December 1938
My dearest Lis,
It is wretched & tense. They arrested one Dutchman & found a whole bunch of letters (where will my letters end up?) that prove this man is some sort of kingpin supplying boys to men. The Resident of Batavia has been sacked too for no specific reason—they can’t find any evidence—and off he’s gone because he was mentioned in those letters. Is that enough, I wonder. Sentenced by hearsay.
It is strange & chilling when such things happen to people you know. You say people are being arrested all over the place at home for sedition—based on gossip—well, here too. And it is not a situation people like Jane are familiar with—to be powerless, to be questioned, to be watched. To feel as if the government might do anything to you—jail you, take away your possessions. We in India have always lived this way—expecting calamity—what is the colonial government but an agent of calamity in our country, NC used to say. Europeans have never faced that anywhere & here too they are used to being comfortable, rich, free. Now some of them feel a little uncertain. As for me, like all Indians I am used to expecting the worst—this situation tortures me, but it is not new.
They haven’t been able to find anything wrong in Bali so far—except a handful of cases, they say—but all over Batavia, Medan, Surabaya, Semarang, places on other islands—there they have arrested many people, well over 150. They say people are being picked up for questioning, being tortured in jail and it has to do with “Matters of State.” It is too terrifying to contemplate. Once they find out how WS is working with the Balinese against the Dutch government, who knows what will happen to him?
I have a very foggy understanding of politics, dear Lis, as you know—or as NC let everyone know—my wife has no understanding of the country’s political situation whatsoever. QED. One of the reasons I found Brijen a comfort was the absolute cynicism and disregard with which he treated every kind of politics, how he thought all of nationalism was nothing but a way of dividing people. NC tried so hard—sending me off to Mukti Devi to improve myself—I just couldn’t. Partly because it was his world & I did not want to be a part of it. Partly because I simply wasn’t interested in spinning cotton when I wanted to paint.
How it tears its way in by its fingernails—I mean politics—& shreds your life to pieces.
All this time I had been thinking the problem was about men having relations with other men. But the whole thing hinges on age, we have now found out—they are doing everything they can to find proof against W to show he did awful things to little boys. In a way this is reassuring because everyone knows he has never touched a boy. They have found not a shred of evidence.
There are people telling him he should move back to Europe for his own safety, but he asks why. He has lived here for years & made no problems. Besides, he says, draining his last sip of whisky & banging two opening notes on the piano, “I don’t want to go back! I have absolutely not an iota of desire to return to Germany or Europe. Not one atom.” And then he plays Beethoven furiously & paints locked away for the next many days.
Yesterday, in the evening, I heard an impromptu concert. There is a little girl here to whom WS is teaching piano—he sits her on his lap & tells her stories & plays along—this is how the Balinese teach their children music & he follows the same method. He was teaching her a sweet, simple tune by a composer called Pachelbel. On & on they went, again & again over the same set of notes & I could hear them from my hut down the slope. I sat outside & breathing in the evening air & listening to the piano & to the birds & in the river down below two people chattering to each other in words I could not understand & out of the blue I found myself yearning for Brijen, he would have loved the music, the tranquillity. I imagined he was beside me, sitting outside as well, and my present troubles retreated with every note.
How idiotic to feel this way after I’ve left him—when I had the chance to be with him! It would have been so much easier to get Myshkin to Bombay than to Bali. Why didn’t I take a mad chance and run off with Brijen as he kept telling me to? But that would have been the end of my work. Everything new I am learning and doing would never have happened. What a tangle.
You cannot know how grateful I am that you don’t condemn me and that I can still talk to you freely. That was my biggest fear—it tortured me until I got your letter. Every line of it is warm and kind and understanding. Your heart is as big as the ocean.
With my love
Gay
February 1939
My Lis,
I haven’t been able to write back—I am sorry, sorry! Things are so very bad here & I cannot put it all in words—maybe the letter will mysteriously vanish if I do. WS was arrested last month. He is in what they call remand—waiting for a trial. To the end they found it hard to get any witnesses because not one Balinese would speak against him, but they managed to scrape together what they needed through the Regent, I believe, & are teaching two or three witnesses what to say. Ni Wayan says they can’t understand—what has the Tuan done wrong? She simply cannot see. Her mother, the eagle-eyed old one who hides under bushes waiting for pheasants to catch & cook, says these foreign rulers who come to other people’s countries are like poison thrown into a lake, they kill all the plants and all the fish. They leave a trail of waste and destruction.
Someone told me there are big politics at work in WS’s present persecution. Things to do with Japan & America—yes, that must be the real reason. You met him—you know him—can you imagine him ever harming a puppy, far less a child? Nobody who knows him believes any of it for a moment. We know he is innocent. But he can be so far removed from reality, he thought nothing would go wrong and he still thinks it is all a mistake.
WS unsquashable as usual. Dashing off long letters—although letters are censored so all of us have to watch what we say. He thinks prison is a pause for him, to think, recover, work again. He’s translating folk tales to while away the time. He has been allowed a gramophone & his painting materials. The prison guards are all smitten by him—naturally. He wants ping pong balls, he says, & paint . . . he feels new paintings entering him, they will settle & ripen, he says. In jail! It should be a lesson to me. I made excuses for not being able to paint at home in Muntazir & he has no trouble making paintings in a jail cell.
