by John Coast
A month or two later, speaking a limping Malay and having graduated from prompter to stage manager, I was endeavouring to form a company that would put on some Javanese dancing. So absorbed did I become in this utterly new experience, that though a prisoner, I felt perfectly happy.
My first Javanese production, I am ashamed to say, was accompanied by a pair of pseudo-Javanese cymbals played from the matting wings and to the strains of “La Cucaracha” jerked out by the camp band, whose unique instruments were made from such things as telephone wire, soapboxes and gut from locally slain cats. The dancer's costume was made from stolen Japanese mosquito netting, ornamented with lead foil torn from discarded Red Cross cigarette cartons stolen from us by the Japanese Army, and the noble Hindu headdress was fashioned from a cardboard crate that had contained dried fish. To me, at the time, this was magnificent dancing; the other Javanese in camp, fortunately, were too amused and polite to express their real opinions.
This enthusiasm led me, when returned home after the war, to look for the nearest Javanese dancers, whom I did actually find in the end in nearby Holland. They were a student group, and after seeing them dance once in Leyden Museum, my friends and I brought them over to England for a couple of months. This was in the year 1946.
There were only nineteen of them, from princelings to waiters, all amateur, all very impecunious. There were two good dancers among them, both from Solo, in Java. In the theatres we had to use scratchy copies of twenty-year-old records to accompany the classical Javanese dance, but for the lighter folk dances of Sumatra, Celebes and Ambon, we used a small, Hawaiian type of band. The finale of the programme was a Djanger dance from Bali, in which, oddly enough, Luce had danced as a student member when studying in Holland before the war.
Our short tour was enthusiastically received in England, and Sol Hurok, the impresario, sent his agent to make us an offer to come to the United States next spring; a Madame Bouchonnet, too, from Paris, suggested that we tour France, Spain and Portugal. But the group broke up, since its members planned to return to Indonesia before the end of the year. And although exhausted after those hectic seven weeks, my ambition had been more than ever fired to bring over a really superb and authentic group, with full orchestra, for the joy and delectation of the western world.
It was my interest in this dancing that led me next into Indonesian politics, so that for some years I was working in Java with the unrecognized Indonesian Government, having unusual adventures as I strove humbly to help in the struggle for Indonesian independence. My eyes, however, remained always fixed on the group of dancers of which I had dreamed, and when, in 1950, nationhood and I was moored impatiently behind a desk in the new Foreign Ministry in the new capital of Djakarta, I spent most of my time working out plans for cultural missions to tour the world. For months I laboured at estimates and routings and earning capacities, and the final result of my research was presented to President Sukarno at ten o'clock one morning in April.
It was a hot and humid day, I remember, as I arrived at the small palace of white marble which is the official residence of the Indonesian President. I sat opposite him in the reception room lined with modem paintings by young Indonesian revolutionary artists, the President cool and elegant in his simple white uniform and black Moslem hat, I perspiring but hopeful in an old sharkskin suit.
Himself a patron of the arts and by blood half Balinese, the President was sympathetic. He recalled, in fact, that in 1948, in the beleaguered capital of Jogja, with Dutch troops trying to force the young Republic to its knees, I had had the temerity to suggest some such venture as this. When I left the palace, in my old battered jeep which often needed a pushing hand from one of the guards, I felt confident.
Imagine, then, my chagrin, when only a few weeks after leaving my memorandum with the President, the chief Palace Secretary, a man with the soul of a true bureaucrat, announced out of the blue that my estimates were ten times too optimistic, that I would need a million dollars of hard currency, that there were many more important things for a young country to think about than mere artistic adventures.
The rejection of my plan, or, more euphemistically, its being "indefinitely postponed," was one of the reasons that sent me on leave to Bali. There, perhaps, was the work on which my heart was set, and together with Luce I hoped to prove my thesis by building up a Balinese dance-group first of all, for I had every confidence that Bali's foreign champions from before the war had not been over-romantic or too grossly misleading in their descriptions of the island's music and dancing.
