The person who had been lying next to me and had smiled was no longer there. It was daytime, and all the sleepers had gotten up. Distraught, I also pulled myself to my feet and wandered around on the weird ship among strange people, and I saw islands on the dark blue sea with wild, shining chalk cliffs and islands with tall windblown palms and deep blue volcanic mountains. Cunning, brown-skinned Arabs and Malays were standing with their thin arms crossed on their breasts. They were bowing to the ground and performing the appropriate prayers.
“I saw my father,” I shouted out loud. “My father is on the ship!”
An old English officer in a flowered Japanese morning gown looked at me with shining bright-blue eyes and said, “Your father is here and is there, and is in you and outside you, your father is everywhere.”
I gave him my hand and told him that I was traveling to Asia in order to see the sacred tree and the snake, and in order to return to the source of life from which everything began and which signified the eternal unity of appearances.
But a merchant eagerly took hold of me and claimed my attention. He was an English-speaking Singhalese. He pulled a small cloth bundle out of a little basket, which he untied and out of which small and large moonstones appeared.
“Nice moonstones, sir,” he whispered conspiratorially, and when I tried forcefully to pull myself away from him, someone laid a hand lightly on my arm and said, “Give me a few stones, they’re really beauties.” The voice immediately captured my heart as a mother captures her runaway child. I turned around eagerly and greeted Miss Wells from America. It was inconceivable that I had so completely forgotten her.
“Oh, Miss Wells,” I called out joyfully, “Miss Annie Wells, are you here too?”
“Won’t you give me a moonstone, German?”
I quickly reached into my pocket and pulled out the long, knit coin purse that I had gotten from my grandfather and that as a boy I had lost on my first trip to Italy. I was glad to have it back again, and I shook a bunch of silver Singhalese rupees out of it. But my traveling companion, the painter, who I hadn’t realized was still there and was standing next to me, said with a smile, “You can wear them as buttons; here they’re not worth a penny.”
Puzzled, I asked him where he had come from and if he had really gotten over his malaria. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Modern European painters should all be sent to the tropics so they can wean themselves from their orange-ish palettes. Here is just the place where you can get much closer to the darker palette of nature.”
It was obvious, and I emphatically agreed. But the beautiful Miss Wells in the meantime had gotten lost in the crowd. Anxiously, I made my way farther around the huge ship, but did not have the courage to force myself past a group of missionary people who were sitting in a circle that blocked the entire width of the deck. They were singing a pious song and I quickly joined in, since I knew it from home:
Darunter das Herze sich naget und plaget
Und dennoch kein wahres Vergnügen erjaget
(Beneath it the heart is still fretting and striving,
No true lasting happiness ever deriving…)
I found myself in agreement with that, and the heavy-hearted, pathetic melody put me in a sad mood. I thought of the beautiful American woman and of our destination, Asia, and found so much cause for uncertainty and care that I asked the missionary how things really stood: Was his faith truly a good one and would it be any good for a man like me?
“Look,” I said, hungry for consolation, “I’m a writer and a butterfly collector—”
“You’re mistaken,” said the missionary.
I repeated my explanation. But whatever I said, he responded with the same answer: “You’re mistaken,” accompanied by a bright, childish, modestly triumphant smile.
Confused, I got away from him. I saw that I was not going to accomplish anything there, and I decided to drop everything and look for my father, who would certainly help me. Again I saw the face of the serious English officer and thought I heard his words: “You father is here and he is there, and he is in you and outside of you.” I understood that this was a warning, and I squatted down and began to chasten myself and to seek my father within me.
I remained still that way and tried to think. But it was hard, the whole world seemed to have been gathered on this ship in order to torment me. Also it was terribly hot, and I would gladly have given my grandfather’s knit purse for a cold whisky and soda.
