by Nigel Barley
Like our Lord, it was only on the third day that I rose again for, the next morning, I awoke with a raging fever, a sharp throbbing in my head and my legs danced of their own volition. I staggered to the bathroom to heave drily for several hours. Shirtsleeved Dr Stove, irritated to be disturbed at breakfast, palpated indifferently as he chewed. A waiter stood beside him with bread and cheese on a plate.
“Stay in bed for two days, drink plenty of water, quinine every four hours, aspirin for the headache and to lower the fever.” He reached out blindly, wrapped bread around filling, popped it into his distended mouth and a thermometer into my own.
“Is it malaria?”
He shrugged and articulated through chewed bread. “With these symptoms, in Holland, I’d tell you to take codeine and aspirin for flu. Out here we say quinine and aspirin for malaria. We never really know what it is. But in both cases it works – usually – unless you die. But you won’t. You’re going to feel pretty drained for a while. Get out of this furnace. Go to the hills.” His own advice seemed to irritate him more, he who could not escape the heat of duty.
“Kintamani?”
“That’s a bit far. Up there you’d catch pneumonia and peg out, like as not. Somewhere like Ubud. There’s an old government resthouse there, a pasangrahan; I sometimes send the fever cases there. Bit tatty but do you I should think.” He looked at the plate hopefully, found it empty and shrugged again. The thermometer, held up to the light, seemed to bore him. “Avoid fat, no booze of course and don’t forget your John Hancock if you pass your time the other way.”
John Hancock? Ah, of course, Hancock and Goodyear.
“Could you possibly do me a great favour and tell my slave … driver, Bagus, what’s going on?
He grunted and seized the empty plate, heading, no doubt, for a refill. “And I’ll leave my bill at the desk.” It would,. I foresaw, be covered with crumbs and buttery fingermarks.
The next day we drove – no, in those days one still motored – up to Ubud through villages that all seemed asleep and turned blank walls and gateways to the road. The manager of the Bali Hotel, as I paid my bill, favoured me with his views on my – Fatimah’s – motor car. He disapproved of it as being a two-seater, not a four, so that driver and passenger were obliged to share the same bench seat, suggesting imperfect racial segregation. For myself this was barely tolerable, for a female passenger it would be outrageous. As Bagus and I drove in this scandalous propinquity, occasional resting figures like public statuary might be glimpsed dozing under trees or beside baskets of cockerels set out to watch passers-by. We swooped along the smooth roads and warmth seeped from the wind that buffeted my arms and face.
Ubud was little more than a small village, a thing of a single street, a shabby palace and a market. The pasangrahan lay some small distance beyond, by the river. According to standard terms it might be used by any bona fide white visitor unless a Dutch colonial official required it on his tournée, in which case, it was to be instantly ceded.
“There,” said Bagus pointing, “there the house of Walter Piss. We go visit him?”
“Certainly not.” I was unforgiving. “I have not come here to spend my time with Dutchmen.”
Bagus shrugged and drove on, turning almost immediately to pull up outside an old wood and bamboo house that quavered in the heat and stridulations of crickets. We got out and walked around, calling. Was there anyone? Hello? It was deserted. The guardian must be otherwise engaged. Never mind. I settled on the verandah and waited. Bagus arranged himself on the ground against a pillar and fell immediately and profoundly asleep, like a machine that had been switched off. After an hour or so, came a crunching of gravel from the back, at first tentative and then more insistent. I rose. The guardian should have a bit of my mind for abandoning his post. Already I was full of the white man’s rage of the Indies. In my head, I rehearsed the list of instructions I should issue for my immediate comfort. Bath. Dinner. Gin. The path led me round the side of the house through a neglected garden of red lilies that swarmed with insects and between two raddled pavilions used for storage. There was a crouched figure in there performing some task of village idiocy, rootling in the shadows amongst the firewood and the old lamps.
“You!” I called. “Where have you been? Don’t you know I’ve been waiting here for over an hour?”
The figure stood up, tall and slim. A ruefully grinning face appeared covered in cobwebs and dust. A white face, about the same age as my own, but in his case, very handsome with classical, even features beneath a shock of unkempt honey-blond hair and icy blue eyes that washed over you like a cold wave. He was dressed like a schoolboy on holiday, wearing a simple khaki shirt, open at the neck, and shorts with sandals scuffed onto very brown feet without socks.
