by Dawn Farnham
With this dream of deceit, half our sorrow’s represt,
Nor taste we the poison, of Love’s last adieu!
She threw the book onto the bed. A dream of deceit. Love’s last adieu. She took the pearl in her hand. Would they never meet again? Was it impossible even to have news of him, to know he was well? She crawled onto the bed and began to cry.
9
Charlotte put the finishing touches to her toilette. The maid had overfussed with her hair, and she pulled it out, tying it more loosely. Charlotte was a little afraid of the maids and rarely dared complain or change anything they did. She was not used to servants and she found herself altered. Somehow she had lost a certain confidence in herself. She recognised it but could do little about it. When she talked of this to Takouhi, her friend just waved her hand and told her to do as she liked with the maids. With Tigran away and Takouhi so engrossed in the wedding plans and other business of her own, Charlotte found herself alone and lonely.
She had wandered down to the river in the early morning. It took half an hour to reach the bank, but the heat was not yet up. She enjoyed meandering along the road lined with the spreading crowns and nomadic roots of these mighty saman trees. She knew this type of tree as a “rain tree” and had discovered it was the goddess Liberalitas of the jungle. It shaded man, beast and plants from the burning sun, but on cloudy days and from dusk to dawn its leaves curled into tight little wads, allowing rain to fall to the ground below and nourish the earth. Birds, small lizards and tiny creatures nested in its capacious nooks and harvested its bounty. In every cranny its body was benevolent host to dozens of sprouting thick green leaves living off the watery bark. Orchids and spidery ferns lovingly hugged its every limb. It oozed a sweet honeydew for sap-loving insects, made into nectar honey by the villagers. In flower it was covered in thousands of fragrant pink and scarlet blooms like small fan-shaped feather dusters standing up from the leaves in a crown, beauteous to the eye and nose, food for monkeys which ran about its height and nectar for moths and bees. The fruit, in long black lumpy pods, was bursting with sticky pulp which was sweet and edible and tasted like licorice. The children sucked the pods, and the villagers made a tea from them. From the infused bark they brewed a medicine for the stomach. The beautiful wood was used for boats, furniture and carvings. Small rodents and the deer in the park feasted on its fallen pods, and its green leaves and seeds were nutritious fodder for the other domestic animals. To walk beneath these trees was to know in some small way the infinite gift of the forest to all creatures who dwelt within its life-giving compass.
They seemed to give her succour too, and the sickness Charlotte felt when she rose had abated. At the river bank she turned to look for the orchard which Riejmsdijk had laid out for his wife. The bathing pavilion was much further up the bank, surrounded by the Arjuna trees. Near the Japanese bridge, however, she found signs of the garden. A grove of gnarled trees stood back from the river, and underneath them a broken and tumble-down wooden hut, its thatch gone, only clinging in places to the corners of the roof, like whispery hairs on an old man’s head. The trees must have tried to flower, for though now full of leaves, the ground was covered in a mat of fading white blossom. Bamboo poles supported the leaning branches of these trees, now straggling and parched. Charlotte presumed that these were trees from Japan which had not grown well, so far from their native soil.
Like them, Charlotte thought, reflecting on the early deaths of Riejmsdijk’s wife and children. A stone lantern covered in creepers and moss stood, just visible, to one side of the hut. She cleared it a little and saw its distinctive roof shape, like the Chinese temples in Singapore, like the silver mount on her pearl necklace. She saw a stone bench and sat down, overcome with momentary sorrow: for herself, for Zhen, for this Japanese girl who had been transplanted to another soil and failed to thrive. She felt tears welling, and shook her head angrily.
“Stop crying, Kitt,” she said to herself. “I am so sick of this endless crying, so tired of feeling sick.”
Charlotte knew that this sickness should go away in a few weeks, but at the moment it seemed interminable.
She looked into the mirror. She was pale, and there were dark circles under her eyes. She applied a little whitening, a touch of rouge, then rose and made her way downstairs to where the carriage was waiting. This evening she and Takouhi were going to the Shouwberg to see the French theatre troupe perform Hernani, ou L’honneur Castillan, the famous play by Victor Hugo which had caused riots in Paris.
