Island (11 page)

“Another of the cosmic jokes,” said Will. “And this one was formulated by Jesus himself. ‘To those who have shall be given, and from those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have’—the bare possibility of being human. It’s the cruelest of all God’s jokes, and also the commonest. I’ve seen it being played on millions of men and women, millions of small children—all over the world.”

“So you can understand why that famine made such an indelible impression on Dr. Andrew’s mind. He was resolved, and so was his friend the Raja, that in Pala, at least, there should always be bread. Hence their decision to set up the Experimental Station. Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics was a great success. In a few years we had new strains of rice and maize and millet and breadfruit. We had better breeds of cattle and chickens. Better ways of cultivating and composting; and in the fifties we built the first superphosphate factory east of Berlin. Thanks to all these things people were eating better, living longer, losing fewer children. Ten years after the founding of Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics the Raja took a census. The population had been stable, more or less, for a century. Now it had started to rise. In fifty or sixty years, Dr. Andrew foresaw, Pala would be transformed into the kind of festering slum that Rendang is today. What was to be done? Dr. Andrew had read his Malthus. ‘Food production increases arithmetically; population increases geometrically. Man has only two choices: he can either leave the matter to Nature, who will solve the population problem in the old familiar way, by
famine, pestilence and war: or else (Malthus being a clergyman) he can keep down his numbers by moral restraint.’”

“Mor-ral r-restr-raint,” the little nurse repeated, rolling her
r
’s in the Indonesian parody of a Scottish divine. “Mor-ralr-restr-raint! Incidentally,” she added, “Dr. Andrew had just married the Raja’s sixteen-year-old niece.”

“And that,” said Ranga, “was yet another reason for revising Malthus. Famine on this side, restraint on that. Surely there must be some better, happier, humaner way between the Malthusian horns. And of course there was such a way even then, even before the age of rubber and spermicides. There were sponges, there was soap, there were condoms made of every known waterproof material from oiled silk to the blind gut of sheep. The whole armory of Paleo-Birth Control.”

“And how did the Raja and his subjects react to Paleo-Birth Control? With horror?”

“Not at all. They were good Buddhists, and every good Buddhist knows that begetting is merely postponed assassination. Do your best to get off the Wheel of Birth and Death, and for heaven’s sake don’t go about putting superfluous victims onto the Wheel. For a good Buddhist, birth control makes metaphysical sense. And for a village community of rice growers, it makes social and economic sense. There must be enough young people to work the fields and support the aged and the little ones. But not too many of them; for then neither the old nor the workers nor their children will have enough to eat. In the old days, couples had to have six children in order to raise two or three. Then came clean water and the Experimental Station. Out of six children five now survived. The old patterns of breeding had ceased to make sense. The only objection to Paleo-Birth Control was its crudity. But fortunately there was a more aesthetic alternative. The Raja was a Tantrik initiate and had learned the yoga of love. Dr. Andrew was told about
maithuna
and, being a true man of
science, agreed to try it. He and his young wife were given the necessary instruction.”

“With what results?”

“Enthusiastic approval.”

“That’s the way everybody feels about it,” said Radha.

“Now, now, none of your sweeping generalizations! Some feel that way, others don’t. Dr. Andrew was one of the enthusiasts. The whole matter was lengthily discussed. In the end they decided that contraceptives should be like education—free, tax-supported and, though not compulsory, as nearly as possible universal. For those who felt the need for something more refined, there would be instruction in the yoga of love.”

“Do you mean to tell me that they got away with it?”

“It wasn’t really so difficult.
Maithuna
was orthodox. People weren’t being asked to do anything against their religion. On the contrary, they were being given a flattering opportunity to join the elect by learning something esoteric.”

“And don’t forget the most important point of all,” the little nurse chimed in. “For women—
all
women, and I don’t care what you say about sweeping generalizations—the yoga of love means perfection, means being transformed and taken out of themselves and completed.” There was a brief silence. “And now,” she resumed in another, brisker tone, “it’s high time we left you to your siesta.”

“Before you go,” said Will, “I’d like to write a letter. Just a brief note to my boss to say that I’m alive and in no immediate danger of being eaten by the natives.”

Radha went foraging in Dr. Robert’s study and came back with paper, pencil and an envelope.

“
Veni, vidi
,” Will scrawled. “I was wrecked, I met the Rani and her collaborator from Rendang, who implies that he can deliver the goods in return for baksheesh to the tune (he was specific) of twenty thousand pounds. Shall I negotiate on this
basis? If you cable
Proposed article OK
, I shall go ahead. If
No hurry for article
I shall let the matter drop. Tell my mother I am safe and shall soon be writing.”

“There,” he said as he handed the envelope, sealed and addressed, to Ranga. “May I ask you to buy me a stamp and get this off in time to catch tomorrow’s plane?”

“Without fail,” the boy promised.

Watching them go, Will felt a twinge of conscience. What charming young people! And here he was, plotting with Bahu and the forces of history to subvert their world. He comforted himself with the thought that, if he didn’t do it, somebody else would. And even if Joe Aldehyde did get his concession, they could still go on making love in the style to which they were accustomed. Or couldn’t they?

