The Hidden Force (6 page)

“Off we go then,” said Eva. A new resource for the social life of Labuwangi. “And no cheating…”

“As friends, we’ll give each other our word of honour… that we won’t cheat.”

“Agreed,” they all said.

The doctor sniggered. Eldersma shrugged his shoulders. A boy brought a side table. They sat around the wooden table and some placed their fingers on it light-heartedly, looking at each other with curiosity and suspicion. Mrs Rantzow was solemn, Ida sombre, Eva amused, Van Helderen laughing indifferently. Suddenly Ida’s lovely Eurasian face tautened.

The table trembled…

They looked at each other in alarm, and the doctor sniggered.

Then slowly the table raised one of its three legs, and carefully set it down again.

“Did anyone move?” asked Eva.

They all shook their heads. Ida had gone pale.

“I can feel vibrations in my fingers,” she murmured.

The table once again raised its leg, and creakily described an angry quarter turn on the marble floor, setting the leg down again with a violent thud.

They looked at each other in bewilderment.

Ida sat staring blankly ahead, with outspread fingers, ecstatic.

And the table, for the third time, raised its leg.

I
T WAS CERTAINLY VERY STRANGE.

For a moment Eva was unsure whether Mrs Rantzow was lifting the table, but when she looked quizzically at the doctor’s wife, Mrs Rantzow shook her head and Eva could see she was acting in good faith. Once more they promised each other that they would be scrupulously honest… And, very oddly, once they were absolutely sure of each other, the table went on describing angrily grating semicircles and raising its leg and tapping on the marble floor.

“Is there a spirit revealing itself?” asked Mrs Rantzow, looking at the table leg.

The table tapped once: yes.

But when the spirit tried to spell its name, tapping the letters alphabetically, what came out was: “Z, X, R, S, A”, which was incomprehensible.

But all of a sudden the table started spelling out a name, as if being pursued… They counted the taps, and what came out was:

“Le…onie Ou…dijck?…”

“What about Mrs Van Oudijck?”

A vulgar word followed.

The ladies were alarmed, except for Ida, who sat as if in a trance.

“Did the table speak? What did it say? What is Mrs Van Oudijck?” people clamoured all at once.

“It’s unbelievable,” muttered Eva. “Are none of us cheating?”

Everyone swore they were playing fair.

“Let’s be absolutely honest, otherwise it’s no fun… I really wish I could be sure…”

That was what they all wished: Mrs Rantzow, Ida, Van Helderen, Eva. The others looked on eagerly, believing what they heard, though the doctor was sceptical and went on sniggering.

The table grated angrily and tapped, and the leg repeated:

“A…”

And the leg repeated the dirty word.

“Why?” asked Mrs Rantzow.

The table tapped.

“Write it down, Onno!” said Eva to her husband.

Eldersma found a pencil and paper and took down the messages.

Three names were given: a member of the Council of the Indies, a departmental head and a young businessman.

“In the Indies, when people are not gossiping, the tables are doing it for them!” said Eva.

“The spirits…” murmured Ida.

“Such phenomena are usually mocking spirits,” lectured Mrs Rantzow.

But the table went on tapping…

“Take it down, Onno!” said Eva.

Eldersma went on writing.

“A-d-d-y!” the leg tapped out.

“No!” everyone said at once, vehemently denying the imputation. “The table is mistaken about that! At least young De Luce has never been mentioned in connection with Mrs Van Oudijck.”

“T-h-e-o!” tapped the table, correcting itself.

“Her stepson! How awful! That’s different! That’s common knowledge!” cried the babble of voices in agreement.

“But we know that!” said Mrs Rantzow, focusing on the table leg. “Why don’t you tell us something we don’t know? Come on, table; come on, come on, spirit!”

She addressed the table leg sweetly and cajolingly. People laughed. The table grated.

“Be serious!” warned Mrs Doorn de Bruijn.

The table fell on to Ida’s lap with a thud.

