The Ten Thousand Things

by Maria Dermout

  Where her son had been murdered by the Mountain Alfura, the warrior who, dark and nude and resplendent in his white loin girdle and his white porcelana shells, stood waiting behind a tree—shot through his unprotected throat while he was catching his breath with his men and Domingoes, talking, laughing at the old convict—

  “And yet I wasn’t only murdered, mother, I fell in battle, that too.”

  How often had he not said that—she thought he would say it that way; she never answered: if that’s the way he wanted it—but she knew better.

  From where she stood she looked straight at the path—was it a path?—along which they had carried the stretcher all those hours, taking turns at holding the wound closed—in the end only the old man, while her son slowly bled to death under his fingers, and Domingoes walked at his side and looked at him and said, “oh soul . . .”—or didn’t he?

  From here she looked straight at his grave on the coast of the island “at the other side” where the surf came in from the ocean “with its steadily repeating equally heavy beats,” he had written. She had been there—she could have had him dug up, reinterred, but she did not like digging up. She knew the sound of that surf now.

  Here, at this pillar, she talked with him in her fashion.

  “Have you been inside?” she asked.

  “Yes, mother.”

  “How are they?”

  “Oh, all right.”

  “Are the three girls there?”

  “Yes, they too. I especially like the professor.”

  “Yes, didn’t I tell you?”

  “Marregie immediately took possession of him, they were standing at the curiosities cabinet and the professor told her about the shells. I don’t think it will be easy for him to get rid of her! But he didn’t seem in very good form, something seemed to be bothering him.”

  The lady of the Small Garden shrugged.

  “Bothering him, indeed! If you’ve been murdered by a pack of Binongkos—that scum!—murdered and thrown into the sea, perhaps before you are even dead.”

  “Yes, no, it isn’t always . . .” her son hesitated, groping for the right word; and for one short moment she saw—no! no!—she remembered his face, breath-takingly clear, the eyes with the spots, and it was so close, the way he could look—“it isn’t easy for us human beings to be killed, nor to die in whatever way, mother—”

  His face was already gone again.

  “No, of course not,” she said, “but you mustn’t mention those two in one breath, you know I can’t stand that! Why do you pretend that it’s the same, being killed and dying? Because it isn’t, and you can’t really think that it is.”

  “Yes-and-no, mother,” she made her son say, hesitant as he would be—but then her own words angered her and she scolded him, “don’t start with that yes-and-no and one-and-the-other, I hate that talk without finality, you should know that by now.”

  “Yes, but certainly, Mrs. Small Garden,” her son said without laughing or looking at her, “but where were we—with the professor; he was telling Marregie the Cinderella story, but a bit differently, all about the double Venus-heart and the Amoret Harp and the Nautilus and the post horn—‘see that! You have to blow the post horn!’ Marregie called to the other girls, but Elsbet and Katie weren’t listening, they were too busy playing with the sailor, with a rope. He must have been showing them how to make sailors’ knots.

  “ ‘Did you ever sail in a proa?’ ” the sailor asked them.

  “ ‘Yes, of course.’

  “ ‘With whom?’

  “ ‘The fishermen from the village, and our nurse.’

  “ ‘A nice nurse?’

  “They looked at each other, ‘Yes, very nice.’

  “ ‘Where did you go sailing?’

  “ ‘Well, here in the inner bay, where else?’

  “ ‘Do you know how you have to whistle for the wind, and that you must call him Mister?’

  “Elsbet and Katie knew quite well that the Wind had to be called Mister—come here, Mister Wind, loosen your long hair!—and they knew how to whistle for him, they started right in and got louder and louder.

  “ ‘Sssh, watch out!’ said the sailor, ‘the others will hear us and you’ll wake up the Storm, who’s called Baratdaja!’

  “ ‘But we like the storm who’s called Baratdaja!’ the two girls said.

  “ ‘Me too!’ said the sailor—and they all three started to giggle.

  “And then Constance stood up and clapped her hands as they do at the rattan tug-of-war, and started to sing.”

  “What did she sing?” the lady of the Small Garden asked her son.

