Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  ‘I need my jacket, Musa. The kumpit is very cold at night. Maybe there will be rain in Hong Kong.’

  Musa nodded. ‘Hong Kong rain….’ He turned the notion over in his mind. But Ali was not going to be put off. He took a step towards me and bellowed, ‘How abo-o-o-ut your jacket? How abo-o-o-out your watch?’

  ‘How about your boots?’ I asked politely.

  ‘Hο-o-ow abo-o-out –?’ His breath was on my face and I saw his hand working round to his hip pocket. ‘Hο-o-ow abo-o-out your jacket?… Ho-o-o-ow abo-o-o-out –?’

  ‘Hο-o-ow abo-o-out…?’ I chanted back, and felt my heart thump when, his fury at its peak, Ali opened his thick lips for a still more terrifying ‘How about …’ – the last, I felt sure, before he drew a gun. Then Musa acted with a diplomat’s aplomb that was quite unexpected. Twitching like a copper-coloured St Vitus, he threw an arm over Ibrahim’s shoulders and pushed and wrenched at him, forcing him to sway back and forth. Ali was ignored as the two Moro desperadoes began to rock to the rhythm of my ludicrous chant, ‘How about…. How about…. How about.’ High spirits possessed them, and an upsurge of love for the universe overflowed even to me. A moment later, Musa had flung his other arm across my shoulders – symbolically, I felt – demonstrating an Anglo-Moro treaty of friendship from which only the churlish Ali was now excluded. ‘How about…. How about …’ we yelled between Musa’s and Ibrahim’s gurgles of mirth like three juvenile drunks. But, of the three of us, only I was acutely aware of what in effect it was that we were chanting: an uproarious incantation against murder at sea – my murder. So, although nerves made it an effort to draw enough breath to keep the chorus going, I made the effort.

  The incantation worked. His mouth open, Ali gazed appalled at this unprecedented spectacle, frowning, puzzled, shaking his head like a bull that has entered the ring to find not one matador but three, and all of them engaged in a mad fandango. For a long minute he considered the situation, biting fiercely at the skin around his fingernails, glaring at our vaudeville act; then, as the Ayatollah put out a hand to bring him into the group, he capitulated. In a moment, from having been a potential killer of a man with a desirable watch and a delectable anorak, he became someone who could have been mistaken, if not for my bosom friend, at least for a fond acquaintance. Such is the erratic character of the descendants of old Babalatchi’s people, the corsairs of Sulu, the lawless scourges of every sea from Cagayan de Oro to the Carimatas.

  Musa’s arm embraced my neck from one side, Ibrahim’s pungent armpit cupped my shoulder on the other. We jiggled and chanted, ‘How about…. How about …’ until the afternoon sun became too much for all of us and we flopped, still laughing, into the shade. Ibrahim and Ali, his frown evaporated in the scalding light, sprawled on the deck, their arms and legs spread out and overlapping, and I collapsed on the bench. Musa slid down beside me and, without letting go his armhold on my neck, swivelled his khaki legs so that they lay heavily across my lap. Then he released my neck and lay back, resting his head against the arm of the bench. In the sudden animal abandon of their limbs the three Moros suggested leopards in human form, hunters in the shade of a forest.

  In his relaxed position, Musa said, ‘You see many wars and fighting?’

  ‘About fifteen wars in twenty years.’ I was including coups d’état and revolutions, but only two or three – a small cheat.

  ‘Why you not come see the Moros on Jolo Island?’

  ‘I’m too old for that now.’

  ‘Too old at thirty-eight, thirty-nine?’

  I didn’t correct that estimate. ‘Also I’d be scared,’ I said.

  ‘You scared?’ Suddenly he swung his feet to the deck, swelled out his chest and put on a warriorlike scowl. ‘You no scared. We no scared. We all brave men. How can you be scared after fifteen wars?’

  ‘I think everyone is scared when bullets go ppz-ing, ppz-ing.’ I punched the air around his head with my finger. ‘Aren’t you?’

  Musa’s nerves chased across his face and the tic twitched the lid of his green left eye. Indignation leaked away from him like air from an old tyre. ‘Yeah,’ he said, lying back again. ‘Okay. When bullets come I scared. We all scared.’ He paused, and then his crumpled smile reappeared. ‘But I have thees. Look.’ He reached into his shirt and drew out a plastic cord that hung around his neck with a small piece of bone threaded to it: a talisman.