M. Mead says she is going to write out a defense of WS because she thinks he is of a rare artist type by birth. She has a theory that this type of person is at once more as well as less dependent on others—they want warmth & friendship, yet need to preserve themselves—keep their solitude, their personalities intact. I am of the mind that I am this artist type too, ever since I have heard of it!!! She says the Balinese instinctively understand this way of being—of light, even physical contact that is casual & easy, without being too involving. She says WS found freedom to work & affection without demands here—that is all there is to it. It is no crime & she will prove it. This seems to me to be correct—but will the police and the court think so? I cannot imagine Dutch judges gifted with empathy for artist types.
Everyone is trying to help WS. Beryl went back towards England last year—she is in Egypt, or somewhere in that region now, trying to get all sorts of people to rally around so he doesn’t get a ghastly long sentence. Let’s see what happens. Things change so fast from one day to the next now. To tell the truth, I feel my isolation terribly. I know nobody well apart from WS, not really. What if he is in jail for ages? What then? What will I do?
(Are we born selfish, Lis? Why do I think about myself at such a time?)
So often the future seems hidden just around the next loop of the road & you desperately need to be able to see around that loop, but there is no way. The future is there as it always is, it is waiting, it will come, good or bad. I don’t know if I’ll wonder why I ever came here, so far from everything familiar. Who will help me if things go wrong? What was I thinking?
You will say I am turning into a bundle of anxiety. Where is the Gay who used to be gay even on a bad day? Well, I am still that girl in spite of all my heartbreaks and evil deeds! One of the reasons he enjoys having me around, says WS, is that I make him laugh. He would keep asking me to imitate lions and monkeys and birds—I’ve discovered a talent for doing animal calls, people’s voices, I can even do WS. I know many of my worries are just that—worries. I am sure Brijen will come back after he’s got over his huff. Such vanity to think he would end his life for me when he had a dozen lovers scattered over town!
There. The minute I write to you, I feel lighter & can see that my head is full of nonsense & nothing will happen.
I forgot to tell you the news: I sold FIVE paintings before W’s arrest. All at once—three to WS’s European friends who were visiting, and two to the Raja of Karangasem, no less. He says he will put them in his palace for a few years and then in the museum. How grand I felt for a day! And rich!
My love to you. And please kiss Myshkin for me, exactly on top of his head & twice on each cheek. And not a word to him or anyone else about these troubles. He has enough of his own, poor child.
Gay
Dearest Lis,
It is a relief to have your note. I read it many times and have left it where I can see it. I smell it to see if some traces of your smoke and vanilla cling to it still. I feel very alone. In a hut trying to work in lamplight while the rain falls outside. Soon there will be frogs croaking & always the river rushing & gushing. The sound feels like an echo of the turmoil inside me at times, this incessant river. When darkness falls there is a small square where the village men play the gamelan & in front of it women set up candlelit stalls selling all kinds of little things & people gather to play cards, listen to the music. I go there sometimes to sit & chat—if it can be called chatting—smiles & nods, a word or two, goodwill. (Language is a problem. I have picked up words, but too few, I am slow with words.) After some time, when the mosquitoes start to plague me—you know how I get horrible weals from mosquitoes—I leave & walk home although it is pretty there & I like the sense of people around me.
Tjampuhan is quite a distance from the main town. I have to cross the river to reach it & the way is dark & empty. I am not afraid, but I can hear my footfall, my slippers’ flap-flap, & I keep turning my head back because I feel as if I can hear someone walking ten paces behind me, following. I walk fast to reach quicker. The only sound is the wayside dogs barking when they smell me. The trees are as tall as towers & densely packed. Long creepers hang loose from them. They disappear into deep, deep gorges. I feel tiny among those tall trees in the blackness. All along the way I can hear the chimes of the gamelan—sometimes repeating a wrongly played note, going over the same bit again & again.
When the gong sounds, the whole forest seems to go quiet. If there’s a full moon, everything is silver & gold & I sing the song from my childhood to myself—about a sky full of stars & sun—Myshkin used to love that song, it was our song, his and mine. It sounds alien here, in a language nobody else speaks. But it’s my most intimate language still, the words I mumbled when I was half-asleep were always Bengali & so were the songs I used to sing on the roof. That roof was my patch of sky to be myself under—only until the moment I heard NC’s footsteps on the staircase coming up. Then my heart would plummet. Here I am at least free of waiting with dread & gloom for those footsteps on the stairs, footsteps approaching my easel & stopping behind me, not a word said, but still a shout of disapproval. Maybe I exaggerate. Maybe I misunderstood.
If I am lucky, Ni Wayan or her mother walks back with me & they take pity on my solitude & tell me to come to their house & sit on their verandah & eat something with them. They have two oil lamps and that pool of flickering light shuts off the darkness. I feel sheltered for a time there with them, listening to their quick chatter, understanding hardly a word. I am happy eating as they do, sitting on the floor, a big heap of rice on a banana leaf, using my hands as at home, not a spoon. They were taken aback the first time they saw me do this—they had found a bent aluminum spoon from somewhere & kept it beside a plate as if it were a Western table setting. When I ignored the spoon & ate with my hands, Ni Wayan’s mother slapped her thigh with delight. She said something I didn’t understand.
