When the World Was Steady

by Claire Messud

  ‘Sims!’ cried the little girl on the way out of the door. ‘Sims!’

  Max smacked at the gooey guava with the back of his spoon. Too late. It was done, irreparably, tiresomely, done. And where was everyone? Why was Jenny not around? Or Emmy, even?

  He walked down the hill to the hotel reception next door, to ask if they had seen Jenny, but they hadn’t. The young woman at the desk did remind him, however, that it was the day of Ubud’s temple-naming ceremony, and she suggested that Jenny might be at her home, involved in preparations.

  Max did not really know where Jenny’s home was, but he knew that her parents’ house—where she formally lived, although she often stayed with her girlfriends, or, of course, in the Sparke house—was not in town. It was several tiny villages to the east, and not on the main road. He did not know how to find it. This, though, was a case of necessity, and there was not time to delay. At the bottom of the hill, by the warung Emmy so loved, just on the far side of the bridge and before climbing the slope into town, Max turned left, eastwards, on to a road he had often seen and rarely followed, and set off in urgent search of his beloved.

  Emmy didn’t know what to think about Max, much as she didn’t know what to think about the Buddha. She didn’t have time to look for him before meeting Jenny—who seemed, outwardly, strangely unperturbed—and she didn’t know whether or not to believe Aimée. If Max were going, in such haste, Emmy was unsure of what effect this might have on her visit. Perhaps it would be time to move on? Back to Candi Dasa, or to Lavina Beach, with its flush toilets? As honorary mother, her duties would be over, and as anything else—well, she would just have to wait and see.

  And the Buddha: maybe the Buddha, Emmy reflected, with his enigmatic smile, the Buddha so out of place in Buddy Sparke’s Balinese Hideaway—maybe he held all the answers to the riddles she confronted? If she could make up her mind about the Buddha, it would be time to go—time dictated from inside herself, not by Max’s whim. Emmy was fed up with how little she seemed to control in this supposedly most controllable of environments. She was aware that she had ceased, at some unmarked moment, to be a tourist, but what she was now she hadn’t stopped to think.

  Jenny was already waiting, dried and dressed, when Emmy reached the house. She carried a basket filled with frangipanis, lilies and orchids. They set off at once for Suchi’s parents’ house, where the increasingly pregnant and—since the arrival of Aimée—rarely seen Suchi was preparing for the evening’s ceremonies.

  The most efficient route was through town, past the clusters of tourists in the main street, past the rows of shops and stalls including the one belonging to Nyoman’s mother, the tailor, who noticed them and waved. Her daughter was not in evidence, but Emmy could see that all households were busy preparing their offerings even as they tried to get on with the business of the day: pyramids and cones of flowers, like extravagant wedding-cakes, were forming everywhere, and great oval platters of fruits and sweetmeats were piled alongside the flowers, attracting the interest of curious insects.

  The sun was high, and the air warm and singing; as they walked through the bustle of town, Jenny and Emmy moved in companionable silence. It was only when they turned on to the quieter Monkey Forest Road, the canopy of trees looming at the dip in the land ahead, that Emmy spoke.

  ‘Is this the only way to Suchi’s?’

  ‘The other way is very far, and we have not much time.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid? After what happened to Max, I’d almost rather—’

  ‘He was bitten,’ Jenny explained patiently, ‘because he was not respectful. Because Nyoman was too young to know how to placate the spirits. The monkey spirit is mischievous, but not—not evil. Sometimes good, sometimes wicked. You see?’

  ‘So you are basically saying that the monkeys might bite us, but then again, they might not?’

  ‘They will not bite us, because we are respectful and wise.’ Jenny reached into her basket, beneath the profusion of flowers, and brought out two paper packets of peanuts, the sort sold in the main street to tourists.

  ‘Offerings to the monkey spirits?’ Emmy took one of the packets and slit a peanut open with her fingernail. They were dusty nuts, shrivelled, their shells flimsy as rotted tree bark.

  ‘The monkeys expect it. The tourists have made the monkeys expect.’

  ‘Devotion has to be flexible, I suppose. Does Suchi do this whenever she comes to town to see Buddy?’

