THE misfortune that came to Pak’s house began almost unnoticeably with sickness among his fowls. At first it was only two or three of the young black ones and then it spread to his whole flock. They sat with open beaks and would neither eat nor drink. His old father blew down their throats and pulled at their tongues, and his aunt compounded a medicine of poultry droppings and powdered chalk. But the fowls refused to swallow it, and after a few days their limp, dead bodies were found here and there in the corners of the yard.
Pak skinned one of the dead fowls and nailed it up with wings outspread on the outside of the wall in order to keep the spirits from further mischief. But the sickness spread, and at last attacked even his lusty fighting-cocks in their bamboo basketwork cages, and this was indeed a cause for sorrow and alarm.
Pak’s head hung down and even Meru was grievously afflicted, for he had set his heart on the white short-tailed cock which his brother had given him when he executed the carving for the new house. But Sarna, who did not like to see long, sorrowful faces around her, did her best to cheer her husband up, and she only needed to put her little son on Pak’s hip to see him laugh again. Also she begged three young cockerels of her father and brought them home with her, and when Pak came in from his labor there was crowing to be heard once more from the baskets in front of his wall and he was happy. And Meru carved a beautiful little cock as a toy for Siang, and the child carried it about with him wherever he went and bit at it, for his first teeth made a very early appearance.
But this tribulation was scarcely over before the cow calved and died. She was a young beast and very good on the sawah and with the plough. Pak heard her mooing in the night; it was so loud and long-drawn-out that it waked him, though he was in a sound sleep. When he got to the shed he found his father already there, trying to help her. He had a torch stuck in one of the posts and by the light of it he was doing his best for the animal, who stood with trembling flanks in the litter of dried leaves. The old man was stroking and pressing her sides with all his strength and the sweat ran down his face. “Her calf lies wrong in her,” he said, for he knew everything. “It will come with its hind legs first and will tear the mother if we can’t manage to turn it round.”
Pak’s uncle came, too, on thin crooked shanks, with his kain girt up, and gave much agitated advice. The women kept at a distance, for this was the men’s business; but the aunt, as always, was very sure she knew best. “You had better go to the sawah and catch an eel and give it her to eat as they do with women to lighten their travail,” she said. “I never heard such nonsense,” Puglug replied; she had got up in the middle of the night to pound leaves so that the cow could gain strength for the labor of calving. Whereupon a brief battle of words raged round the pots and pans in the kitchen.
The three men worked hard to help the beast. “Have patience, mother,” they said to her, “you will have a fine child; you are young and strong and you must help your calf now that it wants to come out of you, dear mother.” The cow looked at the men with her large brown eyes; they were her friends with whom she worked on the sawah, and her breath came fast and sometimes she stretched out her head and bellowed. The uncle’s old buffalo grew restless and answered with strange sounds as he rubbed his sides against one of the posts of the shed. The women, Puglug and the aunt, lit a fire in the yard to ward off evil spirits, but Sarna slept through all the commotion within the walls of her house, her little son in her arms. In the sixth hour of the night the calf, with the old man’s assistance, came from the cow and he dried it with leaves. But the cow rested her head on Pak’s arm, who was squatting beside her in the litter to support her, and died without uttering another sound.
For two days the women tried to keep the calf alive with the milk of young coconuts and a brew made from pisangs, as they did with babies when their mothers died in giving birth to them, but by the third day the calf was dead too.
Pak went about in deep despondence, for he had ploughed the western sawahs once, and it was time to plough them a second time and the cow was dead. His uncle’s old buffalo had no longer the strength to do the work on all the sawahs belonging to the family.
Once more it was Sarna who bestirred herself to seek help. She spoke to her father. “Our cow has died,” she said, “but I am sure my father would lend my husband his buffaloes, so that we shall not get behindhand with the work on the sawahs.”
The rich Wajan, however, who had become rich by never putting himself out for others without some return, replied by asking, “How much rice will Siang’s father pay me if I let my buffaloes work on his fields?” Although he paid his son-in-law a compliment in calling him Siang’s father, his answer was churlish enough to put Sarna in a rage. “The father of Siang is now your son,” she said in a loud voice, “and I would be ashamed to take him back such an answer. If you won’t help him, his friends will.”
“I will lend him the buffaloes,” the rich Wajan replied to this, “if, for every day they are at work on his sawah, he works for two in mine. That is a good bargain for him, for two buffaloes are not twice but eight times as strong as a man.” Sarna indignantly put her little son on her hip and took him away with her, for she knew that Wajan would have liked to play with him. She delivered this churlish message when she got home and Pak sighed deeply at hearing it. “The gods did not make men that they might work till they dropped, but that they might enjoy life and have time to keep the feast days and have enough rest.”