From the moment I became aware of it, this satanic heat seemed to swell and grow like a horrible, unbearably piercing sound. People lost all trace of composure. They swilled greedily out of straw-covered bottles like wolves, they tried in the most bizarre ways to make themselves comfortable, and all around me the most uncontrolled, meaningless actions were occurring. The whole ship was obviously on the brink of insanity.
The friendly missionary, with whom I had been unable to come to an understanding, had fallen into the hands of two gigantic Chinese coolies who were toying with him in the most shameless ways. Through some hideous trick of authentic Chinese mechanics, they were able, with a nudge, to make him stick his booted foot into his own mouth. With another kind of nudge, they made both his eyes hang out of their sockets like sausages, and when he tried to pull them back in, they prevented him from doing so by tying knots in them.
This was grotesque and ugly but it affected me less than I would have thought, in any case less than gazing at the view afforded me by Miss Wells, for she had taken off all her clothes and wore over her amazingly buxom nakedness not a thing on her body but a marvelous, brown-green snake, which had coiled itself around her.
In despair, I closed my eyes. I had the feeling that our ship was spiraling rapidly down into a glowering, hellish maw.
Then I heard, coming as a comfort to the heart like the sound of a bell, a wanderer lost in the mist intoning with many voices a joyous song, and I immediately began to sing along. It was the sacred song, “We’re going to Asia,” and all human languages could be heard in it, all weary human longing, and the inner need and wild yearning of all creatures. I felt myself loved by my father and mother, led by my guru, purified by Buddha, and saved by the Savior, and if what came now was death or beatitude, I simply could not care which.
I got up and opened my eyes. They were all there around me—my father, my friend, the Englishman, the guru, and everyone, all the human faces I had ever laid eyes on. They looked straight ahead with an awestruck, beautiful gaze, and I looked too, and before us a grove grew that was thousands of years old, and from the heaven-high twilight of the treetops came the rustling sound of eternity. Deep in the night of the holy shadow shone the golden glow of a primevally ancient temple gate.
Then we all fell on our knees, our longing was stilled, our journey was at an end. We closed our eyes, and my body toiled its way up out of its profound torpor. My forehead lay on the edge of the wooden railing, below me palely glimmered the shaved heads of the Chinese spectators; the stage was dark, and a murmuring echo of applause could be heard in the big projection room.
We got up and left. It was excruciatingly hot and there was a pervasive odor of coconut oil. But outside, the night wind off the sea, the flickering lights of the harbor, and the faint light of the stars came to greet us.
* Intrigue and Love, a play by Friedrich Schiller.
THE CROSSING
From Singapore I traveled on a small Dutch coastal steamer, which crossed the equator past southern Sumatra. The trip started with baggage problems on the wharf and then nearly turned into a catastrophe right at the beginning; hardly had the little motorboat that was to take us and our trunks to board the Brouwer shoved off from the wharf when a somewhat larger boat, racing along, hit us broadside so hard that we fell all over each other and we thought we were about to have to swim. But against all the laws of probability, it fell out that the aggressor boat was the one tha
t took the damage, and it had to limp away with a big hole in its bow.
On the Brouwer, the three of us were the only passengers in first class, so we had the ship to ourselves like a private yacht. The small stern deck was fitted out for us with Dutch coziness and comfort. There was a white-cloth covered table with grandfather armchairs; next to that were four of those Asian reclining chairs, which can never be praised too much, that have wooden stools to put your legs up on; and then there were two naively styled and solid sofas with red-striped slipcovers. The entire service staff was Malay, and immediately we were served our first meal by three attentive, skillful, handsome Javanese. It was a sumptuous rice dish, rich in content, which after the awful, pretentious meals in the Indochinese inns, I received with gratitude. In the hotels of the Straits and the Malay States, one is always served by Chinese boys who serve almost as badly and uncaringly as waiters in a mediocre European hotel. By contrast, the Javanese looked after our welfare with the indulgent dutifulness of good nurses. They circled around us with constant attention and responded to our every need smilingly and without haste. They served us the meal, offering us their best, offering it with modest gestures; they attentively refilled our glasses after every swallow, distributed the remainder of our shared bottle among the three of us with caring justice, sheltered us from the sun and the wind, were instantly ready with a burning match the moment a cigar was brought out, and their bearing and movements manifested neither reluctant servitude nor craven submissiveness, but rather joyous service and devoted goodwill.
