by Nigel Barley
Blasts on the ship’s siren bullied the smaller ships out of the way as a very dirty tug with Chinese crew took our bowlines aboard and, appropriately, tugged. Anchors thundered down and we entered that long period on ships where nothing happens and no one can get on or off though gangways are locked in place. The other white passengers from Singapore were virtually unknown to me. Van Gennep had simply disappeared. The Niemeyers were there on deck, the younger children squabbling, the father shouting, the eldest girl in tears. I filled gaping pockets, Anton, Hamid, with apology for my love, given with accompanying ritual minuet. Please I wish to thank you. No, no, I cannot, you are my friend. Yes, yes, even friends have to pay for their rice. No, no, I am ashamed. Yes, yes, it is not for you but your children. In that case, I thank you – you are a kind man. Pocket buttoned. All over.
Hamid took my hand-luggage to the top of the gangway and set it down, unallowed to go any further. For the first time he unashamedly hugged me. There were genuine tears in his eyes that I felt damp on my neck as his cheek touched mine. What was he thinking, feeling? I had no idea. I knew nothing about anything any more. But here was a new place, a whole new world. I could be anything I wanted here. If I chose not to, I need not think about how to capture the light on the waves or the billowing smoke hanging over the stern. I was free. Then, I looked over hugging Hamid’s shoulder and, as I blinked away my own tears, there on the dock, by some enchantment, stood two familiar figures – my mother and my father, staring up and frowning.
3
They had come by the quicker Suez route and beaten me by three days, driven, it seemed, by a mixture of parental panic on my mother’s and commercial adventurism on my father’s part. Largely as a result of the contacts made through my social elevation, he had become interested in colonial wares which, that year, set records in the sugar trade for production and price.
“Who is your friend?” My mother’s eyes were, as ever, sharp.
“A bright young man who taught me some very useful vocabulary. The Javanese are, as you see, a hot-blooded race whose passions are easily moved.”
All about us, Javanese, doubtless hot-blooded, were easily moved, indeed running at the imperial trot, carrying sacks, hauling baggage, coiling ropes, sweat flowing over gloriously muscled limbs yet still smiling when their eyes met mine. White overseers ticked clipboards and shouted orders from the shade.
“We are at the Hotel des Indes,” declared father with a certain pride. “Room 374. We’ll head off and make arrangements while you check your luggage through the customs shed. They say it will take about an hour. You won’t need to hire any of the guides. Just take a car, everyone knows it.” This being a moment of great emotion, he touched me lightly on the shoulder.
“You will not,” urged mother moving off on his arm, “I am sure, allow yourself to become distracted by the … picturesque.” I did not greatly like her choice of the word or the emphasis she put on it as she waved her arm at the male dockside bustle.
In the great echoing hall with its smell of dust and mildew, officials were ready with their regulations and chalk. A British couple were arguing about their luggage: “No, Kitty. There were three brown suitcases and the small black one with the dodgy handle”, “Cedric, you know full well that broke in Singers and we got the grey one with the brass fastener”, “Yes but then you bought so much in Cold Storage I had to take it back out of the rubbish and use it to put the shoes in”.
My single bag was hauled up onto a bench like an exhibit and I stepped forward. A man with brilliantined hair and a permanent sniff yawned, asked, “Reason for visit?”
Absurdly, I was nonplussed. “Boredom, a sense of loss, perhaps the search for some meaning and inspiration in a pointless life of artistic failure but popular success, also the extreme beauty of your male subjects whom I hope to thoroughly debauch whilst painting them and so liberate myself from shame and frustration at my own disgusting sexual perversion.” I did not, of course, say that, contenting myself with a vacuous “Er … tourism.” Come to think of it, they probably mean the same thing. He yawned, sniffed and sketched a cross on the leather as if in apostolic blessing.