“That is so,” his father agreed. Puglug received Sarna’s report with a mocking smile and went on with her work in silence. She was consumed with jealousy because the younger wife, useless though she was in the house, assumed great importance on the score of the help to be derived from her rich father. And when next Pak spent the night with her, as he did from politeness and for the sake of peace every week, she went to the back wall of the house and produced two strings of kepengs which she held out to him in the palms of her hands, a thousand pierced coins to each string, without a word issuing from her tightly closed lips.
“What is that for? Where did you get all that money?” Pak asked, taken aback.
“Earned and saved—not stolen,” Puglug said. “You can buy buffaloes with it, father of Siang, instead of depending on the churlishness of the rich Wajan. You do not eat his rice and he has no say in what you do. But do not buy any cows, buy young buffaloes. Rib, I know, has two strong two-year-old animals to sell, and he will sell you them cheap as he is a friend of yours.”
Pak marvelled at his first wife, as he did at women all his life, for the way they always did and said the unexpected thing. But two days later when Puglug had gone to market with her produce he dug about in the wall to find more of her savings. He did find the hollow in the wall, but there was nothing there but the little linen bag containing the dried navel strings of his two elder daughters, which Puglug had kept, as was only right, as mascots to ward off evil.
Pak was overdone with work at this time. There were not only his own five sawahs, and his uncle’s two fields, with which he had to help. He was also a member of two guilds, one for the rice harvest and one for the care of the village coconut plantations, and the members had to give mutual help. He had besides to attend the meetings of the village council, on pain of a penalty for absence, and the gamelan runner was scouring the village almost daily to summon him and the other players for rehearsals and performances. Moreover, the rainy season had brought down the outer wall of the Temple of the Dead and the village had decided to rebuild it from the foundations. Two new gateways rose behind bamboo scaffoldings and skilled carvers and stone masons were to be seen at all hours of the day busily employed on the work. Pak, who was no hand at the fine arts of decoration, was told off, with many others, to collect fresh coral stone, carry it to the site, dress and put it in position. He did this gladly. But he resented it, for it deprived him of his last remaining hours of leisure, when the punggawas and officers of the court rounded up all the men to whom the prince had given sawahs and enlisted them for work in the puri of Badung.
New outer walls were being erected round the puri too; and trenches were being dug and water being conducted to the palace in a complicated manner, so that the trenches could be filled at a few hours’ notice. An extraordinary activity and excitement reigned throughout the territory of Badung. At all hours, Molog, the captain of the warriors, could be seen drilling his men and the rattle of musketry practice often alarmed the peasants, until they got accustomed to it and even delighted in the noise, as though it had been Chinese crackers.
The job that more than once fell to the lot of Pak and several more men was to load the wooden pack-saddles of the lord’s little horses with rice and coconuts and conduct the whole train by side-tracks to Tabanan. Each journey took several days, during which work on his sawahs was at a standstill. But there was no help for it, for Pak was a subject and servant of the lord, as his father and grandfather had been before him.
At the same period a fresh disaster befell. Pak’s twelve coconut palms, and all the plantations of the village, were so overrun with squirrels that there was no getting the upper hand of them. They ate their way into the ripening nuts until these fell to the ground and were nothing but empty shells. The children collected them for firing and Meru found some in which the squirrels had gnawed two deep eye-sockets and carved funny masks of them. But Pak was annoyed: it did not seem to him an occasion for joking. He was up all night with the other members of the guild, trying to drive the animals away with torches and shouting and the clatter of bamboo sticks. But they did not have much success. As soon as the squirrels were chased away from the Taman Sari gardens they made off for the palms of Sanocr and the men there drove them back again. This led to bad feeling between the villages, and even between different parts of one village, and the young men got quarrelsome and the children fought in the streets. The pedanda, Ida Bagus Rai, intervened in person and begged the people to make up their differences; it was no time for disunion. Not only had a comet appeared in the sky, which from the earliest times had always signified war, as the older men observed every night as they gazed at its dull red trailing glow among the other stars; but, what was worse, the two Dutch ships, which had been seen one day off Sanur, had cast anchor and looked like remaining there for ever. The fishermen, Sarda and Bengek, and others who had keen sight, could see guns mounted on their decks with their round black muzzles trained on the shore. And then a little later three large, flat-bottomed boats put off, with a gun in each. Soldiers in blue uniforms and with scowling faces mounted them on the beach after making an emplacement of stones for each, and left them there as a threat and a warning. The people of the coast found it hard to get used to the sight of them—many avoided looking out to sea where the two great ships were to be seen day and night at anchor.