And already, after only two weeks, and after seeing only three or four performances for tourists and this one rehearsal of Lotring's, we were becoming emotionally entangled. Thus, when Lotring laughingly shrugged off the possibility of creating a club again in Kuta—our first hope—it was a setback to us. It only had the result, however, of making us pull up our roots in Kuta forthwith, for within a few days we had heard from an old friend, Daan Hubrecht, that there was a house for sale in the village of Kaliungu, on the outskirts of Denpasar, a house in Balinese style, set in a delightful compound, hitherto the property of the Government's agricultural adviser, Hans Harten, who was due to go on home leave.
At once we set out for Kaliungu; and when we had seen the house and its walled garden, we found it so charming and so exactly what we wanted, that we decided very quickly to make a bid for purchase. But this meant first sending letters to Djakarta to arrange for a loan on the security of my jeep from Chinese banker friends, while to carry us over the first months Luce and I agreed to pool our capital. This consisted of a Rolleiflex camera, a ring and a few household goods that might well be saleable. Altogether, we hoped that we might be able to live there modestly for half a year or a year.
Our decision thus taken and acted upon, we confounded Hans Harten by driving over to see him one evening a couple of weeks later and scattering bills of large denomination all over his supper table. Then one day in the September of 1950 we registered the purchase of our house at the office of the Raja of Denpasar, made a new contract for the lease of the land which no foreigner in Bali may own outright, and moved in.
Kaliungu was to become our home and base for the next two years, and when we took over there was not just one house, but two. Both had high, grass-thatched roofs, supported on finely grained pillars of coconut-palm wood. The floor foundations were made from coral, smoothed over with a dark grey cement, and raised a couple of feet above the level of the surrounding garden. Most of the front house was quite open and acted as a cool living room; but one large comer, our bedroom, was walled off squarely with bamboo wickerwork walls, which, on the inside, were lined with a white matting made from finely woven grasses. At the back of this bedroom was a simple dip-and-pour Balinese bathroom, built under the house's extended eaves, and next to it was a lavatory on which we had to squat. Its heart-shaped aperture was hardly the size of a teacup, and there was quite a drop below. We christened it the "high-level bombing sight” and set about having it altered as soon as the equivalent of a plumber could be located.
In both houses almost all the furniture was made from bamboo.
From the front house a passageway ran back past a kitchen, where our food was cooked over charcoal braziers, leading to the smaller, second house, which consisted of two small rooms at the back of a good verandah. Here Han's servants had slept. The two houses lay in a compound and garden some thirty yards across and sixty yards long.
In the front house, suspended from the eaves by hooked branches, there hung luxuriant ferns and orchids roughly potted in broken open coconut husks and these bordered our entire living space. The passageway was walled with blue-and-white-flowered creepers. In the garden were sireh vines and another vine with creamy, red-tipped flowers called "The Young Maiden chews Sireh," together with flaming red and yellow cannas, and climbing bougainvilleas. A very old hibiscus shrub had grown almost into a tree, and shaded our well
and laundering wall behind the kitchen; while we ourselves quickly planted some branches of white and pink frangipani, and some pale mauve hibiscus transplanted from the hills. In the empty sector behind the second house weeds battled with wild potatoes and chili bushes and papaya trees. In the middle of this small wilderness stood a shrine, the former abode of somebody's household gods which no one yet dared to pull down, for perhaps—and who could tell?—the gods still occasionally liked to pay a visit to their old home.
One of Hans' servants, Agung, stayed on with us as gardener and laundryman. He was a lithe boy of about seventeen, but blind in one eye, and his blindness, alas, gave him a fey temperament such as is rarely to be found in a peasant people.