She’s been very loving to me ever since. Whenever I come, she finds fruit or pieces of food to give me. Food is the only way she has of showing me she cares for me. She makes dumplings with pork, she roasts duck meat, she fries fish, she grates coconut and puts it into almost everything. I love her cooking and so I have almost stopped making food for myself. The other day she had fried something crisp & crunchy & handed it to me heaped up in a coconut shell. I ate it—all at once I was sure it must be a fried insect & started to feel almost faint.
Then I told myself firmly, Gayatri, what did your father teach you? When you are in a new country, you must not turn your back on anything. And what is a shrimp or prawn but a big cockroach? So I ate some more of the fried (delicious) thing & asked no questions. And I’m still alive to tell the tale, am I not? But I know I am a coward at heart. If I go to a feast and see the mounds of turtle shells near the men chopping up turtle meat, a shudder goes through me. I just cannot eat turtle, cannot steel myself enough. I know you would have felt nothing but curiosity.
I was always isolated here, neither part of WS’s inner circle of Western friends nor close to the Balinese because of problems of language. Without WS in his cottage next door, it feels worse. It should not, because he had moved away to Iseh these last years & only visited here now & then—but it still felt as if he would turn up any time, and he did. To think he is in prison—a squalid prison cell, all day & all night, counting the hours, wrongly accused. Before they transferred him further away, to Surabaya jail, the gamelan players did the sweetest, bravest thing: two orchestras he had helped went to the jail compound, set up all their instruments & there, outside, they played their latest compositions for him.
When I heard this I had tears in my eyes. You have seen what a free spirit he is—the way he would vanish to those villages when he was in our town. It is as if a magnificent genius of a man was caught in a machine that chewed him up & spat him out. Beryl’s words in Madras come back to me—that they would have to have another war just so he can be sent to another prison camp to learn new languages, new ways of painting. He has written to Margaret to say it is all for the best. Everything is clear & settled inside him, new ideas are appearing, all the energy & youth is back, he says. He’ll return to a new life. He sounds perfectly peaceable about his time in Hotel Wilhelmina (that is what he calls jail, after the Dutch Queen). He is to be released in August.
Take care of yourself, dear Lis, & take care of my beloved Batty father-in-law. Do please try & write more—I pine for news, for your voice, for the smell of home—whatever comes with your brief & infrequent little notes. Is there really a chance Brijen may be alive and well? That is such good news I am almost afraid to believe it. Will you try & send me confirmed news and maybe photographs in your next? You’ve been promising for ages! I may not recognize Myshkin. Maybe he’ll grow a mustache soon!
Much love
Gay.
December 1939
Lis, dearest,
It is frightening to think of the things my father-in-law is doing, still patching up those wounded revolutionaries with a war declared & all of the problems in India. If the British find out? And NC—his articles, his work for the wretched Mukti Devi—what if they both get arrested? Who will take charge of Myshkin then? His new, mad stepmother? I was horrified to hear how she set everything on fire—I don’t mind losing my things, I was never going to see them again, but ghastly for Myshkin to witness it. Oh Lis!
The sole happy part of life at this time is to know of your man. Wonderfully exciting! Jeremy Gordon. I like the sound of his name, Lis, my girl! What’s Aunt Cathy saying now, eh? How lucky he was to be quartered on you, to find you where he had expected nothing but flies and mosquitoes in a foreign country. I devoured every word about him—he sounds just right for you, the blue eyes, the big build (come, come, I know you always loved tall men), the brown hair, the singing voice. And he must be right for you because you have written me a long letter at last! I loved to read how he is teaching Indian soldiers to drive. It makes me smile, your story of how Indians are used to horses so they step on the gas when they sight a ditch. I start grinning each time I think of Jeremy saying, “Ruddy idiots think the car will sail over the ditch if you kick the damn thing.” I remember Arjun making this kind of complaint long ago when they first got their Dodge. (I have never seen a man who flies into rages as Arjun does, never. No wonder Dinu lives in such terror.)
My mind is not here—I am consumed with memories of home suddenly and so long to see you in your new life! I hope you’re dressing up—the dark green silk dress, the navy shoes, please—when you go out with him. I’m trying to picture the new Muntazir you describe—the droves of Tommies, the new bars & restaurants, the jazz music in Hafizabagh (can’t imagine that!!!), the trenches . . . oh, my mind can’t fit it in, I can’t see it, but I worry. Will the war really come so far? I cannot imagine Banno’s sons as sailors on some far-off British ship. Myshkin must be wide-eyed about it all. Does he know about your Jeremy? I have not heard from him for so very long. I long to hold him and smell his baby smell—milk, soap, powder—even though that went ages ago.
I am relieved to hear that it is now confirmed Brijen is alive and has thought it fit to inform you even if not his own family. Is that because he assumes you will send the news on to me? If that is the case, and it is undying love that makes him tell you now, could he not have let you know earlier? Why take more than a year over it? I have no patience with such thoughtless self-indulgence. I am sorry to think I wasted all those sleepless nights worrying about a man so feckless and inconsiderate. It confirms me in my view that I was right to leave him, even if it felt heartless and cold at that time. I shall not waste a minute more mooning about him.