Puglug came from the big market at Badung and regaled the listening family with all the news she had gathered.
“. . . and they say the white men’s raja has demanded a tremendous sum from the lords of Badung, for that stinking Chinese boat that was wrecked at Sanocr. Why, we’ve all forgotten all about it! But the rajas of the white men have written letters and sent ambassadors and they say in the market that they demand nine hundred thousand kepengs”
“How many kepengs?” the old father asked, putting his hand to his ear.
“Nine hundred thousand kepengs or even more,” Puglug repeated, holding up nine fingers.
“Mbe!” Pak cried out, quite overcome, but his uncle shook his head and said, “That is the sort of rubbish the women talk when they get gossiping at market. Nine hundred thousand kepengs— there is not so much money as that in the whole world.”
“That is what the white men ask, and my uncle is right—so much money does not exist, at least in Badung. That is why the ships of the white soldiers lie off the coast and the order has come to shut off the frontiers of Tabanan and Gianjar, so that the people of Badung can sell nothing any longer, and that, too, is why the father of my children has to take rice by side roads to other countries, in case the soldiers of the white men should know anything about it.”
“You are talking a lot of nonsense,” Pak said crossly. “If we don’t have a better harvest than we have had lately, no one in Badung will want to sell rice to Gianjar and Tabanan; we shall have to go to their markets and buy from there, unless we mean to starve.”
“That is forbidden too. They want us to starve. And if the white rajas hear of rice coming in from elsewhere, they will shoot their guns and destroy our villages. That is why there is a comet in the sky.”
“How could they destroy our villages?” Pak’s father exclaimed. “Are we soldiers? It has never yet happened that soldiers fought with peasants. If the comet means war, it has nothing to do with us Sudras. The white men’s soldiers will have to fight it out with the Ksatrias, who are making such a noise with their rifles under Molog’s orders.”
“That is so,” said all who had been listening.
Yet an uncomfortable feeling hung over the villages, for these rumours and others like them kept on cropping up. And even if Puglug was only a foolish market woman, there were intelligent and experienced people such as Krkek who were of the same opinion.
The next time Pak slept in his chief house with Puglug, she sprang a new cause for anxiety on him in the intimacy of the night. “I am only a foolish woman and it is not for me to give you advice, father of Siang,” she said, and Pak pricked up his ears when he heard himself addressed so ceremoniously. “But if I had a younger brother like Meru, I should not let him keep on going to Badung. I should make him work on the sawahs. I would rather tie him fast like a buffalo, and put a yoke round his neck like an unruly boar, than let him spend his time as he does in the puri. I am only a foolish woman, but that is what I should do if I had a younger brother.”
“What are you talking about, wife?” Pak asked, but all the same he had a strange feeling of uneasiness, for he knew that Puglug was no fool, talk as she might, and she had made the money for him to buy the buffaloes with. “You know as well as I do that Meru is employed in the puri to carve the doors of the new temple tower.”
“The doors have been finished long ago and Meru has no longer any business in the puri,” Puglug said to this. Pak thought it over for a moment. “It’s the women in the puri. It’s them he’s running after,” Puglug added, and said no more.
“It will be time enough to worry when Meru comes and tells me that he wants to bring a slave into the family as his wife,” Pak said. “I was not talking about slaves,” Puglug said, and with this the disquieting talk was at an end.
Pak decided to speak to his young brother. “Meru, my younger brother,” he said when Meru came home at the end of the week, “I want you to help me with the planting instead of going to Badung. You eat my rice and I have the right to your help on our sawahs.”
Meru pulled a face, but as he was a good-natured and amiable fellow he stayed at home for the next few days, got up at cock-crow, girt up his kain and helped his brother with the planting of the new sawahs. But he was not so cheerful as usual; he spent his leisure time sitting in a corner of the yard carving a piece of light-colored wood without saying a word to anybody. His old father squatted beside him now and again and looked on as the work took shape beneath the deft strokes of the knife, but he could not make much of it.
“Do you see what your brother is carving there in the corner?” Puglug asked, as she sat down near her husband.
“No—is it something good?” Pak asked. He was feeding his cocks and giving them water.
“It is a stag leaping a doe,” Puglug replied, compressing her lips as her habit was ever since Sarna had joined the household.
Pak went and watched Meru at his carving. It was a stag and a doe and the male animal was mating with the female. The carving was still in the rough, but it was easy to see what it was going to be. Nothing of the sort had ever been seen before. Pak could not help laughing at it—it made his blood tingle.