“
Adu
! I don’t believe it,” cried the beautiful Eurasian woman, as if awakening from her trance. “It hit my tummy!…”

They laughed and laughed. The table revolved angrily, and they got up off their chairs, keeping their hands on the side table, and followed its angry waltzing movements.

“Next… year…” the table tapped.

Eldersma wrote it down.

“Terrible… war…”

“Between whom and whom?”

“Europe… and… China.”

“That sounds like a fairy tale,” sniggered Doctor Rantzow.

“La…bu…wangi,” tapped the table.

“What?” they asked.

“Is… a… hole…”

Please say something serious, table” begged Mrs Rantzow sweetly, in her pleasant German matronly tone.

“Dan…ger,” tapped the table.

“Where?”

“Threatens…” the table continued. “Labu…wangi.”

“Danger threatens Labuwangi?”

“Yes!” the table tapped once, angrily.

“What danger?”

“Rebellion…”

“Rebellion? Who is going to rebel?”

“Within two… months… Sunario…”

They listened intently.

But the table suddenly and unexpectedly bumped against Ida’s stomach again.

“
Adu
! I don’t believe it,” cried the young woman.

The table had had enough.

“Tired…” it tapped.

They kept their hands on it.

“Stop it now,” the table tapped.

The doctor, sniggering, put his broad hand on it, as if trying to force it to stop.

“Damned miser!” cursed the table, grating and turning.

“Swine!” it went on.

And a few more dirty words followed, directed at the doctor, as if a street urchin were shouting at him: filthy words without rhyme or reason.

“Who is thinking up those words?” asked Eva indignantly.

Obviously no one was making them up, neither the three ladies nor Van Helderen, always very correct and obviously indignant at the shamelessness of the poltergeist.

“It really is a ghost,” said Ida, ashen-faced.

“I’m stopping,” said Eva nervously and lifted her finger off. “I can’t make head or tail of this nonsense. It may be amusing… but the table isn’t used to decent company.”

“We have a new resource for Labuwangi!” said Eldersma. “No more picnics or balls… but table-turning!”

“We must practice!” said Mrs Doorn de Bruijn.

Eva shrugged her shoulders.

“It’s inexplicable,” she said. “I can only believe that we were all playing fair. It’d not be at all like Van Helderen to suggest such words.”

“Madam,” protested Van Helderen

“We must do it more often,” said Ida. “Look, there’s a pilgrim to Mecca leaving the grounds…”

She pointed to the garden.

“A pilgrim?” asked Eva.

They looked in the garden. There was no sign of anything.

“Oh no,” said Ida. “I thought it was a
haji
… It’s nothing: the moonlight…”

It had got late. They took their leave, laughing and
cheerfully
bewildered, but unable to find an explanation.

“As long as it hasn’t made the ladies nervous!” said the doctor.

No. Relatively speaking they were not nervous. They were more amused, although they didn’t understand.

It was two o’clock in the morning by the time they left. The town was deathly quiet in the velvet shadow of the gardens, the moonlight streaming down.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, when Eldersma had left for his office and Eva was wandering through her house on domestic duty, dressed in a sarong and a jacket, she saw Frans van Helderen coming through the garden.

“May I?” he called out.

“Of course!” she shouted. “Come in. But I’m on my way to the pantry.”

And she showed him her basket of keys.

“I’m due to see the Commissioner in half an hour, but I’m too early… That’s why I’ve dropped by.”

She smiled.

“But I’m busy, you know!” she said. “Come along with me to the pantry.”

He followed her, wearing a black lustre jacket, since he was about to see the Commissioner.

“How’s Ida?” asked Eva. “Did she sleep well after last night’s seance?”

“So-so,” said Frans van Helderen. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for her to repeat it. She kept waking up with a start, throwing her arms round my neck and asking forgiveness, I’ve no idea what for.”

“It didn’t make me nervous in the least,” said Eva. “Though I can’t make head or tail of it…”

She opened the pantry, called her cook, and arranged the menu with her. The cook suffered from a nervous affliction that caused her, when surprised, to obey any order and imitate whoever spoke to her, and Eva liked to tease the old woman.

“La… la-illa-lala!” she cried.