From the door the little nurse turned back for a final word. “No reading now,” she wagged her finger at him. “Go to sleep.”

“I never sleep during the day,” Will assured her, with a certain perverse satisfaction.

H
E COULD NEVER GO TO SLEEP DURING THE DAY; BUT WHEN HE
looked next at his watch, the time was twenty-five past four, and he was feeling wonderfully refreshed. He picked up
Notes on What’s What
, and resumed his interrupted reading:

This was as far as he had got this morning; and now here was a new section, the fifth:

Will turned the page. A sheet of notepaper fluttered onto the bed. He picked it up and glanced at it. Twenty lines of small clear writing and at the bottom of the page the initials S. M. Not a letter evidently; a poem and therefore public property. He read:

“Like gentians,” Will repeated to himself, and thought of that summer holiday in Switzerland when he was twelve; thought of the meadow, high above Grindelwald, with its unfamiliar flowers, its wonderful un-English butterflies; thought of the dark-blue sky and the sunshine and the huge shining moun
tains on the other side of the valley. And all his father had found to say was that it looked like an advertisement for Nestlé’s milk chocolate. “Not even real chocolate,” he had insisted with a grimace of disgust. “
Milk
chocolate.” After which there had been an ironic comment on the water color his mother was painting—so badly (poor thing!) but with such loving and conscientious care. “The milk chocolate advertisement that Nestlé rejected.” And now it was
his
turn. “Instead of just mooning about with your mouth open, like the village idiot, why not do something intelligent for a change? Put in some work on your German grammar, for example.” And diving into the rucksack, he had pulled out, from among the hard-boiled eggs and the sandwiches, the abhorred little brown book. What a detestable man! And yet, if Susila was right, one ought to be able to see him now, after all these years, glowing like a gentian—Will glanced again at the last line of the poem—“blue, unpossessed and open.”

“Well…” said a familiar voice.

He turned toward the door. “Talk of the devil,” he said. “Or rather read what the devil has written.” He held up the sheet of notepaper for her inspection.

Susila glanced at it. “Oh
that
,” she said. “If only good intentions were enough to make good poetry!” She sighed and shook her head.

“I was trying to think of my father as a gentian,” he went on. “But all I get is the persistent image of the most enormous turd.”

“Even turds,” she assured him, “can be seen as gentians.”

“But only, I take it, in the place you were writing about—the clear place between thought and silence?”

Susila nodded.

“How do you get there?”

“You don’t get there. There comes to you. Or rather there is really here.”

“You’re just like little Radha,” he complained. “Parroting what the Old Raja says at the beginning of this book.”

“If we repeat it,” she said, “it’s because it happens to be true. If we didn’t repeat it, we’d be ignoring the facts.”

“Whose facts?” he asked. “Certainly not mine.”

“Not at the moment,” she agreed. “But if you were to do the kind of things that the Old Raja recommends, they might be yours.”

“Did
you
have parent trouble?” he asked after a little silence. “Or could you aways see turds as gentians?”

“Not at that age,” she answered. “Children
have
to be Manichean dualists. It’s the price we must all pay for learning the rudiments of being human. Seeing turds as gentians, or rather seeing both gentians and turds as Gentians with a capital G—that’s a postgraduate accomplishment.”

“So what did you do about your parents? Just grin and bear the unbearable? Or did your father and mother happen to be bearable?”

“Bearable separately,” she answered. “Especially my father. But quite unbearable together—unbearable because they couldn’t bear one another. A bustling, cheerful, outgoing woman married to a man so fastidiously introverted that she got on his nerves all the time—even, I suspect, in bed. She never stopped communicating, and he never started. With the result that he thought she was shallow and insincere, she thought he was heartless, contemptuous and without normal human feelings.”

“I’d have expected that you people would know better than to walk into that kind of trap.”

“We do know better,” she assured him. “Boys and girls are specifically taught what to expect of people whose temperament and physique are very different from their own. Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that the lessons don’t seem to have much effect. Not to mention the fact that in some cases the psychological distance between the people involved is really too great to be bridged. Anyhow, the fact remains that my father and mother never managed to make a go of it. They’d fallen in love with one
another—goodness knows why. But when they came to close quarters, she found herself being constantly hurt by his inaccessibility, while
her
uninhibited good-fellowship made him fairly cringe with embarrassment and distaste.
My
sympathies were always with my father. Physically and temperamentally I’m very close to him, not in the least like my mother. I remember, even as a tiny child, how I used to shrink away from her exuberance. She was like a permanent invasion of one’s privacy. She still is.”

“Do you have to see a lot of her?”

“Very little. She has her own job and her own friends. In our part of the world ‘Mother’ is strictly the name of a function. When the function has been duly fulfilled, the title lapses; the ex-child and the woman who used to be called ‘Mother’ establish a new kind of relationship. If they get on well together, they continue to see a lot of one another. If they don’t, they drift apart. Nobody expects them to cling, and clinging isn’t equated with loving—isn’t regarded as anything particularly creditable.”