“For whom are you carving that, brother?” he asked.
“For myself—just to pass the time,” Meru replied. Pak went back to the women.
“It’s a stag leaping a doe,” he said. “I like it, though I have never seen such a piece of carving before. What is wrong with it?”
“It shows where your brother’s thoughts are,” Puglug said as she picked up little Klepon and went away. Pak looked at his second wife in astonishment and Sarna burst out laughing at the bewildered look in his face. “What did she mean by that?” he asked in perplexity.
“Your young brother seems to have warm dreams. He has a woman in his thoughts,” Sarna said, for she understood such matters. Pak forgot her strange smile as she said this, but it came back to him later when the disaster had already befallen Meru.
They finished the planting of the new sawah and Meru helped also with the cutting of the alang-alang grass. On the third day he made off to Badung again and stayed there for two weeks.
Then a message came from the punggawa of Sanur with the request that Pak and his father would go to him. “What can be the meaning of it?” Pak asked the old man on the way, as he helped him along the banks between the sawahs, which were slippery with the rain. But his father, who was never at a loss, could only shrug his shoulders in silence.
“Perhaps the prince means to give us another field. Puglug tells me that he is very pleased with Lambon and has her with him oftener than any other of his wives,” Pak said optimistically. But his father shook his head. “It is Monday today and an unlucky day for all dealings with the authorities,” he replied curtly.
The punggawa received them with unusual kindness and they squatted down before him and there was long talk over one thing and another. He signed to his servants to offer these two simple men sirih, and even then it took him a long time to come to the point, for it was not a pleasant task to have to tell the old man what had to be told.
“Grandfather of Siang,” he said at last, and the old man smiled with pleasure, for it warmed his heart to hear himself addressed thus, “your son, Meru, the carver, has done wrong and must be punished.”
The punggawa did not address Pak, the brother, but only the father, and the old man lowered his eyes as he had learnt to do when as a young man he was in the service of the lord.
“He has lifted his eyes in unseemly fashion to a wife of the lord Alit, our master,” the punggawa went on, “and you know what that means.”
The old man opened his mouth twice before he spoke. His lips had gone dry and he had to moisten them with his betel-stained tongue before he could utter a word.
“Must he die?” he asked submissively.
“Our lord and master is of great goodness,” the punggawa said. “He has turned his eyes away from the crime and grants your son his life.”
Pak sat in a daze as though someone had struck him a blow on the head. “Must he be banished—to Lombok or the island Nusa Penida?” he asked hoarsely.
“Banishment is only for men of high caste. You ought to know that,” the punggawa said, without so much as looking at him. Silence followed. My brother Meru, Pak thought. Suddenly he remembered how he used to carry his younger brother on his hip. They had herded the ducks and their father’s two cows. Meru’s kite had always flown higher than any other boy’s. The singing in his head and all round him went on and on.
“I sent for you to tell you that the punishment will be carried out tomorrow when the sun is in the first quarter. Go to the puri of Badung to take your son and brother away, for he will need your help,” the punggawa said. He looked at the two men—dumb with fright and grief—and added, “It pains me that your family should suffer thus. Meru has done nothing base: his crime is one that any man can understand. Bernis is a beautiful woman and men are weak and it is easy to fall. But even though the prince in his goodness spares his life, yet honor demands that Meru shall pay with his eyes the penalty of having looked upon a wife of the raja.”
Pak cleared his throat and asked, “And what happens to the woman?”
“She is of high caste. The prince casts her off and she is banished for ever,” the punggawa said.
Pak and his father sat for a moment longer mute on the ground, and it was some small comfort and appeasement to have sirih to chew. Then the punggawa helped the old man to his feet and laid his hand on his shoulder. When Pak looked at his father he saw big tears rolling down the old man’s cheeks and his own throat pained him and there was a bad taste in his mouth.
They did not say a word as they went back across the sawahs to Taman Sari. In the village Pak’s father parted from him. “I will go and speak with my friend, the pedanda,” he said, stopping at the gate of his friend’s house. Pak went home alone, blinded with grief. The people he met looked after him when he made no answer to the greeting they called out to him.
He sat down in his yard on the steps of Sarna’s house and took his little son on his knee to comfort him. The women gathered round and his little daughters too, looking at him anxiously.
“My brother Meru will come home tomorrow and he will be sick with his eyes,” he said after a time. “Get the eastern balé ready and put cushions on the couch. You can also take the curtains from Sarna’s house and wash them and hang them round his bed.” As soon as he said this he realized that Meru would no longer be able to see the curtains and he laid his head on the shoulder of his little son and began to weep. His three little daughters leant up against him and Klepon, who was just beginning to talk, said, “Father, father, father . . .”