  ‘Also we have’ – he jabbed his finger skywards – ‘Allah. You know Allah?’

  ‘I know about Allah, yes, of course.’

  Ibrahim and Ali had been whispering and giggling. Now Ibrahim said something, and Musa began to laugh. ‘He says you so beeg, so maybe have beeg steeck?’

  I was certainly taller than them. ‘Stick?’

  ‘Yah, you know, steek?’

  He pointed to Ibrahim, who sprawled languidly massaging his groin. ‘Ibrahim nearly lose his steeck by bullet. Now all time he hold eet for safe-tee.’ He began to wriggle out of his jacket. Across his shoulder, near the neck, a shining sheet of skin stretched over a deep hole three inches long. ‘See,’ he said, ‘hole from bullet.’

  Ali also had something to show. Lying back, he pushed his pants down over his hips to reveal a wide, fresh-looking scar beneath his navel where a bullet seemed to have passed clean through his abdomen. So all three had been wounded. ‘Goddam Marcos,’ Musa muttered. ‘Sonofbeetch.’

  *

  When the Moros came aboard I’d had time to push my Polaroid camera in through the wheelhouse window. (My Pentaxes were locked in the metal suitcase under the tanbark.) Now I brought it out and, as I had suspected they would, Musa, Ibrahim and even Ali leaped up in delight. Their pleasure increased when I explained that this camera could deliver pictures on the spot. They were beside themselves clamouring for attention. They demanded pictures singly, in pairs and as a trio; standing and sitting; always frowning or at least set-faced, never smiling: a smile would not befit a posing warrior. I must have pressed the camera’s button twenty times and had the pictures snatched from my hand and flapped wildly in the air to aid their development. I had to keep instructing them – ‘Not so roughly, Musa! Keep your fingers off the colour!’ – but most of the pictures came out well. Like the Bedouins of Arabia, they often preferred to hold the photographs upside down: it seemed to give them a better view.

  Informed of the Polaroid, the other Moros suspended their negotiating with the captain and hurried to join us on the roof. I took their pictures, too, and they passed them about from hand to hand, pointing and laughing at each other’s likenesses. Even the older, wary Moros with cropped grey hair and lustreless eyes begged me for more, holding up a forefinger to show that they wanted individual shots.

  First Musa had saved me from the ruffian Ali; now the Polaroid made me the friend of all the Moros. They patted and hugged me, wheedling and begging for more pictures. In his latest paroxysm of affection, Musa grabbed my neck again and bumped his bony forehead against mine repeatedly and painfully. When finally one of the grey-haired Moro chiefs clamped my hand in his knobbly one and said, ‘You good man,’ I felt that an immediate danger had receded – at least, any personal danger. The more general one that remained lay in the question of whether the Moros would force the captain of our crippled kumpit to carry us into the lairs of a daunting variety of armed and homicidal men.

  The captain’s delicate but unshakable insistence on our shortage of fuel and food played a role, no doubt, but I think it was the state of the Allimpaya’s dilapidated engine that finally saved our skins. The oil-spattered old ‘driver’, Jesus, cranked the engine into wheezing life once or twice to show the Moros that mechanically we really were not up to any diversion whatever. No gauntlets could be run in the Allimpaya, it was clear. ‘The captain told them again and again that we might break down properly at any time,’ Haji Daoud recounted to me later. ‘Properly’ was the word and Jesus certainly rose to it. Few people anywhere can have been invited to bear witness to such mechanical decrepitude. Li
ke the old trouper she was, the Allimpaya gave a heart-rending and utterly convincing demonstration of a crippled kumpit taking her last staggering steps before terminal collapse. I hope that Jesus, as stage manager, received some sort of reward at journey’s end, but I doubt it. We moved through the sea like a dying turtle, making no more than two knots. This decided the grey-haired Moro leaders. Still smiling, but not as broadly now, they began to wind up their discussion by turning to more general things: the state of trade, the prices of contraband and allied subjects. There was no more talk of diverting the kumpit, Haji Daoud said.

  Meanwhile, over their heads, while Ibrahim and Ali lolled on the deck, Musa had been chatting with me. By now he was quite at ease, leaning his head on my shoulder and massaging my knee in a platonic, dreamy way, as someone might pass the time with petit point. He asked about the world I had seen. Was England a town in America? Was Sarawak part of England? (His Balanini pirate forebears would have known the answer to this. The Sulu fleets of twenty to a hundred ships raided the coast all the way down to Sarawak every year when the north-east monsoon wind, the Pirate Wind, began to blow.) Were there Americans ruling in Singapore? How many Americans lived in Morocco?

