Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (18 page)

“I went to the paper, the office, on Thursday afternoon, two days after, to get my money for the article. Seventy-five thousand rupiah.” About thirty-five dollars. “And the journalists told me that some young Muslims had just brought some leaflets to the newspaper. The leaflet said, ‘Hang Linus. Linus mocks Muslims.’ They were trying to stir up the students.”

I said, “Weren’t you expecting something like that?”

“I was surprised. I thought that if someone doesn’t agree he would write in the newspaper against what I had written. Maybe they have a crisis of identity as a young generation. They are young people who have not finished in the university.

“I came home, and in the morning some soldiers came here with a captain and said, ‘Linus, what did you do? Did you mock the Muslims?’ I said, ‘No.’ The captain had a copy of the article. He said he didn’t see any reference to Muslims. Then he said, ‘And now we will all go to Yogya. And follow me, please.’ We went, to the fourth level of the local command.”

It was Linus’s way of expressing the seriousness with which the army took the affair. On a pink paper napkin—we were sitting facing each other at the kitchen table next to the dividing screen, close to a wall shelf with mementos and ornaments—he made a rough chart to explain the structure of the local army command.

This interest in the army structure took me aback. But it wasn’t really surprising. Linus’s family, and there were many branches, was of some local importance—another reason for his mother’s pain at what had happened to her house. Linus’s father had been a senior village official; his mother’s father (the polygamist’s son) had been a secretary of the local government, and Linus himself had wanted, for all the years of his childhood—even when he was going night and day to the village wayang—to be a general when he grew up. Linus spoke of the Indonesian army with something like love; it was still for him the defender of the state.

“In Yogya I saw a lieutenant colonel in his office. He said that if I didn’t feel safe in my house I was to stay in the mess at the army barracks. I told
him I had to stay with my mother, who was a widow. And for a week he sent one or two persons to sleep here at night.”

And though Linus said that the new Muslim aggressiveness was being encouraged only by a few people, there was with him a clear irritation with this aggressiveness, as at something that went contrary to the way of Java. In 1979 the village mosque had been a plain wooden hall, like the Christian church. Now the mosque was of concrete, and though it didn’t have a dome—like those silvery ones stacked together like a cumbersome kind of bauble in the front yards of some shops—it had loudspeakers on the roof; and Linus didn’t think that in old Arabia there would have been loudspeakers on mosques. Some women had begun to be muffled up and veiled, and Linus thought it was strange in a tropical country to see people wearing clothes like that.

But most upsetting to Linus was the change in the function of the village
coum.
The coum had been special, with special duties. He was Muslim, but he carried over many of the old Javanist ways. He was the man who was called in to wash and bury the dead. He was also the man who on certain ritual occasions informally led the community in prayer. It was possible to see in the coum an old outcast Hindu figure, with the burial duties of the untouchable. And—just as the early Christians used the crucifixion and the cross, the centuries-old Roman punishment of everyday criminals, as the most moving symbol of human pain and redemption—so it was possible here to see how the early Muslims, looking for converts, might have used this outcast to do a karate throw on the long-established faith: the washer and burier of the dead was to lead the community of the new faith in prayer: the untouchable, at one bound, scaled the caste pyramid and became the equivalent of a priest.

I had met the old coum in 1979, a small, strong, wiry old man, with a laughing voice and bright eyes, and hair flattened by his hat; and with memories of the wars. He had died the next year, Linus told me.

“He loved to look at the puppet play, which is the mixture of Hinduism and Javanese culture. His son has taken over, but he is seldom asked to lead the community in prayer. Because of the changing orientation of the Muslims themselves, they have fewer rituals—commemorating the dead in the Javanese way, sharing food in the
kenduri,
ritual food. They used that custom only when the old coum died.

“When my father died we asked the son of the coum to pray with us. The Christian leader led the prayers, and the coum and others, non-Catholics, were asked to pray for my father in their own way. This is the way of tolerance and equilibrium in relations in the village.”

So Linus’s thoughts constantly went back to that death in his house, and, almost as a parallel theme, the loss of equilibrium in his world.

Without any change in his expression or in his tone, he said, “Six or seven feet below us here are many Hindu temples or Buddha temples or Hindu-Buddha temples, buried by eruptions of Merapi a thousand years ago and also two thousand and fifty years ago.” Merapi, the active volcano of the region, creator of the lava that enriched the soil, and showed as black boulders in the beds of streams. “This creates a job for people who want to study about Java culture and religion, because behind these phenomena we can catch the spirit of Javanese people today.”

The vegetation of Java was a composite of the trees and flowers of the Old World and the New. It was like the vegetation of Trinidad and Venezuela and some of the islands. I was even to see one day—on the busy road from Yogyakarta to Prambanan, with the half-restored towers of the great tenth-century Hindu temple complex—a giant immortelle tree bare of leaves and in full, lava-fed flower: red-and-yellow bird-shaped flowers ceaselessly falling on the road, as I had seen them fall in Trinidad in cocoa woods: the immortelle a Central American import, used there as a shade tree for cacao. It was hard to shake off old associations; but I was to feel with Linus, as I had felt in West Sumatra, that there were different things in this soil, other emanations.