The cook jumped, repeated the cry, and the next moment came to her senses, begging for forgiveness.

“Throw it down, cook, throw it down!” cried Eva, and the cook, reacting to the suggestion, threw a tray of rambutan and mangosteen fruits on the floor, and instantly came to herself, begging forgiveness, picking up the scattered fruit, shaking her head and clicking her tongue.

“Come with me!” said Eva to Frans. “Or she’ll be breaking my eggs next. Come on, outside with you, cook!”

“Come on, outside!” repeated the cook with the nervous condition. “I beg forgiveness,
nyonya
. Enough, mistress!”

“Come and sit down for a moment,” said Eva.

He followed her.

“You’re so cheerful,” he said.

“Aren’t you?”

“No, I’ve been feeling melancholy recently.”

“So have I. There’s something in the air in Labuwangi. We must pin our hopes on our table-turning.”

They sat down on the back veranda. He sighed.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “I’m fond of you. I love you.”

She was silent for a moment.

“Again,” she said reproachfully.

He didn’t reply.

“I’ve told you, I haven’t got a passionate nature. I’m cold. I love my husband and my child. Let’s be friends, Van Helderen.”

“I try to fight it, but it’s no good.”

“I’m fond of Ida, I wouldn’t want to hurt her for anything in the world.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever loved her.”

“Van Helderen…”

“Perhaps just her pretty face. But however white she may be, she’s a Eurasian, with her whims and childish petty tragedies. I never realized it before, but now I do. I’ve met European women before you. But you’ve been a revelation to me, of everything that is enchanting, gracious and artistic in a woman… Your exoticism complements my own.”

“I value your friendship highly. Let’s keep it like that.”

“Sometimes it’s as if I’m crazy, sometimes I dream… that we’re travelling through Europe as a couple, that we’re in Paris together. Sometimes I see us together in a private room by the fire, you talking about art and me about contemporary social issues. But then I see us in a more intimate situation.”

“Van Helderen…”

“It doesn’t matter if you warn me off. I love you, Eva, Eva…”

“I don’t think there’s any country on earth where so many people are in love as in the Indies. It must be the heat…”

“Don’t crush me with your sarcasm. No woman has ever appealed to me so completely, body and soul, as you, Eva…”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Don’t be angry, Van Helderen, but I can’t
stand
those clichés. Let’s be sensible. I have a charming husband, and you have a sweet wife. We’re all good friends and have fun together.

“You’re so cool.”

“I don’t want to spoil our happy friendship.”

“Friendship!”

“Friendship. There’s nothing I value as much apart from my domestic happiness. I couldn’t live without friends. After happiness with my husband and my child, the first thing I need is friends.”

“To admire you, and for you to dominate,” he said angrily.

She looked at him.

“Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps I need to be admired and to dominate. We all have our weaknesses.”

“I have mine,” he said bitterly.

“Come on,” she said in a warmer tone. “Let’s stay friends.”

“I’m deeply unhappy,” he said in a flat voice. “It’s as if I’ve missed out on everything in my life. I’ve never left Java, and I feel a sense of incompleteness because I’ve never seen snow or ice. Snow… for me it stands for a strange, unknown purity. I never even come close to what I long for. When will I see Europe? When will I stop enthusing over
Il Trovatore
and be able to go to Bayreuth? When will I reach you, Eva? I reach out everywhere with my antennae, like a wingless
insect… What does the rest of my life hold for me? With Ida, with three children, who I know will grow up to be just like their mother. I’ll work as a controller for years, and then—perhaps—become an assistant commissioner… and rise no further. And then finally I’ll leave the service, retire or be retired, and move to Sukabumi and vegetate on a small pension. Everything in me seems to long for a life of idleness.”

“But you love your work, and you’re a good official. Eldersma always says: anyone in the Indies who doesn’t work and doesn’t like his work is lost…”

“You haven’t got a nature for love, and I haven’t got one for work, for nothing but work. I can work for a purpose, which I can see before me in all its beauty, but I can’t work… for the sake of work and to fill the emptiness in my life.”