  I began to think that it could really be true that Libyan agents had been helping the Moros. Colonel Qadhaffi would have liked to fortify them on nourishing tales of a despotic American rajahdom over Singapore and Morocco. But, when I asked Musa what he thought about Libya, he said he had only vaguely heard of such a place, and Musa of the twitching face was not a man able to disguise a lie. I don’t think he had any idea where Singapore was, much less Morocco. I incline to believe that the Moros asked about Americans simply because, like all Filipinos, they are more or less entangled in that deep attachment for the United States that is sometimes called the ‘little brown brother complex’.

  Even these young Moros’ conception of Islam had a typically Filipino rock beat. ‘Goddam communists not like Islam,’ Musa said at one point. When Crazy Jan, giggling, rashly thrust under my eyes a magazine open at a two-page spread of the most lurid pornography, I feared a volcanic outbreak of Islamic ire that another twenty Polaroid exposures might not succeed in appeasing. I needn’t have worried; Musa slowly flipped a few glossy pages of by now well-fingered photographs depicting what might at first glance have been close-ups of sea urchins or attacking man-eating spiders. Some he tilted sideways or even upside down for a better view; then he passed them down to Ali and Ibrahim, saying with a laugh, ‘Veree loveful. In Jolo, no have.’

  ‘In Jolo, haram.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he sighed. ‘Haram, no have.’ He fell to massaging my other knee with a clownish, melancholy expression.

  Ali and Ibrahim reacted to the dirty pictures in much the same unexcited way. Lazily tumbled together cheek by cheek, they peered at breasts and vaginas, indicating the more brightly coloured parts to each other with a finger, like two tourists idly tracing the outline of a foreign country they had no immediate hope of visiting. Only Jan showed any emotion; he bore away his magazine with the haughty umbrage of an artist whose latest work has received less than its due. I felt no sympathy for him; a Muslim himself, he had been absurdly thoughtless. It seemed to me very lucky that the pictures had not aroused the Moros’ anger. Jan might have been walking the plank by now. I would have been sorry to see the splash, but he would have brought it on himself.

  *

  An hour later the Moros sailed away. Musa gave me his full name and an address on Jolo Island. ‘We een forests very of-ten,’ he said, ‘but please send letter.’ Ali, Ibrahim and the other Moros shook hands and moved to the side of the kumpit. With them went my fifty Malaysian dollars and my binoculars, the haunted ones with the spotted lenses; Jan had produced them from somewhere and Musa immediately wanted to handle them, and having peered through them at length, decided he couldn’t live without them. ‘They be veree good een for-ests,’ he said.

  ‘All right.’ I didn’t want to risk another squabble, certainly not with my protector. Better that they leave us as quickly and quietly as possible. Volatile as they were, they would be dangerous until they vanished over the horizon. Anyway, I wasn’t sorry to see the last of those disturbing stains.

  ‘You veree friend,’ Musa said. He shook hands, pressed a cheek against mine, gave me his side-slipping smile and a twitch of the left eyelid under the scar, and followed the others over the side into the pump boat. The outboard motor started with a readiness that the Allimpaya’s engineers, Jesus and Small-But-Terrible, must have envied, and the outrigger, with the Moros bunched up between its narrow gunwales, skittered away like a water boatman on the calm surface of the sea. Soon its wash and the two lines of flecked water under the outrigs unreeled behind it as if it were laying a trail from the kumpit to the horizon ahead. The elderly Moros sat low in the boat and hardly glanced back. Jan had mounted to the Allimpaya’s roof-deck and was waving and shouting, ‘Ayatollah, yah, Ayatollah, so long,’ and pointing at me. Musa’s strange bottle-green eyes turned towards me in the stern. He and Ali, the troublemaker, raised two hands over their heads while Ibrahim shouted, ‘Steeck-steeck.’ When I waved, most of them made some gesture of farewell.

  Then we turned back to the world of the kumpit. Metallic bangs rose from the direction of the engine. The captain said, ‘Now we go to Zamboanga. First we stay here short time, make good the engine. Not long.’ It was late afternoon. Soon Carlos the wrestler came bounding up with a mug of coffee as if he had delivered us single-handed from the Moros. ‘Double Dragon coffee,’ he said, showing his very white teeth. ‘Veree shtrong.’ He had stripped to ragged shorts and had knotted a white towel around his head.