Three Chinese lay midship playing cards without speaking but they laid out their good cards with exactly the same passionately optimistic sense of triumph and discarded their bad ones with exactly the same air of resignation and disgust that one sees in Swabian soldiers, Bavarian hunters, and Prussian sailors. A Malay family from Tonkal lay on their bast travel mat: a grandfather, the two parents, and four children. The children had it good—they looked well cared for and wore necklaces and silver anklets. At sunset, the grandfather found himself some free space, bowed down, knelt, and came back to his feet—performing the rites of evening prayer with slow dignity. His aged back bent and stretched in precise cadence, his red turban and his pointed gray beard stood out sharply in the failing light of dusk. We sat down with the two officers to a real Dutch supper. The stars came out, the sea darkened to deep black, and the jagged silhouettes of the small mountainous islands we passed were just barely to be sensed rather than seen. We had fallen silent and happily would have gone to bed, but it was much too hot. We all sat quietly and soaked in our relentlessly dripping sweat.
We ordered whisky and almost the instant we called for it, one of the young lads who had long been asleep on the deck jumped up and ran to get us the liquor and some soda water.
Through the sweltering night we sailed past a hundred islands, sometimes greeted by lighthouses. We nipped at our lukewarm drinks, smoked Dutch cigars, and breathed slowly and almost reluctantly under the hot black heavens. Now and then we spoke a few words—about the ship, about Sumatra, about crocodiles, about malaria—but saying nothing of importance. Every now and then one of us stood up, went to the railing, flicked his ashes in the water, and tried to see if anything was visible out there in the dark. And then we parted, and each went his own way to lie down on the deck or in a cabin, and the sweat kept pouring down over us, and for this night we were all travel weary and in ill humor.
But in the morning, already beyond the equator, we sailed into the broad, coffee-brown mouth of one of Sumatra’s great rivers.
PELAIANG
The European who travels to the Malayan islands for other than business reasons, even if he has no hope of ever attaining it, constantly has as the background of his imaginations and desires the landscape and the primitive paradisiacal innocence of a Van Zanten island.*1 Pure romantics may occasionally actually find this paradise and for a time, captivated by the good-natured childlike quality of most Malays, may believe themselves to be participating in an exquisite primordial state of being.
I have never experienced the unalloyed pleasure of such a self-deception, but I did indeed run across a kampong,*2 remote from the world, where for a time I was a guest in the primeval forest. This was a place where I felt good and at home, and which in my memory crystallizes and expresses the whole forest-and-river world of Sumatra. This small kampong with a hundred inhabitants is called Pelaiang and is located two days’ travel upriver from Jambi in the interior of the still little-known Jambi district, which was just recently pacified and is composed mainly of virgin primeval forest.
There four of us, plus our Chinese cook, Gomok, lived in a bamboo hut, whose roof and walls were made of woven palm leaves, and which stood on high stilts. There we hung two and a half meters in the air in our yellow, gracefully woven cage and lived as we pleased. The two businessmen appraised the fortune in ironwood that the forest contained, the painter clambered around on the riverbank with his box of watercolors and got upset with the Malay women, of which particularly the most beautiful one would not allow herself to be drawn or even looked at close up. And I let myself be motivated by the time of day and the weather and walked around in the endless forest world as though in a fabulous picture book. Each one of us went his own way and dealt in his own way with the mosquitoes, the mild storms, the primeval forest, the Malays, and with the eternal, oppressive, muggy heat. In the evening, however, which in the tropics comes all too early, we would always all come together and sit and lie on the veranda near the table and the lamps. Outside the storm rains roared or the insect chorus of the primeval forest that looked in at us through our window holes blared. By then we’d had our fill of the wilderness; we wanted to be comfortable and forget about the burdensome hygiene required by the tropics. We wanted to be happy and know nothing about the world, and so we lay about or sat about and drew upon our four big chests full of bottles of soda water, whisky, red wine, white wine, sherry, and Bremen Schlüssel beer. And then we would go to sleep under mosquito nets on our good mattresses on the floor, each with as a talisman his wool waistband, or we lay still and listened to the rain as it clattered down in pellets or ran with a tender tuneful sound over our leaf roof—until in the early morning the hornbills began their song and the monkeys greeted the day with their mad howling.
