by John Coast
The Koopmans, as their name implied, were merchants. He was a retired civil servant of stubborn, hard-headed character, but a man straightforward to deal with. With his shrewd wife he lived by the edge of the sea near Sanur, and the two of them together ran the Sindhu Art Gallery, which held by far the best collection of carvings and paintings on the island.
One night Koopman and his wife were playing cards with the manager of the local Dutch bank and a Eurasian friend. With no warning, a group of masked men sprang out of the night into the house, firing a sten-gun as they rushed in. Koopman and the bank manager were instantly killed, but Mrs. Koopman and the Eurasian threw themselves to the floor, where at first they shammed dead. When the criminals began to ransack the house, they were able to escape into the garden and run away. Since Koopman was no fool, he kept no money in his isolated home, and the bank manager happened purely by chance to be there. A generally accepted theory of the murder thus arose which alleged that the premature firing of the gun was probably due to inexperience, nerves or hysteria. There were no profits from the two crimes.
Now these wanton murders caused a great dismay among the white population of Bali. Lemayeur and Koopman could hardly be considered persons of any political consequence, and these incidents looked like cases of pure robbery with violence against foreigners. So, we all began to wonder who could count themselves safe—for who, in those days of racial sentiment and personal revenge so often misleadingly obscured by political camouflage, could guarantee not to offend some village cut-throat who might thereupon gather a gang together to revenge themselves on an alien "imperialist"? I looked around our compound, defended by mud walls and gates of bamboo wattle. I scratched my head as I walked through our houses, more than half of which were quite open verandahs and whose only half-walls were of woven bamboo which reached eight feet above the floor and thus not halfway up to the roof. My pistol I had been forced to surrender to Islam Salim when its licence date had expired, and we now had no weapon of any sort. All I could do was collect some Chinese firecrackers, tie them on a long string around our bathroom, place some matches ready nearby, and had any marauders come I would have tried a loud but harmless bluff on them by setting of a magazine of firecrackers.
So once again I was sleeping, as I had done for weary months at the end of 1950, two in the morning. We suffered, however, nothing more annoying than occasional sneak thieves, who would creep into our houses at night, barefoot and silent, to steal cups and saucers, or shoes or clothes or even a burning lamp; and on one occasion they fished with a long pole through the open window of the room we had built for Sampih and Kusti, thus robbing two Balinese of their best kains and shirts. It was not worth while bothering to report such luckily minor occurrences to overburdened police headquarters.
In this somewhat anxious period, Luce, who was far more intrepid than I, became ill. For some time her fingers had been irritated by outbreaks of blisters, which came in patches, and now, to our distress, her hands swelled and the tips of her fingers right up to her wrists became entirely covered in odourless yet water-filled blisters, which soon quite crippled her. The local doctors diagnosed it as heat rash, as an allergy or as a sort of eczema. They were quite certain that there was no drug known that would cure it, but they all said she must go to a cooler climate if she wanted to recover.
Since the poor girl was quite unable to look after herself, and was desperate and furiously frustrated at her own helplessness, she agreed at length to go into the mountains and stay with our friend, Captain McConnell, a retired Naval officer of the old school who had lived some eighteen years in Bali, and whose house commanded the crest of a hill overlooking the blue lake of Bedugul. This was fifty kilometres to the north of Denpasar, on the dusty road to Singaradja.
McConnell was our orchid adviser and a great horticulturalist. He lived on local pork and tinned foods in a house of wood that was really a conservatory and laid only a very secondary emphasis on any human, habitable purpose, and in his amazing garden I had seen sweet peas in bloom, also lilies of the valley, and once, even, an astonished tropic daffodil! But it was when it came to orchids, which he himself imported from every corner of the globe, that the captain was a master. His enthusiasm he shared with our best English pupil, Chan Ling Siong, who owned the Wisnu Store in Denpasar and was building an orchid house on its roof.
Whenever our orchids looked stagnant, we would take them up to Bedugul for treatment; for the captain had his own theory about orchids in his mountain climate.