  When the Moros were on board, the crew had made themselves conspicuously scarce while the captain, Haji Daoud, Anthony Quinn and, from time to time, Jesus, the engineer, had been locked in earnest discussion on which all our fates depended. I had hardly seen anything of the others except at the midday meal. Jan and Jalah had taken refuge in the shade of the wheelhouse, making one or two sorties, such as the tactless flaunting of the porno magazine. Heaven knows where Carlos, Ernesto and Small-But-Terrible had been hiding. They had all been very scared, I realized; and I didn’t blame them. Small-But-Terrible could hardly be expected to take on a complete boarding party of Moros, however expert his kung-fu. As for Carlos, I saw that, for all his muscles, narrow hips and agility, he was endowed with the sweet, timid and pacific nature of Ferdinand the Bull. He would never raise a finger against a living soul if he could avoid it, although, if he ever did, he would surely break someone’s neck by accident. ‘Moros gone away,’ he said, watching me drink the coffee. ‘They no keel you.’

  ‘Yes, all gone.’

  Gone out of his mind as well as his sight, apparently, because he then continued as if our earlier conversation hadn’t been interrupted, ‘Look at theesh.’ He drew from the waist of his bathing suit a piece of paper and handed it to me. It was a letter written in English on part of a lined page from an exercise book that had been much handled and folded. It read: ‘Dearest Carlos, this is to remember me when you are in far places,’ and was signed ‘Loyola’.

  ‘You have a Christian girlfriend and you are Muslim?’

  ‘Oh, yah,’ Carlos agreed indifferently. ‘Never mind.’

  Yet another example, I thought, of the tolerance of seagoing men. ‘Very pretty?’

  ‘Veree prettee. Her nose eesh too shmall.’

  ‘Very small, not too small.’

  ‘Yeah. Too shmall.’ Now that danger had vanished over the horizon, he wandered happily about the roof-deck singing softly in his surprising falsetto, ‘You urr always un mah ma-a-a-ah-nd.’

  *

  The repairs continued until at last Jesus mastered the slipping clutch. We had bobbed and swayed gently on a fair swell but in sticky heat; now the Allimpaya set off again at a much better speed, creating its own breeze.

  ‘Weather will not be bad,’ the Haji assured me. ‘Sulu Sea well enclosed by Palawan Island, M
indoro, Mindanao and Sulu Islands. Palawan is a very long island. People have bows and arrows there, though they are friendly. They’d be most astonished to see you.’ As usual, the flame-flecked sunset brought a cool breeze, and I joined the Haji under the roof where he had spread a bedroll. I lay down on a folding canvas bed I found there that belonged to big, moustached Ernesto, who did not need it; he was at that moment asleep and lightly snoring in the arms of Carlos on a similar bed a few feet away. They were naked except for sarongs. Through half-closed eyes, Carlos was gazing abstractly at the ceiling, smoking a cigarette. ‘“Oh, kees me aga-ee-ee-n before you go-o-o,”’ he crooned, not to Ernesto, I judged, but to Loyola, whose too-small nose, from his lovesick expression, he evidently beheld affectionately in his mind’s eye.

  The Haji said, ‘See, Carlos is singing. Filipinos are very jolly. Only the Moros are angry and dangerous. People are very fed up with Moros. They came to Jolo, which was peaceful; the army came too, and many were killed. Moros are not popular, but of course Marcos, too, is not popular in this region.’

  He lit a Champion cigarette and switched his thoughts to religion. ‘Do you know what attracted me to Islam? The prayers. They are so beautiful, and they mean you must wash five times a day. It is good to wash five times a day, and also to be reminded of God five times a day. If you pray five times a day you have less time to do something bad.’

  ‘Or something good, for that matter.’

  The Haji ignored that. ‘It is good to talk to God five times a day. Also, if you go to the mosque, you must take off your shoes. In Catholic church, no, so the church is full of dirty things you bring in on your feet. The smell is horrible. It can put you off your prayers. Don’t you find that? Another thing: in Islam women pray separately from men and wear long dresses, which is very healthy.’

  ‘“Kees me, oh kees me aga-yeen….”’ Carlos crooned sweetly to Loyola, despite the arm that slumbering Ernesto had thrown across his chest.