W’s friends are nice enough to me, but without him, the center of gravity is shifted, nothing is the same & I am much on my own. I prefer this loneliness to the one with NC. That was isolation of the most desperate, soul-destroying kind, like being alone in a boat in the middle of the ocean and nothing but water in sight and no oars to take you to safety. This loneliness is temporary, it has to be borne till WS is back and things return to normal.
The evenings feel long, but I am so tired I fall asleep quickly. All day I work like a madwoman. I have no clock on the wall, sometimes when I come out of my hut it is evening & the music has started to chime. More & more I am making things with my hands—then I use them in my painting. Bits of terra-cotta clay I shape & fire (in a very primitive kiln) & then work into a plaster surface on which I am trying to make a fresco with clay parts molded in. I’ve given up watercolor, I do oils, collages. I spent hours just observing other painters here at work—and I have been learning new ways to work. I’ve been going to the museum, and looking at W’s art books—I feel as if I am growing new eyes all over my head. Like a big fat fly!
Did I tell you one of my paintings hangs in the museum now? Would you have thought it possible? I steal in every now and then, I slow down when I reach the room where I know it is and wait and linger over the other paintings that come before and my heartbeat keeps growing faster. “Still Life with Missing Woman,” it says. “By Gayatri Rozario.” It makes me go funny, as if I am puffing up and dissolving in a puddle all at once. Maybe one day Myshkin will be here and see that his mother did something with her life!
These days I spin clay on a wheel to make bowls, it is magic to feel them grow under my fingers. How NC would have gawped to see me sitting legs apart at a primitive wheel alongside the wiry village men in their headbands, with their bare bodies sweating. But they don’t look at women here in the way they do in our country. Here the women are free & easy & self-assured. You should see the way young Ni Wayan Arini puts white gardenias in her hair & sways off to the market in her yellow & red sarong, pausing every few minutes to exchange news with passersby. No woman can loaf & lounge on the street in our part of the world, can they? People raised their eyebrows at me merely going to visit you every day or at Brijen popping across to see me. Who knows what Dinu’s mother thought we got up to? She never stepped outside her home except to visit her relatives in a car.
I wish I could do what we did in those days, just sit with you on your sofa & talk, knowing you understand. What I do long for is close friends. It was different when Beryl was here. Who can explain how I found so much in common with that learned Englishwoman years older than me? She has such plans: she told me before she left (I suppose in order to comfort me as you might a child) that she would be back in India and Bali before too long.
I wish she had stayed here some more months now. Why do we have so little time with those we come to love late in life? Although she was often acerbic, even forbidding, under all that there was warmth & a sharp mind—& a funny one. Once we were talking about different kinds of friendships & marriages & she told me she had been married once, to a man call Basil & she & he decided they would go without sex. (I blushed at how calmly she said the word. We are so prudishly brought up, I don’t think I’ve ever said “S-E-X” in my life. I have said it now. Sex.) Well, they decided not to—because it was so coarse. They gave up drinking liquor & eating meat too. A very elevated life based on platonic love was planned. Poor deluded Beryl! She found one day that her husband had abandoned vegetables for steaks, milk for beer, & platonism for carnal love with another woman. She tried to be calm about it, she said & uncaring, but then one day left him. Good thing, she said, or she may never have made her way to Arthur. Arthur has other women, she has hinted—she knows he is with them when she is on her travels. She calls them his other continents. She hasn’t told me if she & Arthur are platonic or not—I don’t know if that’s the thing driving him off to seek out Other Continents. She seems hurt about his other women—yet has made some arrangement with her own mind & heart about it.
Is this how we live as we grow older, Lis? Our minds & bodies changing shape to make room?
My body’s changing shape all right—I am an old crone, thin as a stick & skin gone all patchy & muddy. I keep getting bouts of fever & have to have quinine—it’s malaria, I’ve been told. Never had it at home, I suppose because of the good Dr. Rozario’s precautions.
Write to me, Lis. Tell me about Jeremy. Do you call him Jem or Jimmy? How many children will you have? A whole brood, I hope, to be Myshkin’s little cousins. I hope you will not try Beryl’s experiments at platonism.
As for me . . . that part of my life is gone. It’s gone forever & I feel no emptiness about it, I tell myself it is a relief. I don’t mourn Brijen anymore, not even in moments of sentimental gloom. It is as if I can see my past self from far away, as alien as a woman on a film screen, and I’m observing the screen-woman’s romantic oozing, nonplussed that she could be so deluded.
But I will not think of that. I will not think of love or the police or the dangers. I will not think of armies in far-off lands. All this will pass. I will not pine & worry about all of you. I will only think of you & Jeremy & wedding bells. Come here for your honeymoon! I will make you a canopy of blue lotus & a bed as big as a tennis court covered with the finest white cotton & serve you sweet oranges & whole roasted ducklings at dinner. WS will be here by then—he is out of jail, is spending some months in Java—he will play you a wedding march, we will have a temple dance & a feast, you will be dressed in gold & brocade, so beautiful that Jeremy will fall in a faint. You’ll revive him with a kiss.