"It's the lake," he would say. "The lake and the morning mists. In the mornings the mists rise off the lake and simply fling all the moisture and foods which orchids need from the air, straight into my house. You can't go wrong up here.” And he would smile down from his six feet two and jerk out his jaunty white beard at you.
So we had always brought our plants up to him for rejuvenation, and after barren months· of sulking and producing leaves only in Denpasar, with only a week or so to imbibe the lake's magical atmosphere, out would shoot the flower stalks again. The orchid bond had led us to become much attached to this robust, middle-aged gentleman, who lived for the most part in his garden and dressing gown.
I, therefore, now drove up to Bedugul to see McConnell to ask him whether he would try the magic of his weather on Luce. And characteristically he offered her a room for as long as she needed, and I urged that Rantun accompany her, both for Luce's comfort and in order to cast her influence a little over his kitchen. In a depressedly silent jeep on the following day, armed with net gloves and boracic powder and food and magazines, Sampih and I took the two exiles up into the mountains, hoping that the fifteen degrees difference in temperature-seventy-five instead of ninety-would manage quickly to dry up her painful and maddening wounds.
Soon after Luce had gone to Bedugul and while I was trying to exist on the cooking of Agung, Sampih and Kusti, which was amusing in the cooking but not so funny to eat, the brigantine Yankee sailed into the harbour of Benoa, eight miles south of Denpasar. To Irving Johnson, her skipper, we had not only an introduction from Daan Hubrecht, but there was now living in the old guest house of Walter Spies, in Ubud, a retired New Zealand doctor, Ted Lucas, who had sailed around the world on the Yankee's last cruise as the ship's doctor. He was now living in Bali as a result of having fallen in love with it on that first visit.
When I had walked over the shingly paths of the hotel to greet the skipper in person, I found a thin-faced man, very tanned by the sun and with a chest on him like a gorilla, who introduced me to his crew, and in particular to Jim Ford, a man who had lectured on the fine arts at Princeton. Jim was a man in his middle thirties, round faced, with small features, a compact body, brown eyes and hair which he wore in a "crew cut.” He was as alert as a sparrow. He also seemed to be rich, for within half an hour of conversing with him, he asked me to help arrange a full programme of music and dancing for the Yankee crew, and anything which cost money that the others did wish to share in, he would himself gladly underwrite. This seemed a heaven-sent opportunity for testing out our ideas on a good cross-section of American opinion, and so the next day, as a start, we drove Jim and two of his friends up to the colour-splashed mountain garden of McConnell to meet both McConnell and Luce. There, so fast had the cooler weather helped Luce's hands and feet, and so stimulating did we both find Jim, that within another few days Luce was home and looking after herself more easily, while Jim and his friends were in our guest house. Rantun, in her own kitchen once more, was cooking in such quantities as she had never cooked before. I made one sad mistake, however. I underestimated Jim's capacity, and with rash generosity told him that the household provided free arak and brum for of the former a toughened Balinese toper could drink but half a bottle a day, and I thought that a few noggins of its vitriolic quality would suffice for our guests. Jim was able, however, to consume and control with complete sangfroid two whole bottles each day, thereby earning the everlasting
admiration of Sampih and all Balinese who were aware of this feat.
Perhaps no foreigner has stayed in Bali for four weeks who got more enjoyment out of it than Jim Ford. Each single thing he saw interested him. First he wanted to know: "Why is each house and village surrounded by mud walls? Why these narrow gateways? Are all the villages like this—are they all afraid of something?" "They say it's to keep out the evil spirits," we replied, "who can move only in straight lines and can't climb over walls or through shut gates. But it's also perhaps a safety measure left over from the days of absolute feudalism when the Rajas were always fighting one another and looking for soldiers from among the people. There's certainly not a village in Bali without its walls."
