Round the Bend (37 page)

I sent my passengers into the Bali Hotel in the K.L.M. car, and set to work with the pilots and the engineers to get the aircraft serviced and the load ready to tranship to the Dakota when it came. It turned up just before dusk and taxied in, and as we were all there and working we changed loads that night. It was most of it light stuff that could be carried over from one aircraft to the other, all except one motor generator set that the Dakota had brought for us to take back to Diento; this weighed over a ton and we had to rig the sheer legs for it. It was nine o’clock by the time we could leave for the Bali Hotel, and Connie and Phinit were still working on the engines of the Tramp when we went.

They were there when we got out to the airstrip next morning at about half past seven. Connie said that they had finished about one o’clock and had slept for a few hours on charpoys in the hangar; they had the engines running and the machines all ready to go when we got there, so they had probably been working again at dawn. The crews and passengers got into their respective aircraft and made ready with the usual deliberation; then the machines taxied out and down the strip together. The Dakota took off first and headed straight out from the strip towards the east. The Tramp followed and climbed straight ahead till it was at about five hundred feet, slowly raising flaps; then it turned in a wide circle and flew past north of us, climbing, and set a course to the northwest for Sourabaya and vanished up the coast.

Connie, Phinit, and I were left upon the ground, tired, they with a night’s work and I with four days’ flying. Connie said, “Where are you going to stay? Will you stay in Den Pasar or come with us?”

“I’d like to come and stay in Pekendang, if that can be arranged,” I said. “Would they mind having a European in the village?”

“Not a bit,” he said. “I thought you might want to come there, for a day or two anyway. I’ve fixed up a room for you to yourself, and a bed, and a mosquito net. But it’s all a bit primitive, you know.”

I nodded. “If I get fed up with it I’ll go back to the Bali Hotel. But I don’t suppose I shall.”

“They’ve got very interesting techniques of wood carving,” he said. “There’s quite a bit to see.”

I had brought my bag with me to the aerodrome, and he sent one of the Balinese labourers to get it; we locked the workshop and closed the hangar doors, and started off walking across the airstrip towards the village. We went slowly because the sun was getting up and the heat increasing, but when we got off the aerodrome the track led through scrub and palm trees, and it was shady and cool and pleasant. After about half an hour we came to the walled family enclosures that made up the village, and turned into the one that I remembered, and into the internal square with the shrines round it.

Connie and Phinit, I found, now lived separately. Connie was alone in the one-roomed atap house that I remembered, but Phinit had moved out and had gone to live with one of the families of the village, the family of the girl Ktut Suriatni who looked after him. He was, in fact, living happily and openly in wedded bliss. Connie was living alone. He had got another single-roomed house for me a few yards away and he took me there; a little place with a thatch roof and atap walls, the floor raised about three feet off the ground. There was no door, and not much privacy except what would be provided by the darkness when night fell.

“People will come in and have a look at all your things,” he said. “They won’t take anything.”

A girl came up as he was showing me the little house, Madé Jasmi, that I remembered from my previous visit. She had her long black hair gathered behind her head and hanging down her back; she wore a little cotton jacket which represented her best clothes in deference to me because I was a stranger, open down the front for coolness. I smiled at her in recognition and she smiled at me, and then she asked a question of Connie.

“She wants to know if we want food,” he said. “I’d like to rest this afternoon, if you don’t mind. I was up most of the night. Shall we eat something now?”

I said that that would suit me. “What do you eat here?”

“Rice,” he said. “Always rice. Usually with something curried on top—dried fish or meat. They eat a good many vegetables, and a certain amount of fruit. I leave it all to Madé here, and she feeds me very well.” He spoke to her and she smiled shyly, and went away.

She brought us food to Connie’s house presently; he had a table and two rickety chairs. She brought two wooden bowls filled with rice, and two spoons, and a number of broad leaves upon a tray each with a small portion of curry or dried fish upon it. “I’m teaching her Western ways,” he said. “The people here eat everything off leaves so there’s no washing up. I told her that I had to have a bowl and a spoon, and you’d want one, too.” He had two glasses, and Madé brought water in an earthenware jug with a curious long spout. “If you’re a Balinese you can drink out of that by pouring it into your mouth. Very hygienic. I can’t do it without choking, though.”

“It looks as if you make quite an unreasonable amount of work for her,” I said.