  ‘She comes in a car, or on a moped. But not now: it is bad luck for the baby in the Monkey Forest. Shall we go on? There is not much time, when there is so much to do.’

  Armed though she was, Emmy was apprehensive, tingling with adrenalin: the same feeling as when, several months ago, in Double Bay, she awoke to hear a burglar—only to discover that it was Pod, key-less, trying to jemmy the back door with a credit card. Jenny kept up a patter as they followed the road into the canopy of trees. ‘Do you know the Indonesian word for monkey? No? Say after me: monjét. The word is monjét.’

  Emmy, her eyes veering crazily around, caught sight of monkeys gathering in the shadows. Ears and noses, outstretched hands, waggling thumbs. So human. She checked the branches overhead and saw a couple scampering from tree to tree above her, calling to their friends.

  Jenny deftly tossed a peanut here and there, not stopping, not looking at the monkeys. Where the nuts fell, the monkeys swarmed and batted at each other.

  ‘Say monjét. The word is monjét.’

  ‘This is horrible,’ whispered Emmy, feeling her bare shoulders prey to the greedy monkey hands. She was prepared to scream, her throat clenched.

  ‘Say it,’ said Jenny. ‘And throw one, now, to the right. Go on.’

  Forcing her frozen limbs into motion, Emmy raised her arm, threw overhand: her nut made a ‘pht’ sound as it landed, on leaves, three or four trees back from the road. At once, a patch of the path cleared, as with great chattering and rustling several monkeys pursued the gift.

  ‘You see?’ said Jenny, still looking straight ahead, not pausing, not smiling. ‘It is not so bad. The spirits can be controlled.’

  ‘Up to a point.’ But Emmy unclenched the sweating fist that clutched the nuts and proceeded to lob her share, intermittently, into the undergrowth.

  ‘And the word?’ asked Jenny again.

  ‘The word is mun-jette.’

  ‘Monjét,’ Jenny corrected.

  ‘Monjét.’

  ‘Good. Now, the word for tree is pohon.’

  Afterwards, Emmy did not measure the distance of the forest in minutes (it seemed an eternity), or in distance (to the very last, each step was an effort: it was like being stuck in a child’s nightmare, unable to wake up); she measured the distance in words. By the time they reached open land again, Emmy had learned the Indonesian words for monkey, tree, forest, bird, duck, pig, dog and baby. She had learned the words for friend, mother, daughter and sister, not just in Indonesian but in Balinese as well. And she had learned a Balinese expression that moved her, in the soft, certain way Jenny spoke it. It was the phrase for the island’s time of origin and peace, when all was right with the world; the time before the white men came. The expression was ‘dugas gumine enteg’, and it meant ‘when the world was steady’.

  ‘How will we get back?’ Emmy asked, holding up her few remaining peanuts. ‘Do you have more?’

  ‘Going back we will be carrying offerings, for the temples.’

  ‘So we’ll go in a car?’

  ‘So we will walk the long way around.’

  ‘Monjét would eat anybody’s offerings, I suppose?’ Emmy asked, laughing.

  Jenny’s reply was serious. ‘They do not eat flowers,’ she said. ‘You see, the basket is untouched.’

  Emmy had not realized that preparing for the ceremonies was an all-afternoon activity. When they arrived at Suchi’s parents’ house, half a dozen girls and women were already there. Several of them Emmy recognized from Buddy’s house, and two who were unfamiliar were introduce
d as Suchi’s sisters. Each woman was busy with a clearly defined task: with flowers, or food; with initial trimmings or twistings, or with the final formations of elegant and eloquent devout display. The women worked in the shade of a porch, overlooking a swept courtyard where younger girls entertained small children, and chickens strutted and darted about. Several cocks, preening within their bamboo cages, placed out of the sun with the finest view of the yard, ruffled their feathers disdainfully and blinked at the proceedings.

  The women’s voices rose and fell: for a while, Emmy listened for the few words she had just learned, but not hearing them, she gave up, relying instead on periodic English commentary from Jenny. The afternoon was hot and sleepy despite the vigorous activity. It wore on, and on, and on, uninterrupted but for late arrivals and pauses to sip tangerine juice or to admire finished handiwork.