“So all’s well
now
. But what about
then
? What happened when you were a child, growing up between two people who couldn’t bridge the gulf that separated them? I know what
that
means—the fairy-story ending in reverse, ‘And so they lived unhappily ever after.’”

“And I’ve no doubt,” said Susila, “that if we hadn’t been born in Pala, we would have lived unhappily ever after. As it was, we got on, all things considered, remarkably well.”

“How did you manage to do that?”

“We didn’t; it was all managed for us. Have you read what the Old Raja says about getting rid of the two thirds of sorrow that’s homemade and gratuitous?”

Will nodded. “I was just reading it when you came in.”

“Well, in the bad old days,” she went on, “Palanese families could be just as victimizing, tyrant-producing and liar-creating as yours can be today. In fact they were so awful that Dr. Andrew and the Raja of the Reform decided that something had to be
done about it. Buddhist ethics and primitive village communism were skillfully made to serve the purposes of reason, and in a single generation the whole family system was radically changed.” She hesitated for a moment. “Let me explain,” she went on, “in terms of my own particular case—the case of an only child of two people who couldn’t understand one another and were always at cross-purposes or actually quarreling. In the old days, a little girl brought up in those surroundings would have emerged as either a wreck, a rebel, or a resigned hypocritical conformist. Under the new dispensation I didn’t have to undergo unnecessary suffering, I wasn’t wrecked or forced into rebellion or resignation. Why? Because from the moment I could toddle, I was free to escape.”

“To escape?” he repeated. “To escape?” It seemed too good to be true.

“Escape,” she explained, “is built into the new system. Whenever the parental Home Sweet Home becomes too unbearable, the child is allowed, is actively encouraged—and the whole weight of public opinion is behind the encouragement—to migrate to one of its other homes.”

“How many homes does a Palanese child have?”

“About twenty on the average.”

“Twenty? My God!”

“We all belong,” Susila explained, “to an MAC—a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from fifteen to twenty-five assorted couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old-timers with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents—everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we all have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teen-agers.”

Will shook his head. “Making twenty families grow where only one grew before.”

“But what grew before was
your
kind of family. The twenty
are all our kind.” As though reading instructions from a cookery book, “Take one sexually inept wage slave,” she went on, “one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice.
Our
recipe is rather different: Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection.”

“And what comes out of your open pan?” he asked.

“An entirely different kind of family. Not exclusive, like your families, and not predestined, not compulsory. An inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary family. Twenty pairs of fathers and mothers, eight or nine ex-fathers and ex-mothers, and forty or fifty assorted children of all ages.”

“Do people stay in the same adoption club all their lives?”

“Of course not. Grown-up children don’t adopt their own parents or their own brothers and sisters. They go out and adopt another set of elders, a different group of peers and juniors. And the members of the new club adopt them and, in due course, their children. Hybridization of microcultures—that’s what our sociologists call the process. It’s as beneficial, on its own level, as the hybridization of different strains of maize or chickens. Healthier relationships in more responsible groups, wider sympathies and deeper understandings. And the sympathies and understandings are for everyone in the MAC from babies to centenarians.”

“Centenarians? What’s your expectation of life?”

“A year or two more than yours,” she answered. “Ten percent of us are over sixty-five. The old get pensions, if they can’t earn. But obviously pensions aren’t enough. They need something useful and challenging to do; they need people they can care for and be loved by in return. The MAC’s fulfill those needs.”

“It all sounds,” said Will, “suspiciously like the propaganda for one of the new Chinese communes.”

“Nothing,” she assured him, “could be less like a commune than an MAC. An MAC isn’t run by the government, it’s run by its members. And we’re not militaristic. We’re not interested in turning out good party members; we’re only interested in turning out good human beings. We don’t inculcate dogmas. And finally we don’t take the children away from their parents; on the contrary, we give the children additional parents and the parents additional children. That means that even in the nursery we enjoy a certain degree of freedom; and our freedom increases as we grow older and can deal with a wider range of experience and take on greater responsibilities. Whereas in China there’s no freedom at all. The children are handed over to official baby-tamers, whose business it is to turn them into obedient servants of the State. Things are a great deal better in your part of the world—better, but still quite bad enough. You escape the state-appointed baby-tamers; but your society condemns you to pass your childhood in an exclusive family, with only a single set of siblings and parents. They’re foisted on you by hereditary predestination. You can’t get rid of them, can’t take a holiday from them, can’t go to anyone else for a change of moral or psychological air. It’s freedom, if you like—but freedom in a telephone booth.”

“Locked in,” Will elaborated, “(and I’m thinking now of myself) with a sneering bully, a Christian martyr, and a little girl who’d been frightened by the bully and blackmailed by the martyr’s appeal to her better feelings into a state of quivering imbecility. That was the home from which, until I was fourteen and my aunt Mary came to live next door, I never escaped.”

“And your unfortunate parents never escaped from
you
.”

“That’s not quite true. My father used to escape into brandy and my mother into High Anglicanism. I had to serve out my
sentence without the slightest mitigation. Fourteen years of family servitude. How I envy you! Free as a bird!”