenly appears, followed by rally cars racing in Uganda, an Indonesian badminton player and finally a parade of Father Christmases. The world is multifarious and far-off. Then the cabin lights are switched on, and the stewardesses start coming round with trays of fish in a shiny sauce.

  The harsh landscape of Russia is now beneath you. Spread your wings and somewhere ahead of you is Siberia, while directly below you is Manchuria, and in the dry stream beds lurk the mounted warriors of Genghis Khan with their battle standards.

  Through half-closed eyelids, the businessmen examine the ethnic diversity on their meal tray. They haven’t left Europe yet, but neither have they arrived in Asia; in this culinary no man’s land, the prevailing idiom is ‘crossover’.

  It’s also the names of the places you pass through, words with the mythical resonance of Samarkand, Surabaya, Havana, Damascus, Dakar, Timbuktu, or for that matter Kamchatka. The name has a rhythm to it that’s like the tune of a military march, sung by a male voice choir. A vista opens up in the word; it expands as you say it. That’s a good thing. Because in reality, the wide open spaces are becoming ever more constricted. Overpopulation, wars, waves of migration, natural disasters, resentments and epidemics are pushing them ever closer together. And the cities are expanding ever more carelessly, not merely by swallowing up the grey zones of the outskirts, but, far worse, by making the villages somehow city-like, turning them into places that act like they’re metropolitan and have metropolitan needs to be fulfilled.

  Villages don’t respond anymore to the needs of villagers, they only acknowledge townsfolk, and so we’re gradually becoming claustrophobic. We never get out of the city anymore. And so our journeys take on the nature of leaps into the unknown. We follow a reflex to break out into the open. It’s as though our lives have got stuck in the elevator. But scarcely have we freed ourselves than we rush out in search of a word, a much vaunted word like: Kamchatka.

  Viewed from above, the clouds have the beauty of animal pelts. Their surface seems to positively stretch out to be touched, and the slightest brush, say by the flat edge of one of the plane’s wings, slices through their form. They rear up, roll slowly over to the other side of the aircraft and their edges flutter off into the atmosphere.

  After we’d been underway for about two hours, I raised the blind on my window just enough to let some milky light in, but not so much as to wake the snoring colossus sitting to my left. Barren land now lay below us, dry river meanders in dustbowl valleys, withered steppelands, a blanket of filth stamped flat and stretched out like skin under a microscope or wallpaper – yet at the same time like nothing I’d ever seen before. The sun was wilting on the horizon, seemingly undecided whether to rise or set.

  We flew on to the sub-Arctic landscape, a sparsely populated terrain which up until 1990 had been a restricted nuclear test zone and so inaccessible to outsiders. Since then, the capital, Petropavlovsk Kamchatski, has been steadily shrinking. Once upon a time it had easily 300,000 inhabitants, but today that number has fallen by over a third, and the people that do still live here don’t like to hear you refer to this as ‘Siberia’; after all, that’s too reminiscent of gulags and enforced exile.

  ‘We call ourselves the Far East,’ a woman on the plane says sharply, before snatching up a copy of the Russian Hello! magazine and immersing herself in an article about Amy Winehouse having a nervous breakdown. I glance around the plane. So, these are the people who are already working or living or dwelling in Kamchatka, or who have some other reason for visiting this eastern outpost of the Russian Empire.

  Two aging men, corpulent and with grey crew cuts, who are drinking beer after beer and conversing loudly above the roar of the engines, recline their seats and look at one another through their little piggy eyes like lovers. They hold each other’s gaze, like nothing else in the world really matters. Then they wink at one another, coquettishly and theatrically, to show how much they are on each other’s wavelength, and feast on some fruit jellies and peanuts. On one occasion, they whisper something to the flight attendant that makes her disappear, blushing, behind the partition curtain, where, as it turns out, she exchanges her short-armed bib for a less revealing stewardesses’ uniform. The atmosphere in the cabin is raw, earthy, stressful and only sporadically jovial.

  Then the west coast of Kamchatka comes into view. The outline of the mountain ranges, with their ribs of snow-capped ridges, looks like it’s been sketched by a rather inept hand. Then the scene is enveloped by cloud, but in those places where the cloud cover has been thrust up from below, forming the odd towering cumulus stack here and there, you know there’s volcanic activity going on underneath. When the cloud cover begins to clear, the first thing we catch a glimpse of is the Opala River, followed by the black cones of the volcanoes around Petropavlovsk: Mount Avachinsky, Mount Mutnovsky. For a moment, we’re alone with them in the layers of thin cloud, into which they release puffs of steam and gas from their fumaroles: below is a foam of cloud-cream and above it a feather-light veil of gauze, and between them the two matrons with their fumes and their smoky aura, saturated with volcanic ash. They smudge their dirty exhalations up into the pillows of cloud above.

  The broad, curving expanse of Avachinsky Bay unfolds in front of us. The landscape that comes into view at the foot of the volcanoes is patterned like the bark on a tree trunk. The wasteland between the watercourses and the lakes, the dark spots indicating small community farmsteads, made up of a haphazard collection of barracks an
d sheds, the meanderings of the roads, which obligingly hug the contours of the mountains, the rivers, the volcanoes Avachinskaya Sopka and Koryanksky; this entire natural patchwork is orchestrated by a force that has only found its most visible manifestation in the firespewing mountains.

  Kamchatka lies on the Pacific ‘Ring of Fire’. In the east, this zone of generally unstable geological terrain runs along the Aleutian deep-sea trench and its foothills extend all the way down to California. From the south, the thicker Oceanic tectonic plate is slowly pushing itself beneath the Asiatic continental plate, turning the whole of the Kamchatka Peninsula into a site for the discharge of subterranean energy, which finds release in the form of volcanoes and geysers. This landscape, which geologically speaking is one of the youngest in the world, is constantly being shaken by the shifting of the earth’s tectonic plates.

  Earthquakes occur here sometimes as often as several times a week, and whenever things begin rattling or shaking, this only serves to remind those living here of their mortality once more, and of the fact that they inhabit a young, a very young, piece of land, one that hasn’t yet been completed, and demonstrates to them beyond all doubt that we inhabit a living planet with immense energy at its core. Geologists warn that a catastrophe is bound to take place here in the foreseeable future. The city will disappear, the victim of a volcanic eruption or an earthquake, but still the locals remain here, telling themselves: not now, not today, not in our lifetime. Where else are we supposed to go? they ask. They live quite different lives to the rest of us, more aware as they are of the limited time at their disposal.