by Nigel Barley
The Hofkers came as a pair, Willem and wife, Maria. They had first visited Indonesia at the instigation of the KPM shipping line, to present a state portrait of Queen Wilhelmina to the head office in Batavia, but were seduced by the charm of Bali and stayed. The public burning of said portrait was to be one of the most urgent acts of the new Japanese administration, a compliment of sorts. The Nazis burnt Vicki, the Japanese Hofker, nobody bothered to consign Bonnet to the flames. While Maria painted insects à la Walter, Willem Hofker was a formal portrait painter in the grand Renaissance tradition, and, soon after arriving in Bali, went into the Balinese beauties business, specialising in legong dancers. As Walter would have said archly, we became bosom friends.
In a tiny wooden bungalow, we two men and Maria played, like Marie Antoinette, at growing vegetables, raising chickens, shifting for ourselves, just as the locals did. Maria was a big, cheerful woman emotionally attuned to the making of nourishing soups, which was as well, for, as Japanese forced levies on food and raw materials increased, the markets emptied of goods. Our first attempts at cultivation were not successful. In the steambath of the hot season, Western vegetables flourished in early, rank growth, but were swiftly undermined by boring worms. As usual, Nature everywhere supplied unsought metaphors for life. Only our carrots swelled obscenely and came to fruition. Tired of carrot soup, we tried to exchange them with our neighbours but Balinese disdain wortel as a worthless Dutch peculiarity. Their charity proved a more solid resource, however, and, even in the worst times, we never lacked for rice. Diversifying, we branched out into beans and dutiful cabbage, fighting off the hawks that attacked our chicks and the snakes that their eggs attracted, handpicking pests from our plants’ gnarled leaves. The last also served as models for Maria’s busy pencil. While Dr Nasiputi was otherwise engaged, Willem and I staged a commando raid on Walter’s artistic supplies cupboard and brought back tempera and oils that we eked out in increasingly weak pastel shades. There was, of course, no question of payment for our work. Other artists similarly got by. In bougainvillea-draped Sanur, Le Mayeur continued to live undisturbed with Ny Pollok, painting on burlap with flaming shades of Javanese sarong dye, while Theo Meier, patriarchally equipped with local wives, took to the hills, grew his own tobacco and brewed his own plum cordial, “swisky for Swiss mountain sailors”. In town, so it was said, Manxi was often to be seen, chauffeured around, in the stately staffcar of a high-ranking officer. We all used what talents we had to survive.
Then, out of the blue, the lanky post boy brought a postcard from Walter. I was astonished to learn that the postal service still operated, albeit with great delay and intermittent delivery, rather as the basic bodily functions continue after death and surprise the living with sudden twitches and effusions of flatulence. The silly boy knew nothing of its origins. A knowledge of geography beyond Ubud was not required for the exercise of his duties and all his thought was absorbed in the hope that the arrival of the Japanese might mean that he would be issued with a new uniform involving a sword. The card itself was mysterious. It was a featureless khaki oblong marked “Censored” and written in Dutch to “Dear Rudi”. Walter had never written in Dutch, though perhaps this was a restriction imposed by the authorities. He had never addressed me as “Rudi”, though perhaps that, too, was to avoid overtones of excessive intimacy. Date was illegible but, in small print, I could just make out the name of “Kuta” and thought, at first, it was from the little seaside town where McPhee played the gamelan. Then I saw the other half, not “Kuta” but “Kutacane”, a desperately small town in the highlands of Aceh, a byword for boredom and isolation amongst a joylessly Muslim people. “There is no dancing here and the only music comes from me – we have a piano – and a ragged teahouse violinist. For the local people, music is sinful, sex is sinful, paintings are sinful. I live a very sinful life with much musical painting. Many here are driven to explore their faith from boredom. Of all the peoples of the Indies, those here most closely resemble your own and the young men are very active around the camp. I have become invincible at pingpong. Send more balls. There is a terrible lack of them here.” I did not know what to make of it. The “exploration of the faith” was obvious enough and the “young men” would be ambiguously the beguiling local beauties and the Pemuda nationalists, some of them armed, who were throwing their lot in with the Japanese. Were they a threat to Walter or a source of comfort? Was it the prisoners who lacked the balls or the guards? I could not tell. At any moment, he would walk through the door, flop down, grinning, in that chair and start talking about some new dragonfly he had found.
