by Nigel Barley
After two days, the door opened again and the Trappist guard beckoned me out and led me back through the gates, the maze, the grey hallway and into an office dominated by a large, old-fashioned desk. This was the age of new technology, so the desk was dominated, in turn, by a huge bakelite telephone, the size of a flatiron, with a crank on the side, to ring a bell and so attract the attention of whoever was on the other end. Before it, sat a stranger, looking down at a dossier, with Smit off to one side.
“This,” said Smit, glowing with pride, “is Mr Tonny van Diemen, a special investigator from Batavia.” His awed tone connoted that Tonny knew anyone who was anyone, dined with the Governor General on a weekly basis, kissed his wife’s hand as well as the G.G.’s arse, and – no doubt – made appropriately risqué jokes about his son-in-law in all the best gentlemen’s clubs of Batavia. Tonny raised an eyebrow at something in the dossier and closed it softly. I could see my name on the front. Walter might not have a file at HQ but I clearly did and was genuinely surprised at how thick it was. Tonny was a man in his early fifties, sleek and groomed, dressed in a black suit and – God help us – a waistcoat that made no concessions to the climate. Thus, he would have dressed in a premium legal practice in the Hague. It was immediately clear that his well-manicured sensibilities never engaged the grubby, real world, merely the pieces of crisp official paper to which it was reduced. He appraised me with quick, dark eyes and clasped his elegant hands together to preclude any further courtesies.
“Mr Bonnet,” he said smoothly. “Controleur Smit tells me you may be able to help us in our enquiries into this terrible business. I am sure you would welcome the opportunity to clear your name of any taint of involvement that might prejudice your further stay in our fair colony.”
“As a Dutch citizen …” I began, ponderously.
“As a Dutch citizen, you have a duty of loyalty to your motherland, Mr Bonnet. Now what information do you have of the whereabouts of the renegade Spies? Your own tastes, I note from your dossier, tend in a different but no more creditable direction. Your debauchery of that poor young girl was, I am sure, nothing to write home about.” He twirled an elegant pen, suggesting that he, Van Diemen, might feel compelled to do that writing home. “I remain convinced that you know something.”
“Look,” I said. “I don’t care a hoot what you are convinced about, I …” The phone rang with a derisory little strangulated tinkle. Van Diemen snapped his fingers and pointed – as I thought most rudely – and Smit grabbed it. There was no whispering into phones in those days. You shouted. The person on the other end shouted too. Then what you heard through the earpiece was a pale, crackly voice barely emerging from the hiss and rumble of the static.
“What? When? Where? All right tomorrow. I’ll tell him.” Smit put his mouth to Van Diemen’s ear, cupped his hands and whispered, Tonny vigorously nodding. He turned to me with a triumphant smile.
“There now, Mr Bonnet. It seems we need detain you no longer. We have apprehended Spies in Singaraja, found in a car stopped at a checkpoint. No doubt he was seeking to escape to Java. He is being brought back under guard.” I suspected another trap.
“I can go?”
“Oh you can go all right,” said Smit. “In fact, we insist upon it. At the moment, we’re rather short of cells you see and we expect to make many more arrests. Get out but don’t you try to run away to Java.” I rose and paused. There were a hundred things I might have said, that I wanted to say, but there was no point. Already, they were chuckling clubbily. I had ceased to exist for them. I opened the doors and walked out into the hall, feeling uncomfortably light, like a man who has accidentally left his jacket and suitcase on a train. I was hungry, had not a rupiah to my name, no way to get home. A lanky figure rose to its feet.
“Rudi!” It was the Greg. I was suddenly, pathetically, glad to see him. I hugged him solidly. I wanted to cry. My nurturing father, my Barong.
“How? Why? When?” reprising Smit’s telephone conversation. The hallway was full of the kind of loungers who always fill the hallways of government buildings. Waiting is an art form subsidised by governments. They stared at us, scratched and yawned, looked hopeful and expectant.