The Hotel des Indes was a brilliant white creation in the new art deco style, a thing of exaggerated concrete horizontality, like the towering superstructure of a vast underground ship. It stood on a busy street just down from the prestigious Harmonie Club whose heavily moneyed members ruled this sprawling colonial domain. Trams, more modern than those of Amsterdam, clanged past it and the parking lot was clogged with the latest American cars. To one side, squatted an immemorial banyan or waringin tree, a congealed mass of buttresses and trailing aerial roots, its branches hardly able to bear their own weight. The Javanese, recognising it as a creature of power, whisperingly pressed offerings into the fissures of its trunk It was the haunt of tolerated natives – shoe-shine boys, a bicycle repair man, a seller of fried eggs that turned out to be delicious sweet confections of coconut – offering services that did not impinge on the economic activities of the hotel proper. I knew at once that I would sketch it.
As I approached the doors, my suitcase was whisked away with cries of distress in a process that seemed to involve three Javanese. A white man could not possibly carry such a burden, such a thing could bring the empire to its knees. The staff outnumbered the guests by at least five to one. I clip-clopped across the front hall, all coral and gold stucco, fat lamps, fat furniture and engaged the front desk, a rather odd sight with half a dozen Eurasian clerks working under a Dutch supervisor who was seated – the better to supervise – on a sort of high throne. I explained who I was, who my parents were, had a room been booked? The supervisor looked up. Ah no. That had proved, alas, impossible. Did I not know there was an important governmental conference in progress? Hotel rooms could not be found in Batavia at any price. Instead a day-bed, meaning more properly a sofa that became a bed at night only, had been installed in my parents’ drawing room. So there it was. My proud independence had been converted back into sleeping with my parents.
My parents raged around the European quarter of the capital for weeks. We went to the Dutch theatre. We ate in Western hotels. We shopped in the European quarter. We made little expeditions to the cool hills of Bogor and the tea plantations beyond. I continued to sleep in my parents’ day-bed amongst my old paintings which they had brought with them.
“What am I to do with these? I can’t cart them around with me.” To look at them depressed me. There was tired old Gabriella with her false bosom. Either they were good and I lamented my present ineptitude, or they were so bad that I despaired of ever achieving anything. It had never occurred to me that European oils would melt in the Indies. They seeped and merged and sagged. I was becoming an involuntary Impressionist.
“You never know,” said father. “You might need them for a quick exhibition. I met a bloke the other day that has space.” I sneered and pooh-poohed and then he organised an exhibition in a publisher’s building in three days flat and, suddenly, I was the talk of Batavia.
“Forget about sugar. Rubber’s the coming thing,” so bank director Poos a few months before the Crash. The Indies were booming, with collapsing labour costs and rising commodity prices. Even to me the market seemed diseased. Poos was the sort who could only succeed in the Indies. At home he would have been, at most, a chief clerk. He had terrible dandruff in his eyebrows. Here he was on the committee of the artistic circle. There had been some hard drinking at the opening and now we were sweating our way through the inevitable rijstafel with copious amounts of beer, the glasses weeping with condensation. Hot, musky air steamed in through open windows as if from a laundry.
“The new Sumatran fields won’t come on stream for another three years and production can’t meet demand.” He sucked prematurely on a fat cigar, a Sumatra cum laude, rudely not waiting until everyone had finished eating, and one of the hotel’s staff wafted across and lit it before he could reach for his matches. He puffed and an ashtray was extende
d for his flicking into. “Bloody marvellous, the service. Can’t do a thing for yourself. Mind you,” he leaned forward and winked extravagantly, “it gets a bit much when you try to go the lavatory.” My mother, over the other side of the table, choked on her chocolate dessert. Poos exhaled fragrant smoke, unconcerned whether it spoiled her pudding or not.
“They’d be lost without us, the natives. What would they have to do? I suppose you’ve been following the news about the calls for independence, the PNI and all that? It’ll never happen of course. Once Soekarno’s locked snugly away, it’ll all be forgotten.” It is impossible to convey now the incredible sense of solidity of colonial rule. The Dutch after all had been in Java for three hundred years and everywhere were the signs of their – our – military power and absolute technological stranglehold. Did I really look around, see the countless brown faces of the staff and read them as a statement that one day a great wind would blow and sweep us all away while they would endure like the rooted waringin tree I had sketched that afternoon? If not, I do it now.