Then the kaleidoscope twisted again, the world briefly retreated and blurred, then sharpened into a new order. The naval commander was replaced, Kasimura disappeared. It was announced that anyone with half native blood would be released from internment and it was amusing to see how many “whites” swiftly rushed to the administrative building with written proof of their family’s concealed half-caste status. Willem Hofker and I, growing cabbage in the hills, were adjudged a threat to security and found ourselves abruptly arrested and shipped off, with three hundred others, to Pare Pare in Sulawesi. As we marched through the town, on the way to the harbour, a great glossy car purred throatily past, Japanese driver honking, with what looked like Manxi sitting on the back seat with a huge black hat pulled down low – but I could not be sure since she held her hand to her face and looked steadfastly the other way.
16
It was the silence I enjoyed as I worked in the grand chamber of the town hall in Makassar. It was the sort of rich, deep-dust-carpeted silence you get after a bomb, part real, part derived from the fact that your eardrums have been stunned by what went before. Mural techniques were relatively new to me but this was no Michelangelo fresco – just painting on a wall as I might have painted on a canvas. I had had the odd public commission before but never anything on such a grandiose scale, evoking such grandiose themes and executed on a wall lit by chandeliers, a triptych, rather in the style of one of the old voyages of discovery, de Bry or some such. The idea was more or less the same “unity within diversity” that the Indonesian Republic would take – suitably classicised with Sanskrit – as its own original motto. One province, three peoples.
Over to the left, were sturdy Makasarese, their fisherman role conveyed by ankle-deeep foam and the shells and starfish disposed about their feet – bearing nets, baskets of sprats and great barbed, pouting fish. In the distance, we see their bright outriggers. Foreground figures tastefully unclothed, pubic bulge apparent. Those in the rear, bare-buttocked and apple-cheeked, sporting in the surf. There is nothing harder to invent than a face, so all painters’ canvases are a gallery of those they have known. The foremost borrowed little Resem’s sweet countenance and grafted it onto Alit’s firm legs. As my brush licked their muscled chests and tendons into shape, my only critic was Yurang, a pedal rickshaw driver, unsaddled through advancing years and delegated to bring me the daily tea, coffee and snacks that my contract stipulated.
“There are no women,” he observed, standing back and offering up coconut cream and pandanus cakes. “There should always be women.”
“No women,” I said firmly. After the forced breasts of occupation, I wanted no more Amazons’ chests rampaging across my canvases. “You Muslims would complain it was immoral.”
He nodded and, as always, turned to his habitual theme of the joys of the open road, now denied him. A dreamy look came over his face and he scratched his crotch nostalgically. “Still. Down by the sea. It reminds me. When I was on the bike, you know the best sex I ever had? It’s the rickshaw, puts a terrible strain on the groin that needs easing after a day in the saddle. I used to peddle down to the docks after dark. If the girls had had a thin night, they were glad of a lift home and would pay you in kind, on the nail, right there on the crossbar in the shadow of the fish market.”
In the centre, I set the Torajan hill-farmers, romantically loinclothed with an immaculateness of blanchisserie a
vailable only in Art. They are seen bending rhythmically, as in dance, stretched in the planting-out of rice seedlings, bodies glistening with rain, sweat – whatever – but glistening and, in the rear, rising up, a tropic Arcadia of palms, exotic hills and peaceful buffalo. In the far distance, loom the ancient carved and painted houses for which they are famous, their bird-wing roofs riding lightly on stilts. When the fighting ended, the bodies of the Torajans who had died were said to have climbed up from their graves and marched, all grinning rictus and tattered cerements, back into the hills for the elaborate funerals to which they were entitled, with their massacres of buffalo in the glow of burning villages. There was no shortage of people who would tell you they had seen it with their own eyes.