“We were in Australia when we heard the news. Jane insisted on coming back so we couldn’t let her travel alone, poor little thing. At least Colin got out. That’s the main thing.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s the main thing.” Greg had been transformed into a wealthy planter, white suit, panama hat.
“You look like hell. Did they give you a bad time, old man?” he asked, patting me awkwardly on the back as one might a muddy and over-enthusiastic dog. Being British, he lacked a gesture for this situation. “I heard they’d taken you in, so I climbed into my best too-good-to be’s and came right over.”
“Too-good-to-be’s?”
“Too-good-to-be-trews – trousers to you, old boy. Koch says the Dutch way is to lock as many people up as possible until someone confesses to something, then they offer to forget the confession if they incriminate someone else. Apparently, it works quite well,” he admitted grudgingly. “They rounded up everyone at Manxi’s. You can imagine what a mix they picked up there – draining the sump of Denpasar. Koch says Manxi’s done a runner back to her old lover in Bangli. And that little priest, Scruple, they’re trying to show he was dipping into more than the widows and orphans fund. They caught him at Manxi’s and he made some unwise statement about Manxi being his Mary Magdalene that the papers loved. The bishop’s in a fearful wax.”
“Who’s Koch?”
“Jane’s lawyer. Are you …” he dropped into a transatlantic twang, “all lawyered up? Margaret got her legal eagles in the States to check the locals out. They came up with Koch.” He made it sound as if she kept a whole firm on retainer, ready to swing into action at the drop of a hat, an unnerving idea for a husband. “Where’s Walter?” he whispered, through the panama, out of the corner of his mouth. The loungers pricked up their ears at the tone, looked irritated that they could not follow the words and slumped back grumpily, giving way, once more, to their boredom.
“It’s no secret. They’ve just picked him up in Singaraja. He’s on his way back.” We drifted out, under the yawning lions rampant supporting blazon of armed and langued gules, towards the daytime lapangan kota, stripped, in daylight, of mystique and the freemasonry of deviance and reduced to a mere clump of scruffy grass on which rickshaw drivers were unselfconsciously peeing. I felt an unworthy stab of fear at the sight of it. Greg stopped and went through his complex pipe-lighting routine.
“Mm! Ah! Mm! It looks bad, him running away like that. Sayan is under a sort of military occupation. They’re making a helluva stink. Margaret’s up there giving them a piece of her mind – and you know she has quite a large supply of that. They’re dredging through all forty-three dancers in the area, trying to find some excuse for all this. Today, they interrogated a three year old. They seem to be trying to smear Jane as some sort of child-eating Lisboan. All tommyrot of course.”
“Yes,” I echoed, “all tommyrot. Where’s Sampih?”
“He’s keeping a low profile. As I’m sure you know, they could put him on the rack and they wouldn’t get a word out of him. Damned Dutch! Oh, not you old man, of course. But I’m afraid Colin, being absent, is going to be a handy scapegoat.” A guilty, handy scapegoat. I bit my tongue.
“And Walter,” I said. “Now, they’ve got Walter.”
“Yes,” he puffed. “There is that. I’m very much afraid they’re going to crucify Walter. Manxi’s for a snort? Should be nice and empty, if you can stand the bagpipe music.”
***
“The mistake,” said Walter, “was my trying to find Goris at the antiquities department in Singaraja. It was only ten in the morning and he is rarely drunk by then but he was one of the first arrested and that aroused their interest. It is always a grave mistake to be of interest. You are very lucky not to be of interest, Bonnetchen.”