Linus’s mother was at a funeral when Linus brought me back the next morning. And after some time Linus’s sister appeared in the back room. She sat almost formally in a straight-backed chair before the television. I could see her from where I sat with Linus at the table next to the dividing screen. She paid me no attention. She looked rested; she was calm. She had complained about the priest the day before, and had nothing more to say to me.

Linus said, “My sister cooks. If my mother cooks, and she doesn’t like it, she will cook for herself. But she doesn’t know how to judge things. She will use too much rice, for instance. She can cook vegetables, too. Fried eggs. She will buy these things for herself.” He spoke with pleasure and pride and delicacy. “She feels very much that people shouldn’t treat her differently. We suffered a lot during my big sister’s wedding party. ‘Why am I not married?’ she said. We said nothing. We can do nothing for her. We shook our heads to say, ‘No, we cannot do anything.’ ” And, reliving the moment, he shook his head slowly, and the pain showed in his eyes. “But she will cry. She will use new clothes and complain about it to new people.”

“How does your mother manage?”

“My mother says often to others: ‘I don’t know why God gave a gift of an invalid daughter.’ ” Invalid: it was the word Linus used for his sister: he allowed nothing stronger. “My mother has a big trouble with her. Sometimes she will attack my mother. We went this season after the rice fields had been harvested and bought a lot of rice, to sell later. My sister will tell my mother, ‘Don’t sell it.’ Maybe she thought the rice shouldn’t be sold. We had to tell her that the rice had to be sold to buy other things.”

His face was grave; his tenderness touched it with beauty.

I asked, “Have you written about her?”

“I have tried to write a poem about this sister. But the time hasn’t come yet. I have only written poems about another sister, number eight, who died in 1983.”

He went through the doorway below the cross and Semar to get the book. The display shelves by the dividing screen had simple Hindu images among its Christian pieces and its simpler ornaments and keepsakes. The sister was still calm, watching the television.

The booklet he brought out had a white lotus on a green leaf on the cover. The dedication was to the sister who had died. All the poems in the booklet were written in six weeks in 1987, four years after the sister’s death. There was one poem which Linus particularly liked; and in an anthology of Indonesian poetry which he gave me there was this rendering (by John McGlynn) of the last stanza of that poem:

The feeling could not be denied. In the second line there was an indirect, moving reference to the wayang, Linus’s obsession; and I thought that the last two lines recalled the death of Dido in the
Aeneid
(“The warmth all failed, and the life was taken up to the winds”):… 
omnis et una / Dilapsus calor atque in ventos vita recessit.

In the house this poem was like a private possession of Linus’s. His mother hadn’t read a line he had written. She had encouraged him, or not objected, when he wanted to have an army career. He had gone far; he had got a place at the Indonesian Military Academy at Sukabumi. But then after two weeks—and after a childhood and adolescence dreaming of being a general—he had decided that the military life was not for him, and he had left the academy. It was after that that the poetry vocation had come to him, which his mother had never stopped thinking of as absurd.

And Linus had been discovering that the poetic and literary life was hard. After his great beginner’s success with “Pariyem’s Confession” things had slowed up for him. A four-volume anthology of Indonesian poetry—a great labor, and a famous work that had sold three thousand copies—had earned him only five hundred dollars; and he could get no more than two hundred dollars for a book of articles. And articles and anthologies made enemies; poets didn’t like being criticized or left out. Linus said, “People are jealous of me. Jealousy was behind those young Muslim agitators.”

As hard as anything else was the writer’s need to go on, to go beyond the first impulse, the impulse that had committed him to the career, to dredge up material that when he began he didn’t know about. Now, however, things had begun to move for Linus again. He was just about getting started on a new book, something that might turn out to be bigger than “Pariyem’s Confession.” The new book was going to “reflect” Javanese history.

Linus was a Catholic, the son of converts. To some extent, then, in the religious divide of Java, the competition between the two revealed religions, his side was chosen for him. For him all the mingled emanations of the past, below the lava, the Hinduism and Buddhism and animism that together made for the “restraint” of Javanism, ran naturally into Christianity with its message of love and charity.

He said, “It is easy for Javanese people to embrace Christ’s teaching. And maybe Javanism has some spirit of Buddhism. Siddhartha taught people love.” Siddhartha, the Buddha.

With no change of tone, he said, “I think the spirit of Siddhartha often comes to teach us, to teach wisdom in living. He comes to a small group of my friends. When we collect together, in the night usually, the spirit of Siddhartha will come sometimes to teach us, and we will ask him about our problems. Sometimes he writes on the palm of my friend Landung, a poet and translator. I can’t read it, but my other friend, a woman—she works as
a palace guide in Yogya—she can read it. Landung will feel somebody writing on his palm:
tuk, tuk, tuk,
like that. And at the last the person writing will write his name:
Sincerely, Siddhartha.
And my woman friend can read what Siddhartha has written.”