“Headhunters!” declared Yurang, laying down a dish of kue lapisan, striped durian cake. “Unclean. Uncircumcised. You wouldn’t catch me up in those mountains.” He shuddered. “They’d have the head of a good Muslim off his shoulders before he could say ‘Allah!’ Mind you. The best sex I ever had was with a Torajan girl. She would do things you wouldn’t believe. But since you’re not married, it would be ungodly to tell you and get you all hot and drive you to what must be a sin except in marriage.”
Over to the right and balancing the composition, the Buginese, Yurang’s own people, in primitive breechclouts of soft, clinging cotton. As their main hero, I gave them Oleg but serene and doe-eyed, with the tapered chest and pared waist of his dreams and the nose had been adjusted to Buginese notions of beauty, for Buginese pride themselves on their high, straight noses, claiming they resemble the prows of their great wooden sailing vessels – conveniently depicted in the background – of whose size and prominence they also boast and called – Margaret please note – pinisi. Slung over one caramel shoulder, they wear the chequered, silk sarongs that their women weave. A good quality one is so fine that it may be drawn with ease through a wedding ring. Indeed, I believe there is some ancient ceremonial where this is done. I cannot be sure – I cannot be expected to remember everything – but riding easily beside their Muslim faith, they retain an ancient tradition of transvestite or possibly hermaphrodite priests. Having once been the long-distance traders of the archipelago, they were disbarred by greedy Dutch monopoly and so became smugglers and pirates. Oleg bears on his shoulder a jar of perishable goods in token of ancient seaways and in the foreground market place, the transformed Ubud postboy disposes, with gawky adolescence, a banana-leaf box of cloth. I found the work surprisingly easy to execute after all that festered time in the camp, where I had produced nothing. I had been in limbo, frozen and could only count the days, months, years. The whole work was, of course, based on that mural I had painted in my mind in the bare cell in Denpasar. It had slowly cooked for years.
“A fine-looking people.” Yurang nodded approvingly. “If you wanted, I could model for you. It’s a face the ladies liked in their day. The best sex I ever had was with a Chinese widow who got excited watching me pedaling from behind. I had a regular appointment to take her shopping three afternoons a week but, on the way back, when I had worked up a good sweat, we’d call in at that little park at the end of the sea wall. I had a friend who had a hut there and he’d look the other way while we had our fun.” He set down a dish of raw turtles’ eggs, a great treat but not one I liked. They always reminded me of pingpong balls.
I had sent Walter more balls but never received any acknowledgement. I had always expected him to turn up, looking for me in the camp and, on some days, the certainty that he was about to appear was almost tangible, an imminent windfall that was just another paralysing part of being in limbo. He would come and rescue me, not on a white charger, but in a great ticking staff car or in an aeroplane, bearing credentials of the highest order to which the Japanese would immediately defer. Then, one day, the capricious time machine that was the postal service spewed out another card, delivered by the Red Cross. It had come from Ubud and I thank the lanky postboy for forwarding it. Again in Dutch and therefore from the world before.
Dear Rudi,
How I envy you your freedom! To be able to go where you like and eat what you like! My only relief here is to pour myself into a new painting. It is The Vision of Ezekiel and it is the most impressing thing I have ever done. I will try to get it to you so you can see for yourself. The face of Ezekiel may strike you as familiar but without your glasses! That would have been too much. It shows the godhead but as a great crushing machine, with wings and animal and human heads like my Scherzo, and there is a Balinese sense of the world as a turning, revolving apparatus with wheels that mesh together like Balinese time so that the more a thing moves, the more it is the same. Father Scruple lent me a Bible to look it up. As a schoolboy, I only read Ezekiel for the Whore of Babylon part where she was seduced by the wall paintings showing beautiful young men dressed all in blue, the first human depraved by art! It even drove me to go to Berlin to see the Assyrian walls myself and, as a boy, I was amazed by the complexity of the soldiers’ knees though I did not like their beards and found the men not at all beautiful.