We were
in durance vile, specifically a cell in Denpasar, not the one I had occupied but as near as makes no difference. Walter, too, should have looked like hell, his face a mass of angry, red mosquito bites, hair greasy and unwashed, unshaven for three days, clothes rumpled and stained. Instead, he looked rakishly healthy and rather dashing, like a man on a seaside holiday. My gifts of laundry and cigarettes lay, unregarded, on the bed. The same warder that had silently guarded me now waited on him, full of chat, always a smile, with little extras, wrapped in banana leaf, slid shyly onto his plate, always brought first so as to be hot, and no water in an ambiguous bucket, rather warm tea, served at regular hours. Also, he had been given furniture, a chair in which I sat.
“I was foolish to run away. I did not know where my head was. Koch has explained the legal situation to me. He says he hasn’t the slightest doubt he can get me off. It all hinges on this notion of what is a minor. Of course, we can’t be sure what evidence they may be able to dig out but Balinese are lining up to say that any such contacts that I may have enjoyed were regular by local standards and there is, anyway, no means of proving a Balinese to be underage. Balinese have no birth certificates therefore no official age in law.”
I was aghast. “You mean you intend to confess to being … of the faith? But that’s suicidal. Don’t you see? Once you admit that, they will cast around till they find some way to send you to jail. In itself, it may not be strictly a crime in the Indies, but it’s undoubtedly considered immoral, unnatural, vicious …” God knows, often enough I, myself, thought it so, “… and they will find some way to get you. You don’t have to do, just be. They will turn you into McPhee. Don’t forget the Governor General himself is behind all this and no one, judge, police, local administration wants to displease him. They could so easily be fired for incompetence or corruption.”
He smirked irritatingly. “Judges can now be fired for incompetence and corruption, Bonnetchen? Where will it all end?”
I ground my teeth. “Don’t do it, Walter. Being German is not against the law either but they will find a way to make it so. You know they are having problems with all the Nazi supporters in Java, just like at home in Holland. Please, please, beware.” A phrase from Smit swirled up into my head. “Get the right judge,” he had said, cheerily. That would not be so hard in the tiny colonial world we lived in. Walter waved my objections away.
“I am very ware. Pfui! H.E. the G.G.” – he made it preposterous – “has no interest in me. Anyway, Margaret has agreed to appear as an expert witness on my behalf. Which one will you put your money on, three hundred years of Dutch empire or Margaret?” He thought that was funny. As so often, I wanted to slap him. He was a simple child wandering through a world of dangerous, sharp-toothed creatures possessed by violent, tangled emotions he could never understand.
“Walter,” I sighed. “How old are you? One day you will have to grow up.”
“How old? I don’t know. I stopped counting when I got to Bali. I am not an accountant.”
The warder came back, crouched low with respect, handed him, two-handed, a packet of cigarettes that Walter immediately opened, lighting one for him and passing it back with a graceful smile. My own cigarettes lay, unregarded … Never mind. There came a crashing thunderclap of noise, like Judgement Day, from outside.
“What the Hell?” We all crowded to the window. Down there, beyond the joyless wall, sat some fifteen men in sarongs bright as birdsong, their gleaming instruments before them, great smiles on their faces, one or two with children on their laps, pounding out a tune that I recognised as baris, the warrior dance of Bali.
“It’s the Ubud gamelan!” There were tears in Walter’s eyes. “Oh my God! How very kind! How generous! Look, there is Oleg! To come all that way just to show me … just to say …” His voice choked. He stuck his arm through the bars and waved. There came an answering cheer and the music swelled and quickened. The warder laughed, threw his elbows up, dropped his knees and splayed his feet, stuck his cigarette in his mouth and went through the proper series of classic moves that transfers weight gracefully from one foot to another and was joined by Walter, fingers fluttering at the ends of his outstretched forearms as, in perfect synchrony, they launched into the proper steps of huffing and puffing advance and retreat, miraculously avoiding the chairs, the chamber pot, the comfortless bed – the whole cell become a temple courtyard, the drab prison uniform a glorious cloth of gold. I flattened myself against the wall lest I be run down by the juggernaut of art. They swayed back and forth dipped and rose, executed the swift little runs, the sudden spasming body contractions, their glaring eyes scissoring back and forth and then, at a point where they were supposed to swirl like dervishes, one went the wrong way and they collided and fell, giggling to the floor.