With much love,
Yours ever,
Gay
4th March 1940
Dearest Lis,
How are you? It is very long since a letter came from you. Is the postbox swallowing them up? When I was a child I used to think of those red pillar boxes as monsters with an open maw. A little bit of me believes that still. Where do letters go when we drop them in there, how do they ever make their way anywhere—so many trains & ships & roads before they cross the distance from Muntazir to Tjampuhan. I come back from the hut where I work in the afternoon, hot & mucky, & go straight to Ni Wayan & when she shakes her head (for she knows what I am asking without a word said) my heart sinks. But I rally & say, maybe tomorrow. My father died early but he left me this part of himself: an undousable fire that lights me up inside & tells me things will get better, the clouds will lift. There will be a letter from you tomorrow or the day after that & maybe the day after that you will be here in flesh & blood, sitting with Jeremy, smoking your long cigarette, holding up your new silk sarong to show it to me while Myshkin goes down to our river to meet Sampih in person at last. (Did I ever tell you about Sampih? He once saved Colin from drowning—he is a fine dancer, WS’s protégé.)
How often Myshkin wrote to me about Sampih when he did write. There are few letters from him now. I had felt—hoped—that this drifting apart would not happen, or I would get him here before it did. I’ve been a failure, not selling nearly as much as I need to—not saving enough.
Ni Wayan fusses over me now that I don’t feel up to cooking, but I am not hungry. Though I long for a samosa! I woke up yesterday with the scent of Nanduram’s hot samosas in my nose—it was inexplicable. I must have been dreaming of them. Did I eat them in my dream, I wonder. I do hope so. The only thing I feel like eating is fruit. I eat mangosteens—they are sweet and sour, and these I can still taste.
WS came back quite some time ago & spent ages cleaning his garden. He came with ferns & water lilies & many other plants & since then has been wrapped up in digging a new pond for them—it is now ready—stone bound, very simple. I had not thought the place could be improved, but this pond brings serenity, the light shines on it & changes color all day. I sit by it in the evening with a glass of tea & watch everyone come & go about their jobs. There is again a low, happy hum of normality. A cataclysm came—but it has gone & life is settled again. In another of the verandahs, the old woman—Ni Wayan’s mother—is stretched out dozing and the mound of her tummy rises and falls gently. Near me one of the boys who hangs around here is polishing his kris—it is an ornamental dagger they carry. I will bring you a miniature version some day, to slit open your letters with.
Across the gorge, WS is creeping about, stalking dragonflies with a net in his hands. He is thinner but full of energy. He passionately collects these dragonflies & paints them—fragile, detailed paintings—who could have said an insect might be so elegant? He sends the pictures off to an insect specialist in Java. (A man called Gustav who came here a few times and was flatteringly taken with me, called me a great beauty etc. etc. If you saw what a haggard old stick I am! I am snorting with laughter as I write this.) WS has been running around seeing everyone on the island, there is great rejoicing that he is free & back & a general feeling that a great injustice was done to him.
All is peaceful, it is true—but I feel a shadow over us. The government is doing petty things to stop WS getting work. Why? He is unhappy about it, he complains bitterly. But everyone advises him to be quiet, keep his head down, provoke nobody & just paint. Perhaps that is how all of us have to become in this changed world. Invisible. Silent. Scurrying around in the dark under our separate rocks.
Don’t you abandon me too. Myshkin’s vanishing is bad enough. Write me many, many pages, at least twelve! Covered on both sides.
With much love,
Yours ever,
Gay
25th May 1940
Dearest Lis,
The news is grim. WS has been taken away to prison again—this time it was totally without warning. It is to an internment camp. This is because Germany & Holland are now at war. I do recall you telling me in a letter right at the start of the war that the British were locking away all the Germans in India. I suppose when countries are at war, our lives are not our own anymore even if the war is a million miles away.
How long will this internment be for? We don’t know. Since they have scholars, planters, artists—all sorts of people among that 3000, we expect they’ll check identities & set the harmless ones free to go back to their lives. After all, everything cannot be stopped, can it, just because there’s a war on an entirely different continent? Germans like WS who left Germany years ago, partly out of disgust with the Nazis—what irony to imprison him. (And as for the Jews they are imprisoning here because they are German by nationality, no irony could be greater.)
The local people wonder why WS did not have the sense to change his passport years ago, since he had no intention of going back to Europe. But I suppose he had thought it wasn’t important. Who does? I am lucky to be Indian—the British & Dutch are allies so I am not in an internment camp & not likely to be. I’m safe, I suppose. The German women and children are in separate camps so families are all broken up.
Pugig, who is Ni Wayan’s cousin, works for the Grand Hotel in a place in Java called Lembang. He told us he was on the roadside when Dutch soldiers pulled over Bruno Treipl. Bruno T’s family owns the hotel & they are local grandees. He says the soldiers made Treipl crawl on his hands & knees all the way to the prison van & that they spat at him while he was down on the road. Oh, Lis, I fear that WS will have a harder time of it now, if for no other reason than numbers—there are just too many people in those camps, people turn into things when there are too many in one place.
I am too troubled to write more. I don’t know what is going to happen to me. When will we go back to normal life?
All my love,
Gay
10th October 1940
Dearest Lis,
All on my own! That is my only excuse for not writing for months, I was so busy talking to myself I forgot to talk to anyone else. Don’t be angry, I am sorry! You know how it is—I hate being a moaner, yet all I was doing was moaning. (To myself, in tiny whispers, all day and all night.)