As they drew up at the theatre, Charlotte peered at this building, with its Empire architecture, a sense of excitement building. She had never been to a theatre before. It was thrilling; the sight of ladies and gentlemen dressed in their finery climbing the marble steps, the buzz of conversation about this play which had become notorious, the faint sounds of an orchestra tuning instruments. Exuberant baroque mirrors lined the walls of the entrance hall, reflecting the crowd endlessly around the room. Nathanial Fox hailed them and picked his way through the throng. They left the crush and made their way to the red-velvet-lined seats to one side, set away and slightly above the rest. Wilhelmina Merkus had lent them the Governor-General’s booth for the evening.
The room was hot, and every fan was in motion, like the incessant wings of hovering moths. Oil lights at the foot and to the sides of the stage threw brightness onto the dark blue curtain, but the rest of the room was in semi-darkness. Ushers with lamps showed couples to their seats. Charlotte was impatient for the play to begin, fanning herself rapidly. She watched the audience buzzing with conversation and then, suddenly, the orchestra fell silent. Three loud raps resounded from the stage. A hush fell on the crowd.
The curtain rose, and Charlotte held her breath. A room appeared, a bedroom. Near the bed, in the middle of the room stood a table with a lamp. An ancient crone dressed in black had risen from a chair and begun to pull crimson curtains across a window when a knock was heard at a concealed door. It sounded loud in the hushed theatre, and Charlotte jumped. The crone stopped and listened.
A second knock, louder than the first.
“Serait-ce déjà lui,” the old crone muttered, surprised
A third knock, then a fourth,
“Vite, ouvrons.
She went to the door, opened it and a tall man entered, a hat shading his eyes, his coat collar masking his face. He threw off his coat and hat and stood revealed in a rich Castillian costume of velvet and silk.
The old woman gasped and took a step back. “Quoi, seigneur Hernani, ce n’est pas vous? Au feu!”
Charlotte was spellbound. This was Don Carlos, the King, who had come to seduce Doña Sol, though she was betrothed to Ruy Gomez, her old uncle. She was expecting not Don Carlos but the man she truly loved, the bandit Hernani. The king bribed the crone to hide him in a cupboard, and as the door closed a young woman entered from the left of the stage, dressed in white. Charlotte gasped; she was incredibly beautiful, her voice plaintive.
“Ah je crains quelque malheur
Hernani devrait être ici.”
Then a knock came at the door, and Hernani entered, wearing a great hat and coat, a cuirasse of leather, a sword and a knife in his broad belt. He was a figure of romance, young and vigorous, though Charlotte thought him not nearly handsome enough.
Doña Sol ran to him, her love evident in the way she said his name. His love obvious in the poetry he whispered to her
From that moment Charlotte was utterly caught up in the play. Star-crossed lovers: Romeo and Juliet, Charlotte and Zhen. Hernani came into the power of Ruy Gomez, who spared his life but extracted a pledge that Hernani must take his own life on hearing the sound of Ruy Gomez’s hunting horn. Hernani was found to be a noble, and his rank restored by the king, who had abandoned his ardour for Doña Sol and given her to her beloved. The audience breathed a sigh of relief. The lovers were married and came into each other’s arms. Joy was all around, when suddenly the fatal hunting horn sounded. Ruy Gomez, thwarted, w
as implacable and demanded Hernani’s death, placed before him a poisoned cup. The audience gasped, and tears sprang to Charlotte’s eyes. Her thoughts flew to Zhen. Surely he would not obey. But honour was at stake, and he took up the fatal chalice. Doña Sol threw herself at his feet.
“Non, non, rien ne te lie,
Cela ne se peut pas! Crime! Attentat! Folie!”
But honour demanded it, and he drank, and she, pulling it from his hands, drank too. Ruy Gomez watched now, horrified at his act of villainy.
As the lovers died in each other’s arms in an ecstasy of devotion, Ruy Gomez killed himself. The tragedy was total; the orchestra boomed its doom-laden salute. Charlotte watched, her handkerchief in her mouth, tears streaming down her face. Takouhi too, and even Nathanial, were caught up in the drama, and when the curtain fell, they all breathed a sigh of relief. The audience erupted, standing, clapping and calling. A triumph!
The curtain rose, and the actors and actresses appeared. When Doña Sol came forward, the audience gave her a long, standing ovation. The performance had been a revelation. Charlotte clapped until her hands stung. Nathanial, smiling, said he knew the main actress. Would she and Takouhi care to meet her? Charlotte eagerly agreed, and Takouhi, happy for her friend, accepted. They went backstage.