“Terribly sorry,” he blushed, “I’m afraid you have caught me. I’m trespassing.” The voice was light, humorous, oddly accented. “You haven’t perhaps seen a white cockatoo? She answers to the name of Ketut when not being naughty, which she clearly is today. Normally I wouldn’t be offended if she went back to the wild – her choice – but I brought her so far from Nusa Penida and she’d be all one her own in Bali, you see. Oh sorry,” he extended a dusty hand. “My name’s Walter. Walter Spies.”
I shook the hand. Then the penny dropped. “Oh my god, it’s you. Walter Piss – Walter Spies. I should have guessed. I’m Rudolf Bonnet. Isn’t Ketut a human name, fourth-born child and all that?”
“Yes, naturally,” he ran his fingers through his hair, a characteristic gesture. “It’s a sort of joke. Cockatoo is kakak tua, ‘old elder sister or brother’ so that leads to eldest child so … er … well … it’s a sort of joke,” he ended lamely. “As for Piss, that’s as close as Balinese can get to Spies. I’ve had to get used to it.”
There is a problem with all this linguistic badinage. What language were we speaking? I, surely, was speaking Dutch, maybe Malay, because it is impossible to be rude in a language you speak really badly. But Walter’s Dutch was abysmal. Like many Germans, he found it too close to Plattdeutsch to take it seriously as a language in its own right. His pronunciation was appalling and the vocabulary he just made up for himself out of Germanic roots. Yet he understood it perfectly, as I did German. Stupidly, it took us a while before we realised that there was absolutely no need for us to speak the same language while holding a conversation. He could speak German, I Dutch, and it worked perfectly well. Of course, with others we would sometimes speak English or Malay or Balinese. So we would flit in and out of languages, sometimes from sentence to sentence, sometimes from word to word, using whichever came first to the mind. So I’ve no idea what all this was in. Anyway, I don’t really remember the words. I was staring at the mouth. There was the suggestion of a blond moustache as of one who did not take more than boyish pains over his appearance and barely washed behind his ears before running out to play in the sun every morning. The lips had a full, infinitely mobile quality that denied any possibility of meanness and fell easily into a smile. The teeth were unaffectedly white and even and doubtless overjoyed to be in that mouth. They embraced you in a laugh of such childlike innocence that you forgot to listen to what they were saying. As I think I said before, he was the most magical person I had ever …
A sudden flash of white and a squawk and a large bird was crabwalking up his shoulder and nuzzling his ear. Walter chuckled delightedly.
“May I introduce Ketut.” We began strolling back towards the front of the house. He had a leisurely, elegant walk despite the sandals. He paused and inclined his ear to the bird and made a solemn face. “A little bird tells me that the guardian has gone off to his sister in Sanur and will be gone for at least a week. There is neither dinner nor fresh bedding to be had. You had better come and stay with me across the road.” Walter, it seemed, in addition to everything else, spoke bird talk, a paraclete of parakeets. He nodded at snoring Bagus, mouth vulnerably open, oozing drool. “Is that your young man?”
“That’s Bagus.”<
br />
He smiled. “Hmm. Only comparatively.” He did the bird-whispering act again. “Ketut says he’d better come too. Naturally. Oh, I hear you’re a painter. Me too – in a small way of business.”
5
I pushed the homemade mango marmalade back across the table and smeared the dollop from my plate onto the fresh-baked bread.
“The boys made it themselves, entirely without help,” Walter twinkled, “the very best oat cuisine.” There was no butter. Times were hard at Walter’s.
“I simply cannot,” I repeated with tears starting to my eyes, “stay here another day.” It was one of those traumatic meals. At Walter’s there would be lots of traumatic meals – mostly breakfasts. It was as if people lay awake at night rehearsing their lines for delivery at precisely the moment when drama is most intolerable. It was not material deprivation that was the issue. Walter’s house was well enough, comfortable, indeed, it found many admirers and even imitators.