The women talked together in low voices in the kitchen. “I could have told you what was coming,” Puglug whispered. “Old Ranis was talking about it at market. Meru used to sleep with a young slavegirl, called Muna, until her mistress, the beautiful Bernis, noticed him and took him away from her. So Muna went and told the anak Agung Bima all about it, and it’s he who is in charge of the wives. She was sorry afterwards and took it all back and said she had been telling lies out of anger against her mistress, who often beat her. But the anak Agung Bima kept his eyes open and watched them, and he observed that Bernis and Meru exchanged secret signs and were meeting each other. After that there was no help for it and it must be borne.”
The aunt had already begun preparing special offerings for the house altar, and the women resolved in whispers to take offerings to the village temple as well and to have prayers offered up to the gods that they might lighten Meru’s affliction. The task of preparing and decorating the offerings helped them through the long hours of the night; and the men did not sleep either. The old man came home late and went straight to the house altar and squatted in silence before it hour after hour.
In the morning he was dressed and ready before Pak had wound his loin-cloth about him. They did not go down to the river to bathe that day, for they shuddered with dread. The uncle went with them too, and they were joined on the way by a few friends of the family who had heard of their sorrow. Pak was afraid lest the journey would be too much for his father, but the old man had cut himself a staff and led the way with the even stride of a peasant. Not a word was said as they went along, and as they reached the puri of Badung the sun was still below the trees.
The gate-keeper let them in and pointed to the courtyard in which judgments were given. There was a lofty open building there, built in the same style as the watch-tower and painted in white and red, to show up the pains of hell depicted on the walls. Some officials of the court sat aloft there, and there were other men squatting on the walls that surrounded the courtyard, waiting for the proceedings to begin. There were no women to be seen and Pak gave a fleeting thought to Lambon and wondered whether she had heard of her brother’s fate, and whether she might possibly be able to beg the lord to pardon him. But at the same time he knew that pardon was out of the question in a case where the raja’s honor was involved, and he resigned himself.
After what seemed an endless time there was a movement in the courtyard, and men armed with spears advanced with Meru in their midst. He was in his best kain and wore his kris in his girdle. There was a hibiscus flower in his headdress over his forehead. But what horrified Pak was that he wore a loin-cloth of the cloth in which the dead were wound.
The sun was shining. Meru stood in the middle of the courtyard with a fixed and unconscious smile as though asleep. One of the officials stepped down from the court of justice and, standing before Meru, read his sentence from a lontar book. Meru did not stir and gave no sign of having heard it.
After this another man of high caste stepped up to the little group of relations and friends and said, “If you wish to greet your brother and speak with him, you may do so now.”
Pak looked questioningly at his father. But the old man shook his head. “Better not disturb him,” he said softly without taking his eyes from his son. “As he is now he will feel the pain less.”
As no one spoke to the condemned man, another man came down from the court-house and approached Meru. He, too, was in ceremonial dress and wore a white cloth.
Putting both hands on Meru’s shoulders he addressed him in a loud voice.
“Brother,” he said, and his voice reached the farthest corner of the courtyard. “It falls on me to execute the sentence. I do not do it because I wish you ill. Forgive me in that I must cause you pain and allow me to carry out my office.”
In as loud a voice Meru answered, “Do your duty.”
The man put his hand to his girdle and took out a bamboo knife. Two other men stepped behind Meru and held him fast. Pak turned his eyes away. There was a little altar of bamboo, adorned with flowers. There were a few hens searching here and there for grains of rice. There was a funny-looking little white dog.
The man who stood there in the middle of the courtyard flourished his knife twice and plunged it into Meru’s eyes.
Not a sound was to be heard. Then he let the instrument fall to the ground and received Meru in his arms as he fell forward in a dead faint.
Pak carried his brother out of the puri over his shoulder and he seemed to him strangely light, no heavier than a child. His friends quickly brought a bamboo stretcher and laid the unconscious man on it. Blood trickled in two thin streams from the sockets of his eyes and the closed lids fluttered like the wings of a captured butterfly. One limp arm hung down from the stretcher as the men raised it to their shoulders and moved off, and his father walked beside them holding his son’s hand. It was a long way to Taman Sari. No one spoke a word.
When they got home, the pedanda was there waiting and also Teragia with her father, the balian. They laid Meru down on the cushions with the freshly washed curtains and stood beside him. Towards evening his consciousness returned, and the gamelan, of which Pak was a member, came and played in the yard for many hours, for nothing helps to lighten pain so well as music.