  Amid the placid hum, Emmy’s eyes settled on two little girls playing with tattered dolls in the corner of the yard, rocking them, walking them, throwing them in the air. The girls were clearly alive only to each other and to the engrossing fantasy world they had created for their inanimate charges. Their entire bodies laughed with the pleasure of the stories they shared, and when one of their dolls apparently fell ill, they both grew solemn and all but wept. Watching them, Emmy felt that she and Virginia, too, ought to have had such a shared world. She marvelled at the completeness—however temporary—of the little girls’ union, and she wondered, wistfully, whether being born in this paradise island might have allowed her and her sister a similar freedom, a similar joy. But it was pure fantasy, this notion, just like the girls’ doll world, and it passed back into the rhythm of the women’s weaving fingers and the mounting towers of thanks to the gods.

  Emmy did not have her watch, but she could tell from the lengthening shadows that it was well past three. The work showed no sign of slowing or of nearing completion: several new towers were just being begun. She worried about Max, about what Aimée had said. Unaware of its truth or falsehood, she didn’t want to disrupt the pre-ceremony rituals she had been invited to observe, but it was suddenly clear to her that Jenny was not going back to the house before the event and, therefore, that it was not intended that she, Emmy, go either. She wondered about making her own way back, but had only to think of the monkeys’ eyes and their grasping fingers to reject the idea.

  Fretting spoiled the peaceful pleasure that the afternoon had been bringing her, the delight in the women’s deft hand-movements, in the economy of their bending bodies. Just the sight of Suchi, so exquisitely beautiful, had seemed a gift after the terrifying journey she and Jenny had endured. But as the afternoon wore on, Emmy’s gratitude shrivelled like the discarded leaves that gathered on the porch. She wanted to get back to the house.

  ‘Do you plan,’ she asked Jenny eventually, ‘to go straight to the temples?’

  ‘We will all go to one temple,’ Jenny explained. ‘Only to one. Others will go to other temples.’

  ‘Buddy?’

  ‘Maybe to ours, maybe to a different one.’

  ‘But you’ll go from here, without going back to the house?’

  ‘Of course.’ Jenny seemed surprised that there was any question.

  ‘But what about Max?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, if Aimée’s right and he is leaving on the plane for Sydney tonight, then shouldn’t we both get back to see him?’

  ‘I do not think he will go,’ said Jenny, imposing origami-like contortions on a banana leaf without looking at it.

  ‘I agree it seems unlikely, but if he does—surely you of all people would want to say goodbye?’

  Jenny looked hard at Emmy, her fingers still twitching over the leaves, making boats of them, baskets. ‘If he does go, and I do not say goodbye, then I will see him very soon in Sydney. We can be together in Sydney.’

  ‘You really believe in it? You believe Buddy actually has the power to get your visa sorted out? You believe he’ll pay for your course in advance, make sure you have somewhere to live, all of it?’

  ‘He promises me.’

  ‘Look at Aimée. What did he promise Aimée?’

  ‘It’s different,’ Jenny said, taking a sudden interest in the folding of fronds. ‘She is—she was his girlfriend. I am a true friend. Suchi now is Buddy’s girlfriend.’ She smiled across the room at Suchi, whose gaze was elsewhere.

  ‘So you wouldn’t even want to say goodbye to Max?’

  Jenny was silent.

  ‘Well I have to go back to the house before the ceremony,’ said Emmy, standing for emphasis. She had been kneeling for some time and her joints were unpleasantly stiff. ‘I can’t possibly go to a temple dressed like this.’ She gestured at her sundress, beneath which the straps of her bathing-suit could be discerned. It was, frankly, inappropriate: even Jenny’s tactful once-over could not conceal the fact.

  ‘But I cannot go now.’

  ‘I could go alone.’

  ‘Through the forest? No. You are not good with the spirits.’

  ‘The other way, then?’

  ‘It is too difficult. One turning wrong and you would be halfway to Den Pasar. It is the little paths, the little villages. And you do not have the language.’

  Here I am, thought Emmy, trapped between being a tourist and something else. Most annoying.