The actress they had so admired was seated at the mirror, her black curly locks flowing over her shoulders to her tiny waist. She turned as she saw shapes on the mirror and rose in one fluid movement, the flow of her gown a swish on the floor. She gazed at Charlotte and smiled, a smile of such feminine sweetness that Charlotte was utterly charmed.
Then, unexpectedly, she put her hand to her hair as if to stroke it, but with a gesture polished, evidently, by long practice, the hair was removed from her head with a flourish and a cloud of powder, and she bowed low. “Louis Isidor de Montaillou, Madame, a votre service,” he said courteously in a low masculine voice.
The hair was a wig, the actress was a man! Charlette gasped, and Takouhi made a low sound of surprise.
It was exactly the effect Louis had desired, and he let out a long peal of delighted laughter. Nathanial was pleased at his little ruse, and Charlotte too began to laugh, though Takouhi continued to stare silently at this apparition, his hair flattened by a net, the face rouged rose, the lips a scarlet red, the bosoms, so seemingly real, perfumed and powdered.
Over the next days, Louis and Nathanial would call for Charlotte, for they had discovered a profound pleasure in each other’s company. When she was with them she forgot about sorrow, forgot about Tigran, forgot about the wedding and almost forgot about Zhen. Nathanial had a wicked and wry sense of humour and Louis was simply and charmingly reckless. They gossiped about everyone in town, and she did not stop laughing.
With Nathanial, she spent afternoons at the reading rooms of the Harmonie Club. The library of the Batavian Society was extensive and gratifying, supplied with journals, manuscripts in the strange writing of the archipelago, and books in English, French and Dutch. There were several encyclopaedias in English, a rather dog-eared Rees’s and the 7th edition of the Britannica. It also had an extensive oriental collection. She had taken from the shelves Reverend Medhurst’s recent book on China, Karl Gutzlaff’s Sketch of Chinese History and several copies of The Chinese Repository, through which she was currently flipping, regretting the absence of anything so unworthy as a novel. Nathanial was particularly partial to reading the old Dutch writers on Batavia and Java. When he found a particularly pithy passage he would stop with a small pleased laugh and translate.
“Listen, this is the splendid Doctor Nicolaas de Graaff writing about the ladies last century. It is beyond everything.”
“All the women are so garrulous, so proud, so wanton and lascivious that from sheer wantonness they scarcely know what to do with themselves. They are like princesses and have a great many slaves of both sexes at their beck and call, waiting on them like watchdogs, day and night, and watching their eyes closely in order to catch their slightest whim; and they are themselves so lazy that one will not stretch out her hand for a thing, not even to pick up a straw from the floor, but will call a slave to do it. And if they do not come quickly enough the woman will scold them for a lousy whore, negress whore; son-of-a-whore and worse. For the very least fault, they have slaves tied to a stake and mercilessly flogged with a cat-o-nine-tails until the blood pours down and the flesh hangs in tattered stripes, which they then rub with salt and pickle to prevent the wounds rotting.”
Charlotte put up her hand, frowning. “Nathanial, really.”
“No, Charlotte, listen.” Nathanial looked up, met her blue eyes with his, grinned and pushed his sandy curls back off his face. He was older than her, Charlotte knew, by ten years, but his face had a cheeky boyishness which always made her smile.
“These women are too lazy to walk and cannot rear their own children, but leave their upbringing to a slave nurse, who are brought up with their slaves’ ideas and speak as good Malabar, Bengali and bastard-Portuguese as the slaves themselves and can hardly speak a word of Dutch.
“The worst are the Liplap women, the half-castes who know nothing, are fit for nothing except to scratch their arse …”
Charlotte half-choked on scandalised laughter. Nathanial was smiling broadly.
“Scratch their arse, chew betel, smoke cigarettes, drink tea or lie on a mat; in this wise they sit the whole day, idle and bored, squatting for the most part on their heels like an ape on its arse.”
Nathanial looked up as Charlotte again objected. “Look, this is scientific work. That is what is written here.”