The village took a great and never-ceasing interest in us during the first days. They had heard already, it seemed, that the man was English and although just arrived spoke always in the Indonesian language; and the woman, his wife, was of high caste and from Java, it was said—but she wore shorts, spoke English as if it were her tongue, and was far from submissive. Such people promised to be as good as a shadow play to watch! And watch us they did, curious and full of uninhibited comment, until our new walls hid us. For knowing that the rainy season was fast approaching, we had asked help from our neighbour, Gusti Kompiang, the village head, in looking for carpenters, wall builders and thatchers.
Our mud walls were built up five feet high and then thatched with plenty of the cheap rice straw, so that the coming floods should not dissolve away our walls again this year. Then some ancient carpenters repaired the wooden gates, two on the village road in front of the house, which we then kept shut in an attempt to discourage the pidogs, and opposite the kitchen we fixed a new latch on the servants' gate. In a horse cart, blocks of sandstone were brought from the village of Sempidi, and these we placed like stepping-stones the length of our front garden. Altogether there was a friendly and pleasant feeling of work being accomplished in our compound.
While I supervised the building, Luce was tied to the kitchen, for as yet we had found no cook. Old Wo Ketut we had preferred to keep as a friend, not as a cook, and when we left Kuta he had gone back to his own village in east Bali, whence he had already twice descended upon us, chuckling when he heard that we were still cookless, and bringing bottles of the smoky palm toddy and sweet rice wine, with some jars of wild honey, to sell us. Luce, however, knew what she wanted: she was in search of Made Rantun, the cook trained by the composer and gourmet, Colin McPhee, an American who had lived long in Bali in the years before the war. McPhee had described in a book2 the excellencies of this Made Rantun, for, in addition to being a musician, and studying Balinese music, he had also dug deep into the mysteries of Balinese cooking, and Rantun had been his prize discovery.
It was the search for a cook that led us first to Rantun's village, called Pliatan. Here we stopped at the house of the village headman, and met a fat, jovial, perspiring man of middle years, clad in an old batik sarong, and busily engaged in commenting on the roof of a new house in his compound. I complimented him jealously on the depth of his thatch; and he promised us politely to help us look for Rantun. At the time we had no idea that this man knew a note of music; yet he was destined later to be our partner and to travel around the world with us as a leader of the dancers we were searching for. And though he said nothing of it at the time, the squat man whom he was supervising on the house's roof, was the recently divorced husband of the very Made Rantun whom we sought. The Balinese love to have secrets.
But one morning soon afterwards a quiet-looking woman wearing a neat blue kebaya jacket walked into our garden, sat down unobtrusively on a bench in the kitchen, waited for Luce to come in, and announced,” I am Made Rantun. Is it true that the Nyonya seeks a cook?"
We both liked her manner so much that we wanted to engage her on the spot. But what salary did she want, Luce asked? Oh, the salary was not so important—what she most needed was that her two small children should stay with her and receive their food from us. That could easily be arranged, said Luce. It would be pleasant to have more children around the house. But when could she start? First she must go back to her village, but probably she would be back before ten days had passed-anyhow, she would return with her children as soon as she possibly could.
With Rantun and her children, with Agung and Pegil, our household would be complete.
As our house-building went slowly forward, it became necessary to devise some way of supplementing our living. The local labourers seemed all to be old men, and they worked with a leisurely rhythm that soon frightened my pocket. We discussed, therefore, the idea of building a guest-house.
It so happened that we had seen on the foreshore at Kuta the frameworks of several old houses and huts, and after a trip to take measurements we reckoned that it was possible to move up complete to Kaliungu the seasoned and hard frameworks of two huts, one of which we would turn into anew servants' house, and one of which we would convert into a guest-house bathroom. One day, therefore, we herded our sceptical labourers onto a truck, drove down to Kuta, bought the wooden frames for a song, and arrived back in our village with them intact, though shaken, after the eight-kilometre journey. The wood had been magnificently toughened by more than ten years of weathering the gales from the sea.