Now I have apprenticed myself to a toothless old potter called Nyoman Sugriwa and it gives me something real to write to you about. He has a face as weathered as old wood & he sits in a loincloth & spins the wheel. I sweat rivers in the heat, my sari tucked up to my knees, crouched over the wheel trying to still one tiny part of this wobbly, chaotic world. We need no words, he shows me things with gestures & we smile a lot & nod or shake heads.
I am trying to view this as time for myself to learn & make—am trying to emulate WS in prison. After all, I am in a beautiful prison too, am I not—no way of leaving. No money. No friends. Even Jane gone. M. Mead, whom I never liked much & would never have asked for help, left ages ago. I think—am determined to think—WS will be back home soon & I want to be here and take care of things so he comes back to a normal world. I know there are people who have been here longer, doing that. But still. Indah, the Kintamani dog—you remember?—she sleeps in my room now that WS is gone. The monkeys. The cockatoo. All of them need care. I can’t abandon them when they are his very life to WS—who has done so much for me.
I am babbling. But I do need to take care of things, you know. The other day a Dutch woman, Mrs. Hueting, came visiting. It’s nonsense to think there is any threat from the Japanese, she announced, the Allies are too many. The Japs (she calls them that) know they’ll be finished if they try out any moves in the Pacific. There’s no danger to the Netherland East Indies—none whatsoever. Her husband has told her. As though that is the conclusive word on the matter. She is a planter’s wife, she said she’d come to see if WS had left any paintings she could take for her drawing room. I ask you! They have coffee & rubber, thousands of acres & live like kings & queens with virtual slave labor. They are brutal to the workers. She has a pudgy face & popcorn eyes & seems very pleased with herself. I disliked her intensely, I wish I had stuck a big drawing pin into her giant buttocks.
Are things at all changed at home because of the war? Are there shortages? I haven’t been hearing from you. Nor from Myshkin. Maybe the post offices no longer work. Maybe our letters are sinking in the sea. I will pray this reaches you. I feel as if the world broke into a hundred pieces last year & scattered us far away from each other.
With love,
Gay
July 1941
My dearest Lis,
I have thought I will number my letters to you so that you know how many you are missing. You accuse me of not writing, but the fact is that for the last few months I have written at least every two months. You must have missed three or four, maybe more! Letters do cost money to send, I have to be mindful of that too. Mine invariably tip over into the number of grams that takes them to the costliest level, though I try to keep them within 25 cents because I write to both you & to Myshkin . . . I sound such a miser, but am earning hardly anything now, I am down to selling what little jewelry my mother gave me & it makes me very angry to think all that effort & money & my words & thoughts are floating in the murky depths of the Indian Ocean along with sundry other wrecks. It is not fair.
I am rather crochety, have not been feeling well. Keep getting fevers, can hardly keep food down. Still am trying to work. Sugriwa is teaching me how to weave cane into pots. My fingers are cut all over, but I persist. I am tired, tired, tired. I finished one bowl yesterday, woven with cane, & Sugriwa approved, gave me a Western thumbs-up! I live in splendid isolation. People have been advising me to leave, but even speaking hypothetically, where will I go? My mother is not going to garland me with roses for coming back & NC won’t let me in through the door. Where will I live? What will I do? How will I earn? Here I was earning—until WS was locked away.
I am going to stay. I will be found here one day, the mad old woman from India, surrounded by her paintings & misshapen earthen bowls. I am not going to leave, why should I? How will I take my years of work? I’m not going to just abandon it—I’ve done good work, Lis. When I feel doubtful I think of my painting in the museum, and the two others in the Raja’s collection and all the others that people have bought. My work will come to something again once this madness is over. Or else I will be found as in those old graves of the Egyptians, buried with the things that were precious to them. If I die here, that is how they will find my body. You know, they don’t cremate the dead immediately here, they wait for an auspicious day and meanwhile leave the body mummified. Maybe I’ll tell them to leave me embalmed for you to find some day!
Such ghoulish thoughts.
WS is not back & nobody knows when he will come. A Dutch soldier who had once come to Tjampuhan as a guest wrote to someone to say he glimpsed WS across the barbed wire in the internment camp on his watch a few days ago. WS scrawny & thin, start of beard. Their eyes met, only briefly, then WS started rolling a cigarette, he said. A tormenting thought—W caged up like an animal behind barbed wire.
He has sent a few postcards from the camp. It is badly overcrowded, serried ranks of cots, clothes festooned on ropes overhead, not a minute’s solitude. Clouds of mosquitoes. He is trying to keep up his spirits, even paint, but the last letter did sound downcast. A portrait he was painting had failed, he said, he had lost at ping pong, he has no more butter, his last Russian novel has been read through! He tried to make his misery sound funny—absurdly pathetic—but it makes me sad. I am not allowed to send anything there now. And am not allowed to visit. Nobody is.
There is another German family in Java—young parents, two infant children, and I hear the mother has died in the camp and the children are alone there. The father in a camp for men only. The Germans are putting the Jews through far worse brutality, I know—but does one brutality even out another? Is all of human history nothing but an endless cycle of revenge carried out on the innocent? And we are caught in this ghastly machine, our lives being crushed out of us. It makes me think of the film we saw—was it at Grace or Delite—a matinee, remember, so that Nek wouldn’t be annoyed? The one where a woman was being pressed to death under boulders. It has never left me—the savage glee of the people torturing her to death.