Then I would walk past the six or seven huts into the forest, protected from the leeches and snakes by the same loden-cloth gaiters that I wear in the winter in Grisons,*3 and immediately the tough, thick bush, more alien and isolating than any sea, would swallow me and wall me off from the world. Little, silent, beautiful squirrels skittered away before me, black ones with white bellies and red forelegs; and large birds gazed at me hostilely through staring jungle eyes; and soon monkeys of many different families appeared, racing with wild glee up and down through the tangle of green branches, through which no trace of sky could be seen, or crouching high in the branches and hooting madly in long, extended, painful sequences of notes. Sometimes one of the huge, shimmering butterflies, celestial in its beauty, fluttered down near me and began doing its work among the small plants on the forest floor. Foot-long millipedes raced in blind haste through the undergrowth, and everywhere mighty ants moved in thick, dark convoys—gray, brown, red, black—each ant headed toward its convoy’s common goal. Thick, rotting tree trunks lay about, overgrown by myriad forms of ferns and thin, tough brambles. Here nature seethes unceasingly in all its terrifying fertility, in a raging, extravagant fever of life that numbs and almost horrifies me, and with a northerner’s sensibilities I turn gratefully to every appearance that, in the midst of this suffocating riot of creation, singles itself out clearly as an individual form. Here and there one finds amid the dense confusion, rising above it victoriously, a single gigantic tree of incredible strength and tallness, in whose crown a thousand beasts could live and nest, and from whose princely heights, still and nobly straight, hang lianas, thick as trees.
Starting
just recently, humans have also been working in this forest. The Dutch Jambi Company has won the first major timber concession in this still completely untouched and unworked region and is beginning to log it for ironwood. I had myself taken one day to a place where, recently, large trunks had been cut down and trimmed, and I watched the arduous toil for a while. Trunks twenty meters in length, heavy as iron, were being dragged up on ropes and chains by singing and panting hordes of coolies with winches and levers out of deep, primeval, dark, swampy forest ravines, then hauled, held, supported, and again dragged a little farther on wooden rollers and primitive sledges, over swamps and through brambles, through thickets, and thick, wet weeds, meter by meter, every hour a little bit farther. A small branch of this wood that I experimentally tried to pick up proved to be so heavy that with both arms and all my strength I could not lift it. Because of its weight, this wood is infinitely difficult to transport. In this country there are still no railroads. The only road is the river, and ironwood does not float.
It was great and remarkable to see all this, but it is no pleasure to watch the labor of men when it is still a burden, a curse, abject servitude. These poor Malays will never run such projects as bosses and entrepreneurs as Europeans, Chinese, and Japanese may do, but will always be only woodchoppers, porters, and sawyers, and what they earn from that will all go back to the foreign entrepreneurs for beer and tobacco, watch chains, and Sunday hats.
Untouched by its miniscule enemies, who are there to suck on its riches, the primeval forest stands ever there. On the riverbank, the crocodiles are sunning themselves; inexhaustible in the wet heat the vegetation continues to thrive; and in places where the natives have cleared a small area to plant rice, in two years high-grown bush will be back again, and in six years there will again be tall forest.
Singapore Dream and Other Adventures Page 4