Yet for many days Meru groaned and cried out and threw himself about in his intolerable agony and for a week it seemed that he would die. But he was young and strong and by degrees he recovered. At first he tried to walk with his hands on Rantun’s shoulders, and they all helped him as he groped his way about. He asked for his knife and cut himself a stick and with its help he ventured out into the village street. Pak often gave him his little son to hold, in the belief that the warm touch of the child would console his brother as it always did him.
One day when Meru was groping his way about the yard he came upon the piece of carving he had begun before his disaster befell him. Squatting upon the ground he held the block of wood in his hands and ran his fingers over the surface of it. Another day they saw him with the carving on his knees, working at it with his knife, while with his fingers he touched and felt it since he could not see it. “What are you carving at there, brother?” Pak asked with a smile. “Nothing,” Meru replied, raising his sightless face from his work. But Pak had seen what it was. A clumsy arrow now pierced the flank of the stag who leaped his doe: the creatures were slain in the very moment of their greatest happiness. Pak did not know what to say for grief at the sight of it and after a while Meru put his unfinished work away and never touched it again. “I cannot see what I am doing,” he said, and looked with empty eye-sockets into the darkness that enclosed him.
Pak’s father was a great deal with the pedanda during these weeks and had long talks with him. One day he came home and called the whole family together—the uncle and aunt and Lantjar, too. “My friend the pedanda tells me that there is only one means of warding off further misfortune from our house,” he said, “and you all know what it is.”
They hung their heads, for they did in fact know. The body of their dead mother had not yet been burned and this neglect had continued for too long. It was no wonder that her soul, seeking rest and finding none, had given marks of displeasure in order to insist on the peace which was her due.
“Fortunately there is to be a large burning at Taman Sari on the fourth day of next month. I have spoken with the council,” the old man went on, “and it seems it will not cost more than twenty-two thousand kepengs to have the corpse burnt. This sum must be found.”
“It shall be found, father,” Pak said shortly. His conscience had long been troubled and burdened, because in the pursuit of his desire he had almost forgotten his dead mother. A feeling of great relief came over him now that the cause of all their misfortunes had been ascertained and openly avowed, and the means of avoiding even worse disasters made clear. He dug up his ringits and found there were no more than seventeen, for he had spent a great deal since he married Sarna; Puglug rifled all the mouseholes where she stored up her savings and collected all the money she possessed. It came to three hundred and seventy-six kepengs. Pak talked seriously to his uncle and he produced three strange silver coins, which looked as if they might be Dutch. Pak puzzled and scratched his head, for they were still far short of the sum required, and then he sold Meru’s kris to the rich Wajan, who wanted one for his son. Wajan bargained and made difficulties and then gave him six hundred kepengs for it, which was too little. Meru, however, knew nothing of the deal, for he could not see, and what could a blind man want with a kris?
And so, as the day of the burning was approaching and the cremation beast had to be fashioned and the cremation tower built, not to speak of the cost of offerings and dues, Pak set off once more for Sanur to speak with the Chinese, Njo Tok Suey.
When he came back he was almost cheerful and he said to his father, “I have mortgaged the two western sawahs to the Chinaman and he has given me thirty ringits for them, so now we can have a very fine cremation indeed and there will be money over for unforeseen expenses.”
“That is right, son,” the old man said. “But how will you pay off the debt, for the sawahs do not belong to us but were only given to us by the lords of Badung.”
But Pak could not bear to hear the lord of Badung mentioned without having a bitter taste in his mouth as he had had on the day when the sentence was carried out on his brother. And so he only shrugged his shoulders and a moment later said, “I will sell half the crop and pay the Chinaman. It is not the raja’s business how we meet our private troubles.”
Puglug made an outcry, “And what shall we live on and what shall we eat if you sell the rice crop? Anyone would think that you could see no farther than your nose.”
“You mind the kitchen and feed the pigs instead of interfering in what is the men’s business,” Pak said, observing once again how ugly his first wife was with her untidy hair and hanging breasts. “I will put the new sawah under yams and maize as soon as it is harvested, so that we can get through until next harvest,” he said to his father, hoping for his approval. But Sarna made a face. “Did I marry you,” she said, “to live on yam and maize like any beggar’s wife? Our son will fall sick on such stuff.”