I feel the time coming when I, too, shall be free. All I think about is Bali. The people here are not as graceful as those in Bali, the trees are less tall, the water less fresh, the sky not as high. Once I get back, I swear I shall never leave again and I shall get back even if I have to crawl all the way from this camp.
My own camp had really not been all that bad. Naturally, Hofker had blandly assumed that his wife would be receiving gentler treatment in the women’s camp in Java but, at that time, we knew nothing of the vicious atrocities and deliberate starvation imposed by Imamura and the Japanese 16th army. Our own guards were easy-going, middleaged men, headed by cylindrical Sergeant Yoshida, cynical conscripts not stiff-legged professionals, who – like us – mainly just wanted to survive and knew that this involved our co-operation. There were five of them to guard 650 of us. The private property of the inmates was respected and many had brought large sums with them that could be used to buy food or medicines – Pare Pare was literally a hotbed of malaria. In return, the guards appropriated all the allowances intended for our maintenance and installed themselves in a sort of cosy Japanese kampung where Yoshida could be seen having his white hairs daily plucked by a giggling local woman. Fields of good black earth were allocated to us to grow food. We traded in goats and cattle. We were allowed to fish from the beach. Life was hard but not impossibly harsh, monastically challenging rather than lethal. Our numbers were augmented, in the early months, by dribs and drabs of new arrivals seeping down from Java and, on one such day, a familiar figure clambered from the back of the truck. He was no longer in clerical garb of immaculate conception but worn khaki mufti into which he was sweating
“Father Scruple!” He turned furtively and eyed me with caution. “Don’t you remember? We met in Denpasar. Then Ngawi. I was visiting my friend, Walter.”
He frowned. “No I don’t believe … Which Walter would that be then?”
“Yes. Yes. You must remember. Walter Spies. You played chess with him every day and argued about his Balinese dictionary. A painter. A musician.”
He sighed. “My son. In my line of business, one meets so many people”. He turned to go but, of course, did not know where to go and dithered.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t know what it is you’re up to but I don’t believe you don’t remember him. Think! He played the piano. There can’t have been that many piano-playing Walters at Ngawi.”
“Well, now. Perhaps I vaguely recall someone like that. He was at Kutacane, too. A strange man. When the piano fell apart, he took the keyboard and played it silently for hours. A little odd in the head. I shouldn’t believe much of what he says, if I were you.” A sudden thought struck him. “He’s not here, is he?” he asked, in some alarm.
“No,” I said. “He’s not here. I don’t know where he is. That’s the point. When was the last time you saw him?”
He screwed up his face. “That would have been in Kutacane. It w
as all confused towards the end. We weren’t sure whether the Dutch had already surrendered or not. There was talk of moving the prisoners again. Some of the men just deserted, or maybe they went to do some real fighting. It was hard to know. When there was no point in staying, I left. The Japanese are not always great respecters of the cloth, you know. My own capture in Palembang was terrible. They burst into the church, firing, halfway through ‘Rock of Ages’. I thought we were all to be killed. All the priests were seized, all the workers, even the choir. I never got to deliver my sermon. My assistant, Hendrik, was the only one to get away.” Coincidence? I thought not but was glad Dion was still free. He sighed. “Look, Walter had been working on this painting, The Vision of Ezekiel, he asked me to look after it in the camp, to put it in a safe place. It was an ungodly great thing. The Japanese were said to be twelve miles away and when we moved there was no space for luggage and the camp was burned. I’m sorry, my son, but there it is. All I took was my Bible. It was God’s will. If it is any comfort, I am not entirely sure it was not a heretical work. The face of the prophet was most inappropriate, the face of a depraved idiot. Anyway, it was sauve qui peut.”
“Sauve qui peut. For Walter that would mean ‘Italian wine for anyone who can bear to drink it’.” He looked at me as if I were mad. “Soave – it’s a kind of Italian wine – it was a game we played – never mind.” I remained calm but my voice broke. “So you saved a bible that could be replaced anywhere and burnt a major work of art, the summation of a man’s life? It was possibly a water closet – I mean a watershed – of western art. That’s like burning his soul.”