  “The song—the drum calls from afar, afar, and—the rattan is broken, we are holding the pieces—it sounded rather sad, I must say.”

  “Yes,” the lady of the Small Garden said pensively, “I imagine so—did she dance too?”

  “If you can call it dancing—a few steps forward, a few steps back, and clapping her hands.”

  “Did you watch her?”

  “Yes,” her son answered, “yes, the professor and the sailor and I—”

  “I would have expected you to watch her,” the lady of the Small Garden answered, and then she said what she had been meaning to say all that time, “do you know what, that commissioner is sitting all alone on the beach, under the plane trees—it’s most annoying, he doesn’t want to admit that he was murdered!”

  Her son answered, “but none of us likes to admit that! I’ve tried so often to explain it to you, can’t you listen just once: we’re never just murdered, we’re always ‘killed in action’ too—don’t get angry now, because that’s the way it is, one and the other, my sweet mother!” He had never called her that.

  “Well, that’s what the commissioner seems to think too. When I said, ‘but you must know whether you fell or whether you were pushed,’ do you know what he answered? ‘Both, madam,’ how do you like that!”

  Then her son laughed.

  She had made him say and ask and answer so many things; he had been sad at times when they talked about Toinette and the child Nettie; she couldn’t tell him where they had gone. But why had she never made him laugh? Not once—he who had been gay, who liked to laugh, had been laughing when the arrow came, Domingoes had said—this was the first time.

  “I think I like the commissioner,” he added.

  “No,” the lady of the Small Garden answered in her decisive manner, “no, he is not agreeable. Come along and find out for yourself.”

  She turned around and slowly went back through the side gallery to the garden, she kept to the wall to leave room for someone beside her, down the stairs to the beach, and sat down in her chair.

  She sat still in her chair, she had been sitting there all the time.

  She had the feeling that the commissioner was no longer there under the plane tree, nor the others inside, not the professor, nor Constance, nor the sailor, nor the three girls—none of them, not her son either.

  They had never been there.

  “Stay with me,” she suddenly whispered, frightened; closed her eyes for a moment, opened them and then looked silently out again over the inner bay.

  The moon threw a path of light over the water, one could have walked on it—the inner bay did murmur now, softly, and the waves of the surf flowed right up to her feet; the large trees stood dark and silent around and behind her. The fishers whom she had seen pass earlier came back, walking in the water: torch in the left hand, spear in the right, to catch the fish when they jumped at the torchlight. They walked carefully in order not to make more noise than the water, they did not talk. But when they saw her sitting in the moonlight, the one whose burned arm she had treated for so long called a greeting to her over the murmur, something like “good luck to you, madam!”

  “Quiet!” the others said, because of the fish—and she answered back over the water, as softly as possible, “are you doing well? Yes?” Luck, where is it, that luck?

&nbs
p; For the first time that night she came to think of the others, of the murderers—why?

  The Mountain Alfura behind the tree.

  The four Binongkos of the professor.

  The man who had murdered Constance.

  The murderer of the sailor, no one knew whether it had been a man or a woman.

  The young half-Chinese wife of the commissioner, with her three aunts—or not?

  And the Balinese slave girl, the nurse of the three children —who had been so beautiful, who couldn’t walk any more afterward—she didn’t want to think of her, it was too long ago, and she wasn’t allowed to, her grandmother had forbidden her to think of it.

  The mass-murderer who had wanted to save her son.

  She pressed the tips of the fingers of one hand against her forehead just above the eyebrows—how many murderers there were! It made her dizzy, and at the same time she was astonished about something: while thinking of them she did not feel the anger, the disgust of always, but pity almost; not the large and burning pity that came for those who were murdered, but a small feeling of impatience, of sadness—oh why, why, you fools!—without the desire for revenge, without hatred now. As if they were not the murderers but also among the murdered.

  And then there were no more murderers and murdered.

  It was so hazy, it all ran together in her head; after all it was one-and-the-other, as her son wanted it.

  She took her hand away, shook her head, shifted in her chair: she liked her t’s crossed—this or that—and no nonsense. Were the t’s ever crossed, was anything ever completed? She looked up and then she saw—did she see?—in the empty path of light over the water of the inner bay, far away and near, moving and wholly motionless . . .