Pak, however, shook off his cares, and the whole household and the whole village threw themselves joyfully into the preparations for the great cremation. A creature in the shape of a fish was constructed to receive the bones of their deceased mother, and a high tower of bamboo, covered in cloth and gilt paper. Offerings were prepared, and the presents to be burnt with the body, and Puglug brought a number of small earthenware vessels from the market. Kepengs were stitched on to tenter-frames in the likeness of a woman. Priests were paid, quantities of palm wine bought for the guests and bearers, food was cooked for days together.
The joy and excitement increased as the day of the cremation drew nearer. The women were the best of friends over the preparations and the children jumped for joy. Even Meru seemed to share in the general happiness and a shadow of his old high-spirited laughter was to be seen again in his blind face.
Three days before the cremation the whole family went to the cemetery, where many more had already assembled. Graves were being opened on all sides and the remains of the dead brought to light. Pak’s family soon found their mother’s grave, although she had lain there so long that the mound in the course of years had got flattened. They opened the grave and allowed Rantun to be first to search it; with zeal and an air of great importance she grubbed in the soil with her small hands. They all cried out with joy when a small bone was discovered, for they had begun to fear that nothing at all would be found. And now they all took part in the search and unearthed the skull next from the moist ground and a good large piece of the back-bone; they pulled the bones this way and that and spent a long time in showing the soul of the deceased how dear she had never ceased to be to her family. Then they enveloped the bones in the piece of white linen they had brought for the purpose and carried the light bundle home.
For the next three days the whole village was in a state of wild joy and excitement, for there were forty-two funeral towers ready and over seventy souls were to be set free in the fire, so that they could rise to heaven and return again to earth in a new incarnation. On the day of the cremation itself the gamelan played from early morning, and the posts of the towers were wrapped round with bright-colored cloth, and the Temple of the Dead received rich offerings. The pedanda came to offer up prayers and give blessings, and lamps were lighted at many gateways to show that the house harbored one of the dead.
The tower stood ready in front of Pak’s yard, a gorgeous affair, gleaming with all its decorations. And at the cemetery the cremation beasts were set up, white bulls and cows for the Brahmans, lions for the nobles, and fishes or elephants for the corpses of lower caste.
Some of the poorer people had no beasts at all, but only decorated boxes, and Pak was glad to be able to do better than that for his mother’s soul. In all this excitement Pak had utterly forgotten having mortgaged his sawahs, and he enjoyed the festivity and all the joys of the cremation without a cloud on his mind.
When the moment came to carry the handful of bones, wrapped in white linen, to the tower, it appeared that there were still many in Taman Sari who wished to pay honor to Pak’s mother and to show that she had not been forgotten. Indeed, the crowd of those who wished to lay a hand on her remains and to help carry the tower grew larger and larger and two groups fought for the privilege as though she had been a noted figure in the village. It took a long time, too, before they joined the other towers, for the bearers, with laughter and shouts and every sign of enthusiasm, took many roundabout ways and even went as far as the market-place under the large wairingin tree. All this, however, served to confuse the evil spirits and to prevent them following after the soul of the deceased. Pak himself carried the bones up a bamboo ladder on to the tower and his father followed him. They stayed there while it went swaying on its way to the cemetery, for they were the next of kin to the dead, and Pak was glad that the old man had lived to take part in the ceremony.
The white and gaily decorated glittering towers formed a long procession as they moved along the street, borne on the bare shoulders of hundreds of perspiring and laughing bearers and headed by the gamelan. It took over an hour to reach their destination behind the Temple of the Dead. The cemetery was still rough with the recently opened graves and the bearers by this time were merry with palm wine. Strong men of the village who knew how to make the fire burn well stood by the heaped piles of wood. Each family took its dead from the tower and the women sang and passed along, bearing offerings on their heads.
The bones of Pak’s mother made only a small packet and the smell of moist earth rose from them and reminded Pak of the smell of the sawahs. He himself deposited the bones in the belly of the wooden fish and the rest of the relations and friends crowded round to show their love. They laid pieces of cloth on them as well, and poured much holy water, and then broke the jars and threw them away. The pedanda went from beast to beast, blessing the dead and ordering the ceremony.
Flames now shot up on all sides from the heaps of wood laid under the beasts, and men damped down the fire with sods to make it burn in the right direction. There was a crackling and roaring of flames, and skulls and bones began to catch alight. Pak, too, pushed in a burning bamboo stem into his mother’s pyre and the women remained standing round it, silent and a little sad as they thought of the deceased. The volumes of smoke were so dense that it took away the breath and made the eyes smart. When they were sure that the pyre was burning well and the cremation beast was black and charred by the flames, the family, as was right and proper, returned home.
They entertained their guests, ate and drank and talked their fill and the children told Meru all they had seen.
