The Ten Thousand Things

by Maria Dermout

  MARIA DERMOÛT (1888–1962) was born on a sugar plantation in the Dutch East Indies and educated in Holland. She then returned to the Indies with her husband, a jurist, and spent thirty years living in, she later wrote, “every town and wilderness of the islands of Java, Celebes, and the Moluccas.” In 1951, at the age of sixty-three, Dermoût published her first book, a memoir called Yesterday. Her celebrated novel The Ten Thousand Things was published in 1955.

  HANS KONING, born Hans Koningsberger in Amsterdam, came to this country in 1951 and established himself as an American writer in 1958 with his first novel, The Affair. Among his other novels are A Walk with Love and Death, The Petersburg Cannes Express, The Kleber Flight, and, most recently, Zeeland, or Elective Concurrences.

  THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS

  MARIA DERMOÛT

  Translated and with an introduction by

  HANS KONING

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1958 by E.M. Querido Uitgeversmij, N.V.

  Translation copyright © 1958 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 2002 by Hans Koning

  All rights reserved.

  This translation originally published in 1958 by Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York. Originally published in Dutch in 1958 as De Tienduizend Dingen by E.M. Querido Uitgeversmij N.V., Amsterdam.

  Cover image: Hope Sandrow, Island of Rinja, Teluk Lehokuwadadasami, Komodo National Park, Selat Sumba, Indonesia.

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has catalogued a previous edition of this book as follows:

  Dermoût, Maria.

  [Tienduizend dingen. English]

  The ten thousand things / Maria Dermoût ; translated and with an introduction by Hans Koning.

  p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  ISBN 1-59017-013-X (pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. Koning, Hans. II. Title. III. Series.

  PT5830.D434 T513 2002

  839.3'1364—dc21

  2002005818

  ISBN 978-1-59017-882-9

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  The Ten Thousand Things

  Epigraph

  ONE: THE ISLAND

  TWO: AT THE INNER BAY

  The Small Garden

  Himpies

  THREE: AT THE OUTER BAY

  The Commissioner

  Constance and the Sailor

  The Professor

  FOUR: THE ISLAND

  INTRODUCTION

  I was on my way back to the U.S.—by ship, for this was more than forty years ago—and I was sitting on deck, reading the galleys of a Dutch novel which Alice van Eugen–van Nahuys, the editor of the Dutch publishing house Querido, had given me, “to read on your voyage.” (I had just completed my own first novel, for Knopf, and Alice was going to publish its Dutch translation; I was still writing under my Dutch name, Hans Koningsberger.)

  Those galleys I was reading were of The Ten Thousand Things, by Maria Dermoût, a Dutch woman then living in Holland, in Noordwyk on Sea, but born and raised in the Dutch East Indies, the present Indonesia. Maria was thirty-five years older than I but the novel was her first too. It was long ago, but I remember it like yesterday: the ship, a high wind as always blowing over the North Sea, and tears running down my face. That was one of the most beautiful, and saddest, stories I had ever read.

  Back in New York I took it to Bob Gottlieb, my editor at Simon and Schuster, and told him he just had to publish it here. Those were less mercenary times in our publishing world but all the same the word “translation” scared Bob off. I don’t recall why I didn’t try another publishing house; instead I translated the first two or three chapters “on speculation,” that is, just for the hell of it, and then of course he took it. “Of course,” for that novel burned like a beacon. Yes, it was sad, a quality publishers have trouble with, but it wasn’t sad in a downbeat way. It was sad in a tough, wise, and wonderful way.

  Holland and its (at that time) ten million inhabitants are definitely not as stolid and impassive as the readers of Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates and most other Americans may believe; it has produced a fine body of modern literature and especially poetry. Yet I admit that its fiction reflects the undramatic calm of a well-governed and advanced country. There were two exceptions to that calm in the past century: the German occupation of Holland in the Second World War, and before that war, its role as a colonial power. The German occupation was a disease, cured when the war was won. The colonial empire may now be seen as a disease too, a state of mind the present world is freeing itself from (although it may be argued that in a more subtle way it is still very much with us). But there was more to it than that. It gave a sense of drama larger than would have come from those ten million on the shores of the North Sea alone. To a writer, it added a dimension to his or her imagination.

  Yet Dutch literature produced no Kipling. To the contrary, the “colonial” writer still best known today, Multatuli, was a bitter opponent of colonialism and that was precisely what gave a fierceness to his work. The same was true for other serious writers touched by the Indies, Louis Couperus, the only Dutch novelist ever to make it into the American College Dictionary, and Eduard du Perron, who died during the May 1940 war days of the invasion of the Netherlands. I myself was lucky enough to work a year for Indonesian radio just after the country had secured its independence and when its President Sukarno still deliberated with his staff in Dutch; it was easy then to see myself as a Dutch-American André Malraux.