“I don’t think she minds that,” he said. “She wants to learn how people do things in the West.”

The girl settled down upon the edge of the small balcony or floor before the hut, and watched us while we ate. The food was good, well cooked and appetizing. As we ate, Connie asked me how Tai Foong was settling down into the job at Bahrein, and I told him about that, and about the new Liaison Officer, and how the work had been going generally. He was interested in the proposal of the R.A.F. to build on to the hangar. “It would be better if they didn’t build just there,” he said. “It’s not very important, though. It’s only sentiment, because I took our people there to pray after work, and then the others from the souk got into the habit. But that could very easily be changed. If the R.A.F. really need that bit of land, let me come back there for a week, and I’ll see that they start praying somewhere else.”

“It’s not necessary,” I said. “There’s all the land in the world there. The R.A.F. can put their hangar on the north side of the long strip. They’ve got to have a civil aviation hangar, anyway.”

“If it’s going to make any trouble,” he said, “we can easily put it right.”

He spoke to the girl, and she smiled, and got up and went away. “I asked her to get fruit,” he said. “They’ve got some quite good things like grapefruit here.”

“You’ve learned the language very quickly,” I remarked.

“I never have much difficulty with that,” he replied. “I was brought up to speak Canton in Penang when I was a boy, and I speak Malay, of course. These languages are all very much the same.”

The girl came back with a wooden bowl full of fruit and put it on the table, and went back and sat on the edge of the floor again. “Phinit eats in his own place, I suppose,” I said.

He nodded. “He’s gone to live with the other girl’s family just over there.” He smiled. “Quite a married man.”

“That’s all right, is it?” I asked.

He said, “I think so. Madé here tells me that it’s a very good idea.” The girl, hearing her name spoken, looked up and smiled. “But I’m afraid she’s got an axe to grind.”

I didn’t follow that one up, and presently I got up and went to my own hut, and dropped off my two garments, and blew up the air pillow that I carry on these journeys, and lay down on the charpoy. From where I lay I could see out into the brilliant sunlight across to Connie’s hut; he also had gone to bed, and the girl had carried away the remnants of our meal. I lay dozing before sleep while the sweat slowly ceased to run, and presently she came back with a flat basket of palm leaves, and sat down on the corner of his hut in her usual position, and began doing something with her hands. Later I found that she was making lamaks, woven panels of dark green and yellow palm leaves in a chequer design, and stylized artificial flowers of the same craft, for offerings at the shrines of the house temple. I fell asleep and slept for about an hour in the heat of the day. When I woke up she was still sitting there making her offerings, waiting, perhaps, to be ready to fetch Connie anything he wanted when he woke.

I got up presently and put on my khaki drill trousers and bush shirt, and a pair of sandals, and went to the entrance of my little house. Madé saw me and got up, and moved softly into the room
behind where Connie was asleep. I crossed over to where she had been sitting to look at her basket and examine what she had been doing; she had been using a crude knife of hoop iron to split the fronds of the green leaves, and her basket was half-full of her offerings. She came out of the room, and she was carrying her earthenware pitcher of water and a glass, and she poured out the cool water for me. It was no good trying to talk to her, so I smiled at her and took it from her, and drank, and she smiled gravely in return, and put the pitcher back in the shade and the draught.

She offered me the bowl of fruit, but I refused that and strolled slowly through the village. There was a girl weaving at a loom, and a young man roasting a pig upon a spit over a wood fire, and a very old man carving an elaborate wooden sculpture of a girl dancer, a very advanced and refined piece of artistry, or so it seemed to me. I stood and watched all these for a time, and then I went out into the road and down towards the sea. Two or three children followed me at a safe distance, quiet and a little timid, watching everything I did.

There were fishing boats on the beach, and a few children bathing. The boats were beamy, well-built vessels with one big lateen sail; there was a lighter type also, a sort of dug-out canoe stabilized with an outrigger formed of a large bamboo log. I sat in the shade of the trees at the head of the beach for a time watching the boats come in and go out; women were washing and gutting the fish near by and salting them, and spreading them out to dry in the hot sun. Both men and women on this job were less crude in their manner than fishermen and herring girls in other countries; it seemed to me that they must make their living more easily, permitting greater attention to the arts and graces of their lives.