It was not until late at night, when news came from the cemetery that the fire had burnt out and the ashes had cooled, that they went back there. And now torches could be seen flitting about on all sides in the drifting smoke as each family collected the white ashes of the bones from the darker ashes of the burnt-out pyres. Pak gathered all he could find and the women put them in an earthenware jar to take home.
It was now time to cheer the souls of the dead in their loneliness as they hovered homeless, and unused as yet to their new state, over the ashes they had just left. Fireworks were let off and the streets were in an uproar with the noise of rockets and shouting and singing. The smoke of the torches mingled with the smell of the cremation pyres. The children were wrought up to a high pitch of excitement by all the festivities of the day and did not want to go to sleep. Pak looked anxiously at his father to see if he was tired out, but he was happy and full of life as he told story after story to his guests.
The women powdered the ashes and put them in a coconut and later the pedanda came to pray and bless them. The village echoed with the letting off of fireworks and the bearers paraded the village singing at the top of their voices, for they were by now very drunk with palm wine. The fourth hour of the night had passed by the time the procession left Pak’s house to carry the ashes to the sea and consign them to the waves for the final purification. The children insisted on going too, and as the family set off slowly down the street with their light load they were joined by other torchlight processions whose destination was the same as theirs. There was a smell of torches, of the sea and of thousands of faded flowers. The dark beach was alive with lights and crowded with people and every face had a look of tense excitement. The tide was high, and as soon as they consigned the coconut to the sea the waves snatched it up on their foaming crests and carried it rapidly away.
Pak softly touched his father’s shoulder as he stood looking after the shell as it danced in the water. “Are you not tired, my father?” he asked, and the old man nodded back.
“Your mother was a good wife,” he said as though the vanished years had passed before his eyes as he looked out on the sea. “She was a good wife and now her soul is glad to be released. She will return to us soon in a new child and be with us again.”
Pak’s head was whirling with fatigue and all the honors done and received and all the palm wine. Sarna carried little Siang, and Rantun staggered under the weight of Klepon, who was fat and heavy. But at last she fell asleep as she walked and Pak took his two elder daughters in his arms and left the youngest to Puglug. Thus they got home at last and slept soundly without a care. And, sure enough, Sarna told her husband soon after that that she was expecting a baby, a second son for the house.
And then, just as Pak congratulated himself on having warded off all misfortune and purchased security for the family, just at that very moment rats began to infest the sawahs.
He had let in the water on an auspicious day and ploughed the first time and broken down the soil and brought the prescribed offerings and prayed to the goddess Sri for a good harvest. He had put out the seedlings in a corner of the field and strewn cooked rice over the field and sprinkled it with holy water and prayed again. His back ached from his labors. When the seedlings grew tall and showed their dark green tips, the sight gladdened his eyes and he ploughed and prepared the ground a second time. It was heavy work, for the young buffaloes were stupid beasts and slow to learn what was required of them. Pak had levelled the edges of the field with the spade and dug the corners, where the plough could not go, by hand, and he had kept the water at the right height and neglected nothing. He waited ten days and ploughed a third time and gave the fields three days’ rest and then he went over it twice with the lampit and levelled it until his sawah was like silk under its covering of water. And he got the loan of cows and asked his friend Rib to help and went over the ground again with the largest lampit and three teams. Before this he had mown the edges and buried all the grass and weeds deep in the mud so as to make the ground even more fruitful and he allowed no woman on the field but gave it all the strength that was in him.
Then he took up the little plants and trimmed and bundled them. And he planted them all by himself, for Meru could not help him now and his uncle lay at home with pains in his joints and was of no more use, and it was one of the hardest days of Pak’s life. And he waited for the auspicious day and watched for the constellation of the Plough and set up an altar on the left of the water inlet and made more offerings and prayed. And so the days passed and all was done with care and in proper order, and when the right time came the women were allowed on the sawah to weed and the children caught caterpillars and dragonflies for their meal times and Lantjar drove the ducks out to seek their food in the mud. Puglug worked hard and the sweat ran down her fading breasts, but Sarna said that it made her back ache to bend, because she had the child within her. She left off working and picked unripe green fruit, for which she had a great longing. Pak only laughed; he rejoiced at the prospect of having another son and he spoilt Sarna a little at this time.
The stalks grew longer and in four and a half months the ears began to show. A festival was held in the rice temple and a new altar was built on the fields. The ears hung heavy and were already a silvery green and Pak sniffed up the moist green smell of the grain into his nostrils and began making the clappers to scare the birds and his heart was glad. He was going to have a fine harvest, the best for many years, and pay off his debts with enough over to feed all who lived