  But Maria Dermoût was sui generis, a case all her own. She did not write about her Indies as a Dutch woman, or as a Javanese or an Ambonese. Hers was a near-compassionate disdain for the dividing lines, the hatreds and the fears. Some of her characters were Dutch but most of them were not; she dwelled on the color of their skins but that was in the context of aesthetics: a Scottish professor is ugly pale with freckles, a Javanese nobleman has a “fine light-brown face. . . . Yet he was not feminine in his gracefulness.”

  She painted landscapes, still lifes, and people in a world of myth and mystery.

  That world rises from an interlocking of animals, plants, men, women, children, pearls lucky and unlucky (“tears of the sea”), sea anemones, jellyfish with little sails they can hoist when the wind is right, crabs waving their claws at the moon; and everyone and everything in it has a role and a fate, has in a sense a soul of its own. In a sense, Dermoût’s was an animism built not on primitive superstitions but on a love that encompasses all creation. In this world the great sin is to reject love when it is offered.

  Felicia, the heroine of the novel (and she is a true heroine), is a young woman living with her child at the beginning of the twentieth century on one of the Spice Islands. She teaches her little son, Himpies, about the ten thousand things which make the island, but the riches of the teaching are lost when her son, who has grown up and become a soldier, gets killed by a headhunter’s arrow:

  She wasn’t an oversensitive woman and certainly not sentimental, but she would always keep that deep and burning pity for those who had been murdered; she rebelled against it, murder, she couldn’t accept it, not for her son nor for anyone, not then, not now, and not in all eternity.

  That wo
man is of course also Maria Dermoût, whose only son died in a Japanese concentration camp.

  Within this novel, which flows like the clear mountain streams it describes, there are moments when the story, when time itself, comes to a breathtaking standstill.

  Thus when Himpies, who has gone to school in Europe, returns to the island as a young man, looking so very much like his father, her husband, that “stranger in a hotel in Nice” who had left Felicia long ago, without a word, taking her lucky jewelry with him (although she would have given it to him if he had asked, since “she loved him and always would”), “the tall, the handsome stranger . . . in a white uniform . . . her heart stopped beating. But when he was close, it was someone else . . . the warm brown eyes of the boy Himpies and he said, ‘Hello mother, there you are. . . .’ ”

  There is the young Javanese nobleman who is a clerk in a government office and who is assigned to assist the Scottish professor on a study voyage. He had been sent to the University of Leyden once, but after a year he received a letter that “for lack of funds” he had to come back. Thus he ends up a clerk.

  But he keeps a portrait of his stepmother, a princess of the Javanese principality of Solo. In the picture she holds a parasol, she is dressed in velvet and batik, with all her diamonds and pearls; her name and rank are under the picture with the added words, “in travel costume”:

  And then he thought something he had never thought before.

  He thought, when he was still young, in Leyden, when there was still time, if she had then pulled one ring from her slim fingers, or taken one clip from her ears, or the jeweled pin from her coat, or the gold and diamond brooch from her hat with the marabou feathers—but she hadn’t, the Sir Princess in traveling costume.

  And when there is a letter come from Himpies to the town, and his mother has gone to collect it and returns home in the little boat—she looks at the water and

  Suddenly there were three young turtles, all three of the same size, their shields gleaming, almost pink, with a symmetrical pattern of dark brown and yellow and black stripes and spots; each with its four fins waving up and down, young and yet with the same old man’s bald head on a wrinkled neck, with little gleaming eyes under sleepy lids, and a large yellow beak like a bird’s.

  They let themselves drop, their fins upright, as if they were drowning, rose again; they kept together, swam over and under each other, carefully, not touching, with a strangely thoughtful and yet casual grace. Then, as unexpectedly as they had risen, they dropped down into the deep and did not reappear.

  The following day she learns that just at that time her son was killed.

  There is indeed no sentimentality in Maria Dermoût’s novel. There is violence in it, murder; one day a year the lonely woman on the island has set aside to think of the murdered and the murderers of the island, to mourn them and to forgive them, and one of these is Himpies, who leaves her a victim of an unfathomable loneliness. “And she went . . . under the trees and indoors, to drink her coffee and try again to go on living.”

  When I saw Maria Dermoût last, a year before her death, she inscribed the English translation of her book for me, and dated it, “autumn, with sun, 1960.” And in the note about herself which she wrote for the English translation, she said,

  As long as I can remember, we were taught that every human being has his own value, that we should be grateful all men are not exactly alike. . . . When I write about “then” and “there,” it is not in mournful remembrance but because I see it so clearly in front of me. . . .

  “Is it escape literature?” my grandchild asks me.

  “Perhaps,” I answer. “And what if it is?”

  —HANS KONING

  THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS

  When the ten thousand things have been seen in their unity, we return to the beginning and remain where we have always been.

  Ts’en Shen

  ONE: THE ISLAND

  ON THE ISLAND in the Moluccas there were a few gardens left from the great days of spice growing and “spice parks”—a few only. There had never been many, and on this island they had even long ago been called not “parks” but “gardens.”