“Now look what you’ve done, ruined my fine costume!” They fell back, laughed and hugged each other in a moment of pure joy, physical and emotional, that consumed them both and, in their eyes, I saw clearly a surrender to simple, open love and respect that held nothing back, as we do. It was a flow of sheer common humanity, without barriers of culture or language, an insubstantial exchange that enriched both and impoverished neither, a moment in which there was no room for misunderstanding or meanness or cavilling .
Now there were tears in my own eyes. “That look,” I thought. “That look is Walter’s relationship with Bali and the Balinese. That look is his only and irrefutable defence”. But how do you put a look into a legal dossier?
***
The little District Court was crammed and very hot. Outside, profiting from the crowd, the usual array of little foodstalls had sprung up for the Indies is a constantly munching maw that is always hungry. Whenever the doors were opened, smoke, noise and the aroma of roasting meat impertinently broke through the imposed sterile silence and the steely smell of righteousness. Downstairs, under the ticking fans, sat the dripping European community, dressed up, come for a good show.
“A classic rite of solidarity,” stated Margaret too loudly, looking round like an entomologist at insects. “A statement and affirmation of the status quo. Here we all sit as one. This is our place and the room maps the proper distribution of power, Balinese excluded from the main body and on their feet, not sitting. The object is to define Walter also as ‘not-one-of-us’ and ship him off to limbo. In the old days it would have been to Jimbaran, of course, where the outlaws and lepers were driven off to – later, the Christian converts.” She was wearing a broad straw hat that annoyed the man behind, a spotty frock – not one of her fieldwork smocks – and the kind of white clumpy shoes favoured by American nurses. Yet, other maps were here to be called upon. Upstairs in the gallery, the Balinese indeed stood, but over our heads, therefore inappropriately elevated, even above the judge on his high chair. Moreover, the judge sat to the south west and thus the lowest-status part of the room. This arrangement would cause problems with the high-caste witnesses if they were called to take the stand and even with the low-caste ones called to climb into the witness box above the heads of any superiors on the ground floor. For Balinese, it was a conceptual omelette. Only males had come but whether as the result of some local classification or a regulation imposed by the Dutch, I did not know. My Moluccan military friend was one of the guards standing to attention at the front of the court, flanking the judge in a pose that showed his fine powerful legs to advantage. I managed to catch his eye and risked a wink that sent him into suppressed giggles. From the dark wainscotting, the meaty face of Queen Wilhelmina and the smoothly handsome Jonkeer Alidius Warmoldus Lambertus Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer, His Excellency Governor General of the Netherlands East Indies and first cause of all our woe, glared down on us in photographic reproduction.
The chief judge, His Honour Herman de Jonghe, was sitting resentfully hunched in his black robe, red collar and white tabs, making it immediately clear that he was a man of powerful dislikes. Flanked on either side by foetus-faced Tweedledum and Tweedledee colleagues, he did not want to be her
e in the provinces and closed his eyes upon them for long periods, only his yawns showing that he was not quite asleep. The bored voice cried out that all his life, he had been plagued by the distasteful crimes of defendants, the stupid accusations of prosecutors and the specious excuses of the defence and now legal process was experienced as a measured personal affront, made worse by non-conformity of participants. He was annoyed by people who did not speak Dutch, or who refused to swear on the Bible or did not wear ties. He was bored by the presence of so many men in his court and appalled by any woman who did not know that a lawcourt was not her place. He was like a cat irritated at its own tail. Koch was busy whispering a running translation of events to Walter, as I was obliged to do for the Meads, despite the irritated coughing of the man behind and beady glares from de Jonghe. At least Walter had scrubbed up well in a nicely ironed pair of trousers and shirt, looking like everyone’s favourite nephew.