  The purple Palm of the Sea, and under it her grandmother and Mr. Rumphius and the coral woman in her flowery dress; her grandmother held the poison plate from Ceram and put the sentinels of Good Fortune in it which she picked from the Palm; between its roots sat the Crab which controls the tides, and up in the branches the holy Bird had its nest.

  The stranger from the hotel whom she had loved—and loved now, and always—held the stolen Snake with the Carbuncle Stone in his hand, she would have given it to him if he had asked for it, free as a gift for nothing to keep—the bitter water from the bitter spring flowed over his feet.

  The bibi of whom she had been afraid showed her basket to the three pink girls; all the pearls of the commissioner were in it, pearls of the sea, and the other string of beads, fading orange and yellow, pearls from the earth, and strings and strings of gleaming white porcelana shells of Mountain Alfuras in war dress—they couldn’t do any harm now.

  Her sweet son was standing beside a woman, Toinette, and a daughter Nettie, they had their backs turned toward her (that was her own fault), they were watching a fleet sail up the inner bay, a fleet of a thousand sails all together, crystal mizzens with edges of purple and violet—they weren’t large, nor small, they reached to the sky, where was the professor now?

  Her father and mother with the five Pekingese on leashes.

  The four visitors of that evening: the professor—there he was—Constance and her sailor, the commissioner, she now saw all four faces clearly—she would have liked to wave at the professor but she wasn’t supposed to, she could only look.

  All the murderers, because they had to be there too.

  The most beautiful shells: in the middle two enormous crenated shells against each other, the Leviathan from her youth who is too terrible lived in them again, and the smallest of the smallest shells in the world next to him, the gleaming little “white lice” of which the professor had told Marregie that evening; also the double Venus-heart which is very rare, also the Amoret Harp which her son had held to his ear to listen to.

  The white stone from the “special drawer” with its child—three young men, Bear, Domingoes and Martin the Portuguese seaman who had drowned long ago—the child Sophy with the tame cockatoo she had given her, Sophy’s nurse who was herself a child—a young Javanese was drawing a proa on the waves and his name was Radèn Mas Suprapto; a very slender Javanese lady in a coachman’s cape watched him, “you’ve forgotten the ballast again,” she said—who was she? the lady of the Small Garden didn’t know her, what did she mean by that? The Binongko girl of the flowers sucked on her bleeding lip and listened; from the Portuguese wharf on the other side came the sound of hammering—and the three little girls, the real ones, were standing side by side, they held the snakestone, the knife of the sailor, and Marregie blew on the post horn—coral, fishes, crabs, the three young turtles —the Dancer with the Shell—birds, butterflies.

  The stork, the bird Lakh-lakh with his long bill and fiery red legs, and the roaring lions, in between them the boy Himpies was sitting on his mat and looking around with large enraptured eyes, and everywhere the small silver waves; and slowly, with long pauses, a voice said from far away, the bay, the inner bay—will you ever forget the inner bay, oh soul of—?

  What was happening to her, was she dying, were those her “hundred things”?

  She sat quietly in her chair, they weren’t a hundred things but much more than a hundred, and not only hers; a hundred times “a hundred things,” next to each other, separate from each other, touching, here and there flowing into each other, without any link anywhere, and at the same time linked forever . . .

  A link which she did not quite understand; understanding it was not needed, wasn’t possible, she had seen it—for one moment over the moonlit water.

  She hadn’t noticed Sjeba and her husband Henry the cowherd who had come around the house and were now standing to the left and right of her chair.

  “Why don’t you come to bed?” Sjeba asked, grumbling and at the same time worried, and they both shook their heads, “why are you sitting here? The moon is shining, but what good does that do, it only makes one sick! There’s fresh coffee in the kitchen, and you’d better come inside now.”

  Then the lady of the Small Garden whose name was Felicia stood up from her chair obediently and without looking around at the inner bay in the moonlight—it would remain there, always—she went with them, under the trees and indoors, to drink her cup of coffee and try again to go on living.