  ‘I have an idea.’ Jenny was genuinely excited. She turned and spoke to several of the others, who stopped their work and looked Emmy up and down. One woman laughed. Another stood, came over to Emmy, indicated that she should lift her arms, and reached around her bust, embracing her. The woman said something to Jenny. Something noncommittal. Jenny was insistent. The woman did not change her tone. Suchi called something from across the porch, where she sat, and several of the women burst into peals of laughter. But Jenny was stern.

  ‘We know what we will do,’ she said to Emmy. ‘So you will not have to go back to Buddy’s house. We will make you a Balinese woman, in the proper clothes. In a sarong. It is very easy.’

  Emmy looked around the group and understood why they had tittered. ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘There wouldn’t be a top to fit me.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Jenny said. ‘I know that Suchi’s Bibi, her father’s sister, she is big like you. We will send K’tut.’ She called to one of the girls in the courtyard, who laughed, nodded and ran off down the path beside the house.

  But this did not solve everything. Emmy turned to Jenny, but Jenny anticipated her question.

  ‘Max will not go,’ she said, as simple as fact. ‘I do not care what Aimée says, I know that Max will not go. He cannot go.’ Jenny spoke not with Buddy-will-fix-it certainty, but with the confidence of one in love, who knows that she too is loved. And Emmy was convinced.

  ‘You will be a Balinese lady,’ Jenny said. ‘Come.’

  Max’s search for Jenny was fruitless. He walked miles before giving up. His inability to speak the language hampered him in the smaller villages, where only Balinese and not even Indonesian was spoken. The name ‘Jenny’ didn’t seem to mean anything to anyone, and only as he conceded defeat did it occur to Max that her real name might actually be something else—something less clearly English. He wondered whether she was a Wayan or a K’tut or something in between.

  When, in the late afternoon, he eventually returned, sweating and exhausted, to the house, Max found K’tut waiting for him, in a very bad humour.

  ‘You are going tonight,’ K’tut said, as if this were a distasteful rather than a disappointing fact. He ran his hand through his hair as he spoke, revealing his high, veined forehead.

  ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘I am here to take you to the airport.’

  ‘And my father?’

  ‘Gone.’ K’tut gestured limply, a cynic’s dismissive wave. ‘With the German. This afternoon.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Today it is the day of our temple ceremonies.’ K’tut’s voice carried reproach, but Max did not hear it. ‘You may want to eat s
omething before you pack your bags. Possibly I could cook.’ K’tut sounded doubtful.

  ‘No worries.’ It was after six. It was a blow that his father had left, but Buddy’s behaviour was not out of character. Getting the last laugh, thought Max. Besides, neither was any good at farewells.

  K’tut had removed himself to the bed and was watching an old kung-fu film with the volume turned down.

  ‘Bruce Lee?’

  K’tut nodded.

  ‘Just two quick questions for you, mate?’

  K’tut turned a weary eye.

  ‘One, where is everybody, aside from Buddy and Kraut? And two, do you have any idea where Jenny might be? Then I swear I’ll bugger off.’

  ‘Frank is at the hotel,’ said K’tut. ‘Aimée is with Ruby, to get chocolate cake at the warung. Your Australian woman, I do not know. But Jenny is probably at Suchi’s, preparing for the ceremonies.’

  ‘Where’s that, then?’

  ‘On the other side of the Monkey Forest. Far away. I do not think the spirits would want you to go there. Also, there is not time.’

  Max thought for a moment and spoke again, even though K’tut had already turned back to the film. ‘We could go, if you would take me in the bus. We’d be really quick. It’s just that—you’ve got to understand—’ Max stopped because even preoccupied as he was he could see the curl of K’tut’s lip.

  ‘No,’ said K’tut, crossing his legs tidily beneath him. ‘It is not possible. It is too late.’ His eyes settled once and for all on the flickering movements of Bruce Lee.

  Upstairs, on Max’s bed, he found an envelope from his father addressed to him in his familiar, hasty hand. Inside there was a note, a wad of Australian dollars and a fat joint.

  Junior,

  Sorry about the monkey. That’s what spoiled it for you I reckon. We’ll do Komodo next winter. See you in Sydney—don’t know when. The cash is for having a good time till we next meet. Smoke the j before you go, or leave it here. Not cool with customs. You’re a bonzer kid. Cheers, B.