It was of original design, built of black wood, not on but into the landscape, a small, steep valley just above the joining of two rock-strewn rivers, Campuhan, a beautiful reserve of nature – mists and plants and dragonflies with rainbows on their wings. His nearest neighbour, across the water, was the old royal temple and among the rocks was a hollow where a primordial holy python lived. Such juxtapositions are untroubling to Balinese thought. Out among the water-smoothed stones lay a deep spot where he would encourage the boys to dive for the sheer pleasure of their screams of laughter and the beauty of their gleaming brown bodies, slicked and darkened by water. In the Balinese fashion, it was less a house than a series of interlinked buildings, with high, thatched roofs, at various levels, joined by paths and steps and even little bridges, constructed of a mix of delicate basketry, huge beams and ancient blocks of stone. Like a grand lady, it gleamed with subtle touches of gold at throat and ear but, in its flirtation with open space, it recalled childhood tree houses and “camps” constructed in the bamboo at the end the garden, a Peter Pan if not a Wendy house. Baskets of scented orchids hung down from the gables. Inside, it was dotted with local works of art, upholstered with vivid Sumba cloths in nursery colours and, of course, resonant with musical instruments, including a grand piano and a complete gamelan orchestra. There was nothing Walter could not get a tune out of. I have seen him play a teapot, blowing through the spout to coax well-formed notes through the manipulated lid. Walter was also a painter whose works found a steady market with the tourists and sometimes, over the years, one would be hanging in the hall but, he explained, he only ever painted to get rid of something within himself and when it was done, his only interest was to get it out of the house. It was some time before I saw any of his work. The whole house exuded melodrama, invited the suspension of disbelief – and encouraged damp. Mould blossomed on any exposed surface. My Johnny Hancock, long unneeded and unused, would be, by now, bright green inside its rusted-solid tin. My lower limbs sprouted not Nieuwenkampian moss but athlete’s foot.
Then there were the animals. Cats, dogs, canaries are all well enough but Walter had never outgrown that stage where a little boy keeps frogs in his pockets and beetles in jam jars. Any receptacle placed on the dining table had to be carefully examined before being opened. There were stinging fish in the pond and baby crocodiles and a deer with a broken leg that cried pitifully night and day. His snakes – admittedly non-poisonous – favoured the darker corners of the bathrooms for their afternoon siestas. Worst by far were two snarling monkeys with great green teeth that consorted freely with their wild, loutish brothers, fifty of whom lived in a tree in the garden. Since my simian encounter in Columbo, I bore them instant ill will. Monkeys are far too close to humans to be endearing. They moved at pleasure between the house and the wild and made hay with everything that was not locked away. They smashed the china so that, for two weeks, we drank from tins and ate off enamel plates, and that only after having climbed on the roof to retrieve the spoons and forks. Positive as ever, Walter used the windfall of fresh material to tile one of the bathrooms in a mosaic made from the fragments. They licked the paint off one of my Italian canvases which loosened their bowels. (“Ha ha, moved by your art” – Walter) so that they fouled my bed and pillows. They tore up my few Balinese sketchings (“At least it was nothing important. Something they might have drawn themselves” – Walter) and drank a bottle of ink that they then vomited back up over my wardrobe (“What a pity it was black ink, so formal” – Walter). I could not persuade him that this was anything but funny. He leaped childishly around on the furniture, arms pendulous, screaming monkey noises back at them – Ooh ooh aah – until they all became hysterical. I suppose it was evidence that he would have made a wonderful father but I wanted to slap him and could not. It was, after all, his furniture. There was constantly some Balinese at the door trying to sell him some new, inconvenient, more dangerous, even more insanitary companion, captured in the fields or woods. He began to speak dreamily of the tigers that lived in the great western forest and his absolute need for one.
Then there was the sheer expense of being Walter’s guest. He gave you everything he possessed: lodging, food, drink, laundry, transport, service. He placed at your disposal all his knowledge of Bali and his contacts from the lowest to the highest and money was never mentioned – except to point out that he didn’t actually have any, not a sou, no coins, no notes, anywhere in the house. By that time, it had been established that you were in a kind of fraternal, primitive joint economy and to try to segregate his needs from your own would be to betray the friendship given so trustingly. The boys would ask what you wanted for dinner and, when you answered, they would hold out their hands and say “One ringgit maybe enough”. Bagus had been sent back to Buleleng as an economy measure but the free use of Walter’s car was at least as expensive and certainly more unpredictable. Petrol had to be brought by pony, at great cost, from Denpasar and, once the tank was filled, Walter always had household commissions in all directions that rapidly drained it again. The boys brought the laundry and Walter bewailed the fact that – though they were very good and faithful boys – he had no money to pay their wages. They turned their good and faithful brown eyes on you in disappointment and, before you knew what you were doing, you were patting their cheeks in compassion and bearing the costs of the entire household. It was an economy of frank enticement. And it was not just me. As I walked around the little town, people would ask, “You stay with Tuan Walter?” and when I assented, they would press eggs and chickens and little presents of rice into my hands – refusing all payment. “Tell him from Ketut in the market” or “From Wayan at the temple”.