“Your purpose is the Indies.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Fine words,” he said. “That may be true of someone like the Commissioner, whose career is going smoothly, who has never sat and pored over the Colonial List and speculated about so-and-so’s illness and so-and-so’s death… in the hope of promotion. For someone like Van Oudijck, who really believes, in all his idealistic honesty, that the Indies are his purpose, not for Holland but for the Indies themselves, for the Javanese, whom he as an administrator protects from the tyranny of landlords and planters. I’m more cynically inclined…”

“But don’t be so lukewarm about the Indies. It isn’t just fine words: that’s what I feel. The Indies are where the true
greatness of us Dutch lies. Listen to foreigners talk about the Indies, and they are all enraptured by its glories and about our way of colonizing… Don’t associate yourself with that wretched spirit you find in Holland, which knows nothing about the Indies and always has a sarcastic word for them in its petty, stiff, bourgeois narrow-mindedness…”

“I didn’t realize you were such a fan of the Indies. Just
yesterday
you felt anxious here, and I defended my country…”

“Oh, I feel a shudder in the mysteriousness of the evenings, when some imminent danger—I don’t know what—seems to threaten: a frightening future, a danger to us… I feel that I personally remain far removed from the Indies, though I don’t wish to be… that here I miss the art I was brought up with, that here I’m without that line of beauty in people’s lives, which my parents always drew my attention to… But I’m not unjust. The Indies as our colony I find great; us, in our colony, I find great…”

“In the past perhaps, but now everything is going wrong, now we are no longer great. You have an artistic nature; despite the fact that you seldom find it, you always look for the artistic line in the Indies. Then that great, glorious image comes to your mind. That is the poetry. The prose is a huge, but exhausted colony, still ruled from Holland with one idea in mind: profit. The reality is not that the rulers are great in the Indies, but that the rulers are petty-minded exploiters. The country is being sucked dry, and the real population—not the Dutch, who spend their money from the Indies in The Hague, but the native population, attached to the soil of the
Indies—are being oppressed by a disdainful overlord, who once helped create that population from his own blood. Now they are threatening to rise up against that oppression and that contempt. You, being an artist, feel the danger
approaching
, vaguely, like a cloud in the air, in the tropical night. I see a very real danger arising—for Holland—if not from America and Japan, then from the soil of this land itself.”

She smiled.

“I like it when you talk like that,” she said. “You might convince me in the long run.”

“If only I could achieve that much with words!” he laughed bitterly as he got up. “My half hour is up: the Commissioner is expecting me and he doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Goodbye, forgive me.”

“Tell me, am I a flirt?”

“No,” he replied. “You are as you are. And I can’t help loving you… I keep extending my antennae. That’s my fate…”

“I’ll help you to forget me,” she said, with warm conviction.

He laughed briefly and took his leave. She saw him crossing the road to the Commissioner’s compound, where he was met by an attendant…

“Actually life is one long self-deception, one long wild-goose chase after illusions,” she thought despondently. “A great goal, a universal goal… or a small private goal, for my own body and soul… Oh God, how little it all means! We wander round a bit, without knowing anything, and every one of us is in pursuit of his own little goal, his own fantasy. The only
ones who are happy are the exceptions, such as Léonie van Oudijck, who is no more alive than a beautiful flower, or a beautiful animal.”

Her child toddled towards her, an engaging, fat, blond little boy.

“My baby!” she thought. “What will become of you? What will life bring you? Oh, nothing out of the ordinary perhaps. Perhaps a repeat of what has happened countless times before… Oh, when one feels like this, the Indies are so oppressive!”

She hugged her son and her tears dripped on to his blond curls.

“Van Oudijck has his office of commissioner; I have my little circle of… admiration and domination; Frans has his love… for me… we all have our toys to play with, just as my little Onno plays with his little horse. How little there is to us, how little there is to us!… All through our lives we give ourselves airs, imagine all kinds of things. We are convinced we have a direction and purpose to our poor, lost, little lives. Oh, what’s got into me, darling? And what awaits you, my darling?”