Yesterday I wasn’t feeling well again—well, what is new about that, you will say. I went to Nyoman Sugriwa as usual because it was worse to be sitting alone at home doing nothing. I tried to work on the wheel, but my hand would not be steady, my body was out of tune with the clay & I ached and gritted my teeth & pounded more & more clay into balls, tearful, getting furious with myself for not being able to control one little ball of clay while Sugriwa kept saying things to me I could not understand—he was probably telling me not to waste my time & his clay & go home. Nothing in my life is in control any longer. Nothing. Finally he got up & stomped off outside. I could see him puffing away. The scent of his clove smoke.
My eyes fell on Indah, who always follows me to Sugriwa’s house. She was lying in one corner of the bamboo shed, dozing through the heat. It is so hot, so blazing hot in the afternoons, it is like being inside a volcano. You cannot imagine the sweat and discomfort, though now I am better able to bear it. (The nights are cooler, there is often a breeze.) Indah raised her head & her brown, calm eyes were on me—one long moment. Then her head fell back on the floor. She is an old dog—she was old when we found her, I’ve realized—& is still painfully thin despite the food. Her eyes are marbled with cataract, they see little if anything at all—I cannot tell. Her black muzzle is gray & her ribs show when she lies in that way on the floor although her coat is shiny black. At night she sleeps near my bed, but never in it—even when she accepts that she needs you, she does not woo you in the way of other dogs. You sense she has a world inside her that you’ll never be able to share. Such stubborn solitude! Who knows how she lived all by herself on the rocks of the Kintamani all those years before she followed us home? What did she eat? Where did she find water?
I haven’t any notion what passed between us when she placed her gaze on me for those few seconds, but from that moment the clay started spinning evenly & smoothly under my hands again. A flawless bowl slowly rose between my fingers & thumb. If only I could make you understand what happened, Lis! And how spiritual it felt. If there is the divine, it was this. I will pray to whatever force it was that steadied my hand & body that it may still the world too & reunite all of us one day. Be well, dearest Lis. If this letter reaches, or even if it doesn’t, please write! Tell me about Myshkin. I will not rest till I see him again. That’s a promise. I will find a way.
With much love,
Gay
13th Sept. 1941
My dear Lis,
My birthday. You would have arrived with an iced cake & being impractical, 31 candles—which we would never have got lit all together—& that would have driven NC mad. The extravagance, the childishness, the needless frivolity. Would Mukti Devi have a birthday cake, ever? Never! Tch tch, the very thought. He’d have let himself out of the back gate & not come back till he thought the coast was clear. Brijen would have sung an extra song for me and brought the creamiest kulfi from the street, tasting of salt and sugar and saffron. When I was a child, nobody did anything for my birthday, it was not important. You were the first to make it so. Every year without you, I’ve tried to imagine you here, have done something festive even if alone.
Well, this time I was not alone on my birthday. I had a visitor. It was very unexpected—it was a Mr. Kimura from Den Pasar, which is the next town. I had never met him, but I had heard the name—he is a Japanese diplomat or official of some sort. Anyway, I was working on WS’s verandah at that time—I’ve taken to doing that because it overlooks the stone pond & it has a cool red cement floor on which I stand barefoot while I paint. I was actually sitting on the floor cross-legged at that time & painting designs onto a few pots, all wrapped up in my work, so I jumped in alarm when he appeared. I tried to smooth my hair—it was such a mess & it became worse because I managed to smear it with my clayey paint.
Mr. Kimura was impeccable in a black suit, white shirt, a well-behaved & smiling Penguin with perfect English, bowing exactly as the Japanese are said to do—though I had never seen it before. He said he had heard there was a famous Indian painter here (Famous? I?!) in Tjampuhan & as he was passing through he wanted to see for himself. Rabindranath Tagore had once been to Japan, did I know that? He offered his deepest condolences on the Poet’s recent death—oh, I had not known of his death? Then his sympathies and sadness at being the bringer of bad news. It had happened last month—perhaps the newspaper had not reached me.
After this he sat down & told me to continue, he had come all this way to see me at work, he said, I was not to stop. I sat on the floor again, as I had been sitting, but now it felt very awkward, with him watching from the broad sofa which is set against one of the walls, tapping his long fingers on the armrest. I couldn’t keep my eyes on my paint nor on my pot, kept being distracted by the magenta bootlaces on his gleaming black shoes. Anyway, I tried to paint & he did not take his eyes off me & then for no reason that I could see, he went to Indah & picked her up, placed her beside him & sat again. She was restless & trying to wriggle away, but he had one hand firmly gripping her neck & one hand stroking her back.
That bony, ragged back. Lis, a shiver went down my spine, I couldn’t hold my brush still. I thought he would break her neck, just squeeze so hard it would break. I told him Indah likes to be on the floor, maybe he could let her go, but he said, “She seems comfortable. Please do not worry yourself. Please continue.” There was something menacing about him—I cannot pin it down to any specific thing he did—despite his polite manner. I dropped one of the raw bowls on the floor & it cracked & he said nothing. I applied myself to the remaining bowls. Tried to stick to swirls & whirls & bamboo stalks. He murmured about tenmoku & celadon glazes & straw brushes & bamboo brushes—bamboo best for painting those bamboo stalks, he kept repeating.