“Their usual topic of conversation is their slaves—how many they have bought, sold, lost, etc., or of a tasty curry or rice dish. They eat only with each other, seldom with their husbands, their table conversation being limited to such remarks as, ‘A good chicken soup is not so tasty as an appetizing curry sauce.’ They mix their chicken or fish with their rice and gurgle and suck it up through their fingers like pigs from a trough, and then stick their hands and fingers in the mouth so that the juice runs down between and slops over them.
“If these Liplap women should chance to be invited to a gentleman’s table or a wedding, they have no idea how to behave or say a word lest they make fools of themselves. It happened, on a certain occasion that one of these ladies, sitting at a table with a number of other ladies, was served by one of the gentlemen present, as a compliment, with a piece of roast chicken. Upon which she took the meat very ungraciously from her plate and put it back on the dish saying, “I don’t want to eat a bit of hen’s arse.”
Nathanial could not continue for laughing and was seized with a fit of coughing. Their merriment died away, until they saw the alarmed face of the old Indies man peeping around the door, at which point they both went off again in gales, and he departed in alarm.
From enjoyment she regained confidence. One day when Nathanial was busy, Louis came early, and they rode down to the boathouse. Louis had told her they could go down the Kali Krukut to the Chinese village at Glodok. This was an adventure she could not resist, and she sent for a boatman. A thin, wiry, copper-skinned man arrived, pushed out the boat expertly and took the long oar in his hands.
They both sat back and watched the banks of the river move by. Here the current was fast and the jungle went by in a blur. Louis had barely time to point out the grounds of the Hotel de Provence before they had arrived suddenly at an arched bridge. Gang Chaulon, he said, the street named for the pompous Frenchie who owned the hotel. “I am waiting for a Gang montaillou,” he said, and his laughter boomed as the boatman swept them under the bridge. Beyond, the river slowed, and the boatman could guide it more easily. Watching him was like watching a dance, so delicately and easily did he manoeuvre the craft. It was like looking back into time, through hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, as the ancient people of Java had travelled this river in exactly the same way. Nathanial had spoken to her of discoveries which showed very old civilisations in this land.
Charlotte felt like a dewdrop suddenly, a drop of water in this river, where bodies no more consequential than herself had bathed and roamed and lived and died. Through the trees, sunlight fell on the water like blossom.
They flowed down to Glodok through banks of overhanging trees, rice fields and villages. Then gradually the scene changed, and houses began to appear, clinging to the riverside or back on the embankment. Chinese houses. The boatman rowed them to Toko Tiga, beneath a crooked bridge, and moved over to the bank. Louis helped Charlotte out of the boat, and they stood for a moment looking around them. The boatman had turned and was now on his way back to the estate. How he was to negotiate the full-flowing river she did not know. Louis shook his head. Never mind, he said.
Louis took her hand, and they walked along the street. They had been there barely a few minutes, but in that time, it seemed, every inhabitant of the shops and houses had heard and was now hanging out of the windows staring at them. Charlotte felt that she had landed on alien shores. Suddenly she had begun to think differently about this adventure, and it occurred to her that Tigran would not have approved. She had come in some measure to feel closer to Zhen, to the people who formed part of his life, his soul, but it was not turning out like that. “How were they to get back?” she thought.
They followed a muddy and winding lane, and Charlotte began to feel thoroughly lost and apprehensive. Then Louis ducked his head and pulled her into a shop. She realised it was an opium shop, for she recognised the smell from Singapore. The interior was so dark and dingy she could barely make out the back wall. He motioned her to sit, and a young woman brought some tea. The table looked clean but Charlotte had no wish to touch anything in the store. She felt the strangeness of this place. She loved a Chinese man and was carrying his child, yet she had nothing to do with, nothing in common with these people at all.
Shadows of incomprehension and mistrust clung to the walls and streets and invaded her mind. She wanted to go home. This did not feel like the Chinese town in Singapore, where a white woman could walk with ease. There the town was small, a few streets at most, fitting neatly between river and sea, the salty winds blowing freshly, the European and Chinese merchants mingling on Commercial Square and Boat Quay. This felt dangerous. Here the town sprawled miles along rivers and dirty canals, sinuous, treacherous, or so it felt to her, like a many-tentacled creature ready to swallow up unwary travellers who stumbled into its lair. She had not the slightest doubt that the Dutch citizens rarely penetrated its shadowy regions except for the Pancoran pleasure quarter which Louis had told her about.