  Now, as then, the gardens spread along both bays—outer bay and inner bay—the spice trees clustered together, kind with kind, clove with clove, nutmeg with nutmeg; a few high shade trees in between, kanari trees usually, and on the bayside coconut palms and plane trees to give shelter from the wind.

  Of all the houses not one was standing whole; they had collapsed with an earthquake and been cleared away. Here and there a piece of an old house had remained: a wing, a wall only, and later people built against it, usually just a few shabby rooms.

  What was left of all the glory?

  Yet something seemed to have lingered in those gardens of the old, the past, of the so-very-long-ago.

  On a sunny spot between the small trees—when it gets warm there’s such a strong smell of spices there . . .

  In one of those silent ruined rooms, with a real Dutch sash window and a deep window sill . . .

  On a stretch of beach under the planes, where the little waves of the surf flow out: three waves, one behind the other —behind the other—behind the other . . .

  What could it be?

  The remembrance of a human being, of something that happened, can remain in a place, tangible almost—perhaps there is someone left who knows of it and thinks about it sometimes. Here it was different again: with no foothold anywhere, no certainty—nothing more than a question? a perhaps?

  Did two lovers once hold each other here and whisper—forever—or did they let each other go between the little nutmeg trees and say—goodbye?

  Did a child play with her doll on the window sill?

  Who was standing on the beach then, staring over the three little waves of the surf? and over the bay? at what?

  A silence like an answer, a silence of both resignation and expectation; a past and not past.

  There was not much else left.

  Two of the gardens were haunted.

  In a little garden at the outer bay, close to the town, a drowned man walked; but that was of not so long ago, of now, so to speak. And in another garden at the inner bay there were, from far time, three little girls.

  The house there was gone: even the foundations and the pieces of wall which had remained standing a long time after the earthquake and fire had finally been cleared away. But a guest pavilion was left, under the trees close to the beach: four large rooms on an open side gallery.

  And it was inhabited too: the lady who owned the garden lived in it herself.

  She had a beautiful name—Mrs. Von So-and-so (that had been her husband’s name; he was from an East Prussian noble family)—and she was the last of an old Dutch line of spicegrowers.

  For five generations the garden had been in the family; after her, her son would have been the sixth generation; after him, his children the seventh—but it was not to be like that. Her son had died young and childless and she was an old woman, beyond fifty now, without other children, without other relatives—the last one.

  According to the custom of the island, where they had trouble remembering difficult names and where everyone had a byname, she was called “the lady of the inner bay,” or also “the lady of the Small Garden,” for that was the name of the garden.

  The Small Garden—only in a manner of speaking: it was a large garden, one of the largest on the island, extending at the back far into the hills up to the foot of a steep mountain range, bordered in front by the inner bay, and on the left and right by rivers.

  The river to the left, where the land was low and level, flowed brown and sluggish through the trees, not very deep and almost always fordable. But the people from the village on the other shore preferred to cross it on a little raft that they pushed with a bamboo pole.

  To the right the hills continued down to the beach; a small wild river bounced foamingly over the rocks, through a valley and so on to the inner bay.
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  In the valley the poultry was housed, chickens and ducks; the cow sheds were there too—so much clear water at hand to scrub the barns and the runs, and not too close to the house.

  Behind the pavilion and at a right angle there was a whole row of annexes—low-ceilinged and with thick stone walls. On one side, in its wooden bell tower, the slave bell still hung; it was rung now for every proa which came or left—welcome . . . goodbye—if someone happened to be at hand. It was also often forgotten.

  Behind it the wood began, a lovely wood with many paths and clearings between the trees, especially in this part close to the house. Everything grew there, pell-mell, useful and not useful—spice trees, fruit trees, kanari trees full of nuts, palms: arèn palms from which sugar and syrup were tapped, many coco palms, sago palms in the moist places. But also flowering trees, or rare trees, or trees which were just beautiful.

  A small straight lane—going nowhere—of cassowarinas, high firs with long drooping needles, as smooth and straight as the feathers of a cassowary, stirred by every breeze from the inner bay—rustling, lisping, as if they were standing there whispering together. The singing trees they were called.

  A water-clear brook ran through the wood; higher up part of it was led through a hollow tree trunk to a stone reservoir marked by a sculptured lion’s head with a mossy green mane. From the gaping mouth several spouts of water arched across each other, down into a dug-out stone cistern: a large yet shallow cistern with a wide edge of masonry to sit upon.

  All this was in the shade: the cistern, the reservoir with its sculpture, the tree trunks, the ground, all was moist, thickly covered by moss or molded with black and dark-green spots—only the surface of the water held the light in its clarity, in the transparent ripples which swept across it.

  It was the old bathing place, shallow for the children, seldom used any more—where were the children? The birds from the wood now came to drink here.