After this had gone on for a while, Ni Wayan brought us some lemon barley on a tray. One of the glasses was chipped, there were no biscuits or anything to eat with it. I apologized for our slovenly service. Mr. Kimura did not seem interested in the drink anyway, but this broke the spell & to my relief, he took his hands off Indah—she slunk off at once. Mr K then stood up & said, “Beautiful dog, even if old. Should you be wishing to leave Bali for your country in the near future, I would be more than happy & willing to adopt her.”
The way he said it, I felt a sudden chill, as though he was trying to tell me something. He was saying I ought to leave. Is that not so? Was he warning me about an imminent Japanese invasion? Everyone talks about it and nobody thinks it will happen, or if it does we think that it will not touch us here in Tjampuhan. Am I just imagining things? I wiped my hands on my cloth & got up from the floor & made some polite noises—wouldn’t he please have some lemonade—lemon from our own trees etc. But he ignored all that & picked up his neatly furled umbrella from the corner & waved me away when I started to accompany him out of the verandah & up the stairs cut into the hillside. “Please, madam. You are not fit enough to come out into the sun. You have jaundice, it is clear from your eyes,” he said. If I wanted a doctor, there was one in Den Pasar he knew, not Dutch but Japanese, who knew tropical diseases well.
Ni Wayan was scornful when I told her Mr. Kimura was trying to tell us something important. What difference does it make to us if the Japanese come? We are ruled by the Dutch now. Later we’ll be ruled by Japanese, she said.
No friend here. It is hard to know what to do. If only I had someone to talk to.
I’ve been examining my eyes & fingernails ever since he left—for yellowishness. Isn’t that what jaundice is supposed to do? Make you yellow like turmeric? I feel weak sometimes, it is true, but that has been for a while, ever since the fevers started. It passes. I’m as slim & trim now as I was when I was sixteen—I can’t eat too much—at last! Maybe now’s the time to wear one of your dresses & feel young & pretty.
No news from WS. I miss him. I miss the sound of his piano & his mad fervor for beetles.
The Bring Home Myshkin Fund—it never took off at all. I wonder when/if I will ever see WS or Myshkin again. Is this how partings happen? No word, no preparation, it is over and you didn’t even know it. Will I ever see Beryl again? She’s in England now, in the middle of the war. No news from any of you either.
The newspaper comes weeks late or not at all & mostly they are in Dutch. I listen to the radio sometimes & then turn it off because the news is so grim. Better not to know. What good has it done me to know that Rabi Babu is dead? It is as if one last beautiful part of my childhood is gone. Everything feels emptier now. I would rather be the fool who lives in her imagined paradise.
I should post this letter. I started it on my birthday, but now it’s more than a week later. I write it when I have energy, put it away & sleep when I’m tired. The life of a lady of leisure. Sipping lemonade spiked with the last of the gin. Once the gin goes there will be arak in plenty!
Much love to you & to my Myshkin (Will you tell him please that I am well and coming home soon?)
Gay
October 3rd 1941
Dear Lis,
I sent you a long letter only two weeks ago. This just to say—nothing to be alarmed about, but I do feel rather more unwell. Have decided to be practical & will go to Surabaya—to Lokumull’s house, rest and get better—& from there back home. I am sure he will find a passage for me to Singapore, war or no war, once I am well enough to travel further. He has friends in Singapore—they will put me on a ship to Ceylon & so on & on & on until I reach you like a parcel passed from one to another.
I am taking Indah with me. I cannot bear to leave her behind, she’s my only friend left here & she’s old & helpless & half blind. I will eventually turn up in Madras + Kintamani dog. You will come & meet me there, won’t you, so we can plot & plan my future? Bring Myshkin with you for sure, I long to see him, my eyes are starving for him.
I am running ahead of myself. I haven’t even left Tjampuhan yet.
I feel all vomity. My stomach’s gone—you would hate the details, I’ll spare you them. I have a fever. I burn up with it, my skin goes as dry as a dead leaf & I babble nonsense when it comes. Maybe I babble in Hindi or Bengali. I do hope so—what if I’m saying scandalous things? I’m a mean old woman now, Lis, shriveled up with rage. How could it have ended this way? Just when my life was turning a curve and what lay ahead was beautiful. How could a war thousands of miles away have done this to me? I am furious about everything. If they gave me a gun, I’d kill.
They’ve brought me some medicine, but it smells so peculiar I don’t dare. Ni Wayan has sacrificed a rooster to make me well and nailed its carcass near the entrance door by its wing. Gruesome. I tried to stop her, how could killing something make me better? She said I don’t know how these things work.
I think it’s typhoid, will pass. Am trying to remember what my father-in-law used to prescribe for typhoid. Can’t. My head’s addled. Do you remember? How will you tell me?
I am determined to be well enough to reach Madras. And I will. Once I have seen Myshkin & you again, I don’t care what happens next.
Make a wish on the evening star as you used to, Lis, that we will be together again before too long.
With much love,
Gay