Then we drove him up to Batuan, to see a Balinese village from the inside. The jeep scraped along narrow lanes, its roof grazing the thatch on the mud walls, till we pulled up among the pi-dogs and children outside the house of Kakul, the dancer and teacher. We showed Jim that there was far more to a village than the strip of it seen bordering a main road, for here we had travelled half a mile down lanes and paths under the shade of mango and breadfruit trees, beneath rare durians and the inevitable coconut palms, passing patches of banana trees and vegetables, all of which were quite out of sight of the main road.
Kakul sent one of his sons up a palm to cut us down a green coconut so that we might drink its milk, and we watched him hurriedly hanging out to dry the tattered costume that he wore for the Masked Dance. He kept shouting over to us, apologizing for not sitting with us immediately:
"A moment, Tuan—a small moment. Last night I was dancing again in Klungkung. Dawan my daughter is still there."
And I told Jim that for some quite original reason Kakul was teaching his children to dance the Baris with squinting eyes.
"But what a life!" said Jim. "These people have got the answer to it all. For food they have pigs and chickens and these wonderful white-bottomed cattle who look as if they had all sat down in pools of cream; fruits and vegetables grow in every village; salt they get from the nearby sea; and there's running water, coconut milk and arak to drink."
"But that's not all," I added. "They spin, weave and design their own cloth to make their kains and sarongs. They have great sport with fighting cocks and crickets; they gamble nightly with cards and dice; their religion is one that happily embraces their every thought and action, and only economics prevents a man from having any number of wives he desires."
"I don’t know how good this life is for the women, but it sounds just the stuff for the men. I think I'll build me a house here, too."
In Kaliungu he struck up immediate friendships with Sampih and Kusti; and in the guest house the three of them were waited on as if it were all a game by Kusti and his young brother, Tompel, who had just joined our household and was now going to school in Denpasar with his slightly patronising brother. Tompel had a mole on his upper lip and had been nicknamed by Theo Meier "Hitla".
One afternoon after coming back from school Kusti came into the front house, where Luce and I were talking about our difficulties with Jim, telling him how the cost of the transportation seemed an almost insuperable obstacle to our ever getting to Europe or the States. Kusti stood scratching his head with embarrassment, half grinning, half ashamed. We could hear the infectious chortling of Rantun's laugh in the kitchen, and could see Ketut and Sugandi, her children, peeping around the kitchen door, looking up the passageway into our living room.
"Well, Wayan, what is it?"
"It's like this, Tuan. Perhaps it sounds very strange, Tuan, but I want to change my name again."
"But you changed it only a few months ago! What's wrong with Kusti as a name?"
"It is a good name, Tuan—but I think the name Wayan Pudja would be even better. Don't be angry, Tuan, but I ask to be known as Wayan Pudja. And next term in school I shall change to Wayan Pudja, also."
Just as I was slowly agreeing to this, mystified, and unable to find out why Wayan really wanted to change his name again, Rantun came in from the kitchen, her eyes tearful with laughter, holding an old knife in her hand. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and blurted out, "Would the Tuan like to know why Wayan is changing his name once more?" Here fresh guffaws shook her, and then, as the spasms came under control: "It is the children at school, Tuan. At first Wayan was very proud of his new name, Kusti. He even preferred to be called Kusti rather than just plain Wayan. And then one of the boys found out that if they called 'Kus-ti! Kus-ti! Kus-ti! Kus-ti!' very quickly, Tuan, just like that, it sounded as if they were calling 'Ti-kus! Ti-kus! Ti-kus! Ti-kus!’ So they started to call him Wayan Tikus, and tikus, as the Tuan knows, means 'rat'. Now, Tuan, it seems that Wayan does not like to be known as the First-Born Rat!"
And here Rantun ran back into the kitchen again, where, judging from the noise, we imagined her rolling about the floor in her mirth. Wayan, however, during this recital, grinned at us with extraordinary good nature, saying hopefully at the last, "Is it good, Tuan-you will call me Wayan Pudja now?"
"It is better so, Wayan Pudja," I replied gravely.
When we interpreted this for Jim he was full of admiration for Wayan. "What a kid!" he kept exclaiming, "God! what a life you lead here."