This time we could no longer afford the slow Denpasar labourers. But on our travels in search of music and dancing, we had recently been more and more often going to watch the Legong dance in a village called Saba, and I now found some young Saba men who said they would enjoy coming in to work in Denpasar on house building; and since they were very content to be in the southern capital of Bali for a change, the work went ahead rapidly. By the time Rantun reappeared and began to work her magic in our kitchen, the servants' house had been reassembled and a new roof of deep lalang-grass thatch had already been bound and trimmed. Within a matter of days all the servants and children had moved in, and the new labourers were ready to start on the guest-house.
In these ways we acclimatized ourselves to living in a Balinese village. Rantun proved herself a supreme cook of Balinese and Javanese food, and we ate always with our fingers at home so that none of the delectable spicy flavours would be banished by the chill of steel or silver plating. Early in the morning Rantun would leave for the market, buying things at half the prices we had been giving, and soon after eight o'clock she would return, hands laden, a basket on her head, while little Ketut, her four-year-old son, trailed absently behind her, sucking some Balinese sweetmeat, and on his head, perhaps, a live, trussed chicken. Luce, therefore, was now free to think of decorating the two houses.
It was Rantun who looked after our offerings, which made the house a safe place to live in. Every fifteen days, and on all big feast days, she would dress up in her best clothes, her small daughter Sugandi with her, and place offerings of blossoms, fruit, rice and money, arranged on a tiny square cut from young coconut leaves, at all the gateways facing north, south, east and west, and inside the house itself and at various key points in the compound. For this ritual both Rantun and Sugandi would place flowers in their hair, tie an extra cloth around their waists as they would to enter a temple, and as Rantun set down each offering she would flick a little holy water over it and mutter inaudibly some ancient mantra.
Agung, on the other hand, introduced us to leyaks. Nearly all Balinese believe in leyaks, demons that appear as balls of fire or as monsters with flame-dripping tongues, and who suck the blood of unborn babes.
One afternoon Agung was out at the back of the house, ironing. While working he felt a hand push him in the back. He thought it was Pegil, and he swung round quickly to catch the boy: but there was nobody there.
That evening Agung, Rantun and Pegil came together to see us, and to talk about the demons. The Balinese accept these monsters as part of their cosmos, and though perturbed, were no more so than I would have been had I heard an unexpected stair creak in an empty house.
"Tuan,” said Rantun, quite happily," Agung wants to speak to you.
He was teased by a leyak this afternoon while ironing."
"What is this, Agung?"
Agung twisted restlessly, shyly, and said in a voice almost impossible to hear.
"It is so. I was ironing. I felt a hand touch my back, as if someone were pushing me. I thought it was Pegil. But when I turned around, no one was there. It must have been a leyak."
The last words came very softly, but quite surely.
"You don't think it was a muscle twitching in your back, Agung?
You feel sure it was a leyak?"
“It was a leyak." Then in a louder tone: "Masa! Is it possible that the Tuan does not know? There are leyaks in this village! Many have seen them. A few days ago I saw one in the shape of a flaming monkey, seated on the south garden wall."
So that was that. I thought it best to ask Rantun's advice, for she was older and more experienced in both Balinese and foreign ways. "What should we do, Made? Is this serious?"
Rantun laughed good-naturedly at the ignorant Tuan.
"We will make some more offerings. Perhaps the leyaks feel that we do not pay enough attention to them. Also, I could ask the pemangku."
The pemangku is the village priest-not the high caste Brahmana, whose priestly title is pedanda, but the everyday and more-close-to-the-people priest.
"But it is nothing heavy, Made?"
"It is a light matter, Tuan. If the leyaks were serious they would do more than push Agung in the back. No, they are perhaps a little offended; we may have been careless not to propitiate them enough.
I will prepare some offerings tomorrow."
The matter dropped.
Pegil, who had started going to the local school during the past weeks, gave us our next educational surprise. He came back one day, very tidy and clean, wearing a white shirt and dark-coloured shorts, his satchel in his hands, and said, "Greetings, Tuan. May I speak?"