I left the beach presently, and went back into the village in the late afternoon. There was a temple there, an enclosure of brick walls with facings of a soft white limestone, most elaborately carved with fruits and gods and gargoyles. Inside there were a number of platforms with thatched roofs, and a number of shrines, but the shrines were all empty and unattended, and the whole place was swept and clean and empty. I learned later
that there was a festival there three or four times a year, when the whole countryside came to make offerings and pray, but at other times it stood empty and unused, the daily worship taking place at the shrines in each house.

I came out of the temple and looked around. There was another one a short distance away, and here I was brought up with a round turn at a statue before the door. It was a stone figure, more than life-size, of a hideous old woman, perhaps a witch. She had huge, pendulous breasts, and the face of an animal; her body appeared to be covered in hair. In the talons of her hands she held a baby, and she was about to eat it.

The children were still following me. I stopped and stared at this monstrosity, and they gathered around me. One little girl went and patted the stone figure and said, “Rangda.” Whatever the thing was, it didn’t seem to worry them a bit.

I left the enigma, and found my way back to my own place. Connie was up and sitting at the entrance to his house in a deck chair; Madé Jasmi was still sitting at the corner of his house weaving her offerings. He said something to her and got up to meet me, and she came back in a minute with another deck chair and I sat down beside him.

I told him where I had been and what I had seen, and I asked him about the hideous statue outside the temple. He laughed. “Oh, that’s Rangda,” he said. “That’s the Death temple, where they do cremations. Rangda symbolizes death, and evil—all the bad things of this world. To make it perfectly clear, she’s usually shown eating a baby.”

“Well,” I said. “That doesn’t seem to leave much doubt.”

He smiled. “No. The opposite to Rangda is the force of Good, or Life. He’s the Barong. The Barong’s an animal that’s a cross between a lion and a bull, very fierce. At one season of the year mummers go round every village and act a sort of play. They have a pantomime Barong with two men in it, and this has to fight a pantomime Rangda. It goes on for hours. I’m not sure who wins, but everybody gets very excited about it, specially the children.”

“Is all this Hinduism?” I asked uncertainly.

He shook his head. “It’s something much older—animism, I think you’d call it. It’s not got much to do with the daily worship,
although, of course, it all gets a bit mixed up. What Madé here is making”—she looked up at the mention of her name, and smiled—“is offerings for the shrines here in the house. Those are for the Hindu gods in the shrines. The one in the big shrine in the corner is the kingpin—that’s Surya, the sun god. Then there’s Brahma, and Vishnu, and Shiva, and Ganesh, and half a dozen others. Madé doesn’t know them all. The only ones she knows are Surya and Shiva. She picked Shiva when she was a little girl, because the shrine was the fourth from the left and she liked that one best. Perhaps she was four years old. She’s always said her prayers to Shiva ever since. She asked the pemangkoe once—he’s the local priest—she asked him who lived in that one and he told her Shiva, so she says her prayers and makes her offerings to Shiva.”

I asked, “Is there an image in the shrine? I didn’t see one.”

He smiled. “No image. Shiva likes to come down and live in a bit of quartz. She got the pemangkoe to show it to me the other day. He keeps it in a sort of cupboard with a lot of other bits of things—a piece of coral, a bit of lava, a bit of carved ivory, one for each god. Shiva’s spiritual home is this bit of quartz. On holy days the priest takes them out and puts each in its own shrine, and then the god comes down and takes possession of it. The soul of the god, that is. She works for days before that holy day to make offerings that will please the god. Not only palm lamaks like these—she’ll kill a duck and roast it and dress it up nicely as a cold roast duck, with little sweet rice cakes all round. She mustn’t smell it, if she can avoid it, because that takes the essence of it, that’s reserved for the god.” He paused. “When the great day comes she takes her offering and lays it down before the shrine, roast duck and all, and kneels down to say her prayers. The priest comes along and sprinkles it and her with holy water while she prays. And the soul of the god comes down out of the shrine while she is praying, and he takes the soul of the roast duck, and the soul of the rice cakes, and the soul of the lamaks. She stays there praying for an hour or more than that, and she feels good after it, so she knows that the god is pleased with her. Shiva doesn’t want what’s left of the roast duck and the rice cakes; he’s taken their soul, and so only the husks,
so to speak, are left. She can have those, and so she picks them up when she’s done praying and takes them away to eat, and has a feast with her friends. I got a bit of Shiva’s offering for supper the day before yesterday.”