"He is a delightful child, Jim. But heaven knows how long it will last. I'll let you into a secret." I broke off and shouted something to Wayan. "I've asked him to bring us his school drawing book."
Wayan brought the blue exercise book and handed it me in silence, and as we turned the pages he stood on one leg, nervously, sometimes stooping with broad grin to explain what some drawing was meant to be.
"And what are these?" I asked him.
Wayan continued to grin, but clearly he was ashamed, for he had forgotten about these drawings and had not known that I had come across them some weeks ago after helping him one evening with his homework. I handed the book back to the child, and turning to Jim, said, "That's what I meant by saying I don't know how long kids such as these will remain delightful—from our point of view. I'll tell you what those drawings meant. Those were figures of bandits, or robbers, which are only too frequent in Bali these days. They always wear black masks and carry pistols. So far, perhaps, so good. Many children at home go to the movies and draw just the same things. But on each page you saw the word 'Merdeka!' written? That is the modern Indonesian slogan meaning 'Freedom!' And this all means, I'm afraid, that at the age of eleven Balinese children are being taught to confuse banditry with patriotism by their schoolteachers who are indoctrinated from Java. Wayan's teacher, incidentally, is a young woman."
"You mean you think that I had better postpone building my house here after all?" said Jim, and shouted for more arak. Then, returning to where our conversation had been interrupted by Kusti, he asked, "This transportation for your group—what do you reckon it would cost?"
"Well, Jim, the group will have to go by air, because if we tried to arrange a tour by ship it would add two or three months to the length of our stay abroad, and I'm not at all sure how long the Balinese will want to stay outside Bali once the novelty wears off. I've warned them it'll be hard work, but I realize they can't be expected to visualize what they'll be in for. I've calculated we can get forty people, the gamelan and costumes complete, in one Skymaster. We'd have to have the round trip money in our pockets before we could get American visas, and that would come to about half a million rupiahs, or $45,000. To us this sounds astronomical."
"And nobody will take that risk? Who have you actually got working for you in the States?"
I told him that so far no American or European impresario had volunteered to risk so much money on an unknown, unseen company.
"But the most irritating thing is this. Some months ago when we were flat broke, I had to sell our camera—that was at a time when Luce once had to borrow back from Raritun twenty rupiahs of the wages we had paid her! And now we simply can't
afford to make publicity photographs. Two Danes, the Nielsens, made us some, and Dick Tregaskis, the Guadalcanal man, who came here with a cameraman in tow, had our group filmed when collecting colour material for a movie called Fair Wind to Java, and he sent us some prints, too. But they've all been used. However, Hollywood is still one hope. Tregaskis said there was a faint chance that a theatrical tour might be combined with being used in his film, and a friend of ours called Mal Sibley, who works in Bel Air, wrote and told us that Bring Crosby and Bob Hope are about to make another "Road" film, this time called Road to Bali. Mal thought we might get a Djanger sequence in that. But nothing has matured so far and we just have to face it-we're too risky an investment to be brought to America or Europe before we're tried out."
"So what now-you're not going to give up?"
"I shan't give up. For some inscrutable reason, partly personal desire, partly a balletomane's wish to show our Legong to people like Margot Fonteyn and Markova, partly a belief that such a group as ours would make a powerful, because nonpolitical, link between east and west, this thing has become what you might call "my life's ambition." Does that sound a little crazy? Well, anyhow, I've recently had another idea. A little while ago there was a charming young Dutchman here who was as mad about Balinese painting as we are about the dancing. His name was Ben Joppe, and his firm were transferring him to Kuala Lumpur, in Malaya, where he knew nobody. So I gave him an introduction to my old friend, Noel Ross, who is the British Adviser in Selangor State and very keen on Balinese and Indonesian art. These two now want me to bring the group to Malaya. If they can arrange it, they want me to fly over to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur to settle the details, and from Kuala Lumpur I'd continue on up to Bangkok and Hongkong to see what could be done there. Then, if we could bring off a tour of southeast Asia, maybe somewhere along the line a confidant of a big impresario could see us and recommend us, and off we'd go to Europe or America."