Walter chuckled. “They call them titipan.”
“Tittypans?”
“Titipan, something given by A to B so that he may pass it on to C. Up here we’re all in the titipan business. A telegram came through the post office the other day from the bank in Batavia, asking when they might expect a deposit and making threats. In a small town, people hear these things.”
I was appalled. “Walter, how can you live like that?” He shrugged and looked suddenly serious.
“In villages there is what the Javanese call gotong-royong. People help each other, exchange things without money. While I have never been rich, I think I should have been rather good at it. Towards the end of the Great War, I happened to be in Russia and to get back to Germany, I had to walk across quite a lot of it, through the Russian lines, across no-man’s land and then through the German lines. I think many people tried to shoot me, some by accident, others deliberately. When I arrived, they arrested me as a spy and offered to shoot me more formally the next day before an invited audience. I was twenty-two years old and I worried about it all night, after all, I didn’t have a thing to wear. I don’t think I shall ever be truly afraid again, certainly not of debt collectors.”
Then there was the matter of my first night in the house by the river. We dined by candlelight, à deux, in the beautiful cool of a tropical evening, looking
down on the shimmering little river. It was a simple enough meal: local chicken – a gift of “Nyoman at the crossroads” – rice and a vegetable dish made of wild fern shoots, washed down with river-cooled beer and deftly served by Walter’s smiling boys. The Balinese way of eating is for each person to go off with his banana leaf of food and eat alone. It is a fineable offence to talk to a man who is eating, so meals were always served in silence, the boys shocked and amused by the phenomenon of Western table conversation. There was some sort of a sweet, made from marquisa fruit from the garden, a new, palate-tingling taste and the table we sat at, three meters long, was a piece of eternity, the polished trunk of a huge forest giant, split lengthways and resting on massive supports. That table was always covered with work in process – diagrams of dances, a Balinese dictionary, collections of folktales or altar decorations – hobbies that had been set on the back burner or newly called back to life. That day, we talked mostly of Walter. I confess, I felt an insatiable curiosity.
“Walter,” I remarked boldly, sipping coffee, “you have a strange accent, what is it?”
He smiled and swiftly intoned a potted history of his life, as he must have with so many visitors before.
“I grew up in Moscow. My father was German consul there but my first language was Russian. So when I speak German it is with a Russian accent and, when I speak English, a German accent. When I did something wrong, my father would beat me in German with a meter rule and then my mother would comfort me in Russian with soft hands. I suppose it left me with a deep suspicion of the fatherland and the metric system but a deep love of Mother Russia. During the Great War, as an enemy alien, I was interned in a camp in the Urals but I managed to turn the guards into my friends so that I painted and gave concerts and made a little extra money with piano lessons and had really a wonderful time, running wild in the mountains and learning some of the local languages and living with the peasants and writing down their music. Wait …” He threw down his napkin as if tired of words, took my hand and led me up the little staircase to the music room, where the piano stood gleaming on its own plinth, a sort of stage. A full moon shone down melodramatically through the open doorway, a natural milky spotlight, and he milked it for effect, stretching his interlaced fingers and – I swear – flicking out the back of a non-existent tailcoat as he sat down. He began to stroke the keys, slowly and sensually, coaxing forth a dark, wild melody with deep runs and trills and a curious limping rhythm that somehow summoned the loping creatures of the night. I crept across to stand, transfixed, at the end of the keyboard. As he played he stared up at the huge moon, the same moon they have in the Urals. I have no idea how long it lasted. It seemed to be contained in a time of its own. His music grew faster and he bent over the keys and the pounding hands conjured up black pine forests and the howl of wolves in stark silhouette, leading to a crescendo of muted violence that then faded to a crystal tinkling swept away by the sound of the dry-season tropical river outside. He deliberately broke the mood with a cheap, cheery chord and turned towards me grinning. “Based on a couple of old tartar tunes the peasants play on the violin at their barn dances. I forget the rest.”