“Talking of artists …” Poos must be about to say something embarrassing since he was speaking louder, “… one of my managers had a bit of bother with one on the boat out.” My ears pricked, sensing danger. “Niemeyer from Probolingo, nice fella, though not quite white and even the white bit’s Jewish so it hardly counts – but we’re pretty tolerant and relaxed out here as you’ve doubtless had occasion to see, Mr Bonnet. Anyway, thanks to that particular artist’s activities, he’s left with a daughter in the club and …” He became aware of his own sallow daughter, seated beside me, dripping onto her plate. I thought that would lead him to break off but no … “so I want to see you, young man, keep your hands firmly on top of the table, if you know what I mean.” He guffawed roundly, sucked his teeth and bit on the cigar, flicked more Javanese-assisted ash.
“Is he sure it was the artist, Mr Poos?” My own father, anxious to save the honour of his son’s profession. Mother seemed unsure whether to disapprove generally of heterosexual lust or take comfort in the mere possibility of it amongst artists.
“Oh, no doubt about it, Mr Bonnet. A thoroughly bad lot, apparently, a prey to every human vice, whereas everyone else on board was totally respectable.”
“Tell me. What was the name of the ship–”
“Mr Poos,” I interrupted hastily, “would you advise me to convert my Dutch currency into Indies money immediately or should I wait?” I was aware that a foot was caressing mine under the table.
“Oh no need to be hasty seeing as the two are tied together. The only real problem is the denominations, once you get into the native economy. You’ll need smaller notes out there or coins and no one has change. You’ll need an account too, what with all the pictures you’ll be selling and I’ll be glad to set that up.”
My father looked pleased that I was finally taking an interest in business. My mother abandoned her pudding and it was whisked away by a delightful gazelle-eyed young man in a very tight, starched uniform. The whole East Indies empire ran on starch as a bulwark against the enervating effects of limpid heat.
Poos launched into, “Of course, even rubber pales when compared to the possibilities of oil …”
“Are you,” whispered Miss Poos excitedly through sharp, little teeth, “a thoroughly bad lot?” Inexplicably, she smelled of parsnips.
“Actually, no,” I said with sudden clear insight, revealed to myself and tucking my foot under my chair and out of her range. “I don’t think I am. You know, I think my problem is that I really rather want to be good.”
***
The next two months were spent in the company of my parents. We toured the spiny backbone of Java, leaping from vertebra to vertebra – Bogor, Bandung, Yogyakarta. I thrilled to forests, mountains and volcanos, gorges and valleys, to limpid oceans and the huge waves that crashed on the southern coast – all glimpsed briefly from train windows. I saw palaces and princes, emerald rice fields and gushing springs – from passing cars. And I met many Dutchmen. We lived in hunting lodges and slick hotels and, for excitement, visited plantations and factories where the back of nature was bent in toil and hammered into shape with Dutch steel. My haul of sketches was slim. Javanese remained unknown to me except as the hands of brown helpers and the teeth of servile smiles. As was to be expected, I managed a small number of brutish encounters in the margins of my sketches – a palace guard in Yogya, our panting tryst completed in an impossibly hot sort of shed full of ceremonial yellow silk umbrellas and the flutter of moths that ate them – a young Chinese, working in his father’s shop, whose deliberate spite appalled me – but they served merely to stoke my lust and self-disgust until finally my father said, “We are headed for Surabaya tomorrow. I must get back to Rotterdam to take care of my sugar shipments. Come with us.”
We were in Gresik, a small white-painted town north of the main port, famous chiefly for the landing there of holy Sheikh Maulana Mahil Ibrahim – may God preserve him – who brought the faith from Arabia, and for the manufacture of tinkling gongs. But all that was to change. They were dredging the harbour and tearing up the coconut palms and turning the coastline into brown soup. Factories and chemical plants were going up and there was talk of building the biggest cement plant in the East. The café around us was full of plump, pink young men in clean shorts: engineers, planners, accountants. They were even filming down by the harbour to show the taxpayers back home what great changes the ethical policy was bringing to the grateful masses.
“I can’t possibly,” I said. “I haven’t seen anything yet. You know this was all about Bali, the untouched East, undefiled and unchanging” An old man was arranging buckets, a bamboo ladder, brushes, sloshing a new coat of whitewash over the wall behind us. “I haven’t painted anything yet.”
Father sipped beer. The engineers laughed as though I had said something witty. Mother took off her tortoiseshell sunglasses, a new American affectation, and shivered slightly in the wind. It was a mark of the speed with which she had acclimatised.
“How long?”
“Oh a month or two, three at the most. You know the way I work. I have to immerse myself completely in the locals, then it all comes quite quickly in a great rush.”
She pouted. “I hate to think of you out here alone. If only you were married. Perhaps your father could go back on his own.” She turned to him in supplication and he opened his mouth to answer in the affirmative. Oh no.
“Mother!” I seized her hand in a fit of hot filial passion. I had noted and not greatly liked the way she had included that swift barb about marriage and hoped it was not the opening shot of a larger campaign. “Then who would look after poor father? I am not alone. There are fifty million people here! You know I have to be free to move about, follow my nose. Then I can come home and paint it all up, take my time. You have seen how it is here, perfectly safe.”
She disengaged herself and held up the local paper, the Oetoesan Hindia, pointing grimly to thick, black headlines, like a lawyer in court. “But there is talk of these nationalists, strikes, political chaos.”
We always look in the wrong direction for trouble. No wonder so many are killed crossing the road. It was only thanks to my father’s sheer pigheadedness that, when The Crash rocked the world’s finances in a couple of weeks, he would be safely at sea with his assets tied up in neither worthless paper nor plummeting guilders but a precious food cargo that kept its value on the Dutch market and buttressed the family in the harsh years to follow.
“All that is hot air mother. You heard Mr Poos. Nothing ever really changes out here. Besides, that is Java. Bali is outside all that.”
The old man, having painted the wall to his satisfaction, now began to paste a poster to its still-wet surface, fighting the fresh sea-breeze that tried to tear it from his grasp. Job done, he stood back, lit a cigarette and admired. I pointed, in turn.
It was an announcement of the impending Surabaya Regatta, with promised – and eagerly awaited – return vis
it by the Royal Singapore Yacht Squadron, marchpast of schoolchildren in ancient Batavian costume and special promotion of locally produced cheese.
“You see?” I said triumphantly and with an irrelevance that was thoroughly compelling. “Nationalists don’t eat cheese. But it’s a pity he put the poster up upside down.”
4
Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight. I was at Buleleng, in the north of Bali, with the KPM ship fretting and treading water out from the shallow bay. But wait, I was not quite alone. A large cock came and inspected me, decided I was not a worthy adversary and stalked haughtily away.
All travellers’ tales are lies. This was not the beach recorded by Cornelis de Houtman who wrote so lavishly of the beauties of Bali in the sixteenth century and whose crew were seduced into desertion by the velvet eyes of the ladies. This was not the paradise of Nieuwenkamp’s lush pictures and the posters of the KPM. The sand was volcanic black, coal-dust not gold, an industrial product. A miasmal stench arose from the water and the sea reached out to grasp and suck in, not coral, but a rich deposit of human excrement daily dotted below the high-tide line. Crabs came and waved their claws at me in pathetic bullyboy bluff. I picked up my luggage and tramped wearily towards a straggle of buildings in rough brick where nasty yellow curs opened their throats and howled at me, gathering from the diaphragm, the way opera singers are trained to do, so that their rage lifted their front feet clear off the ground. Of course, the people here were Hindus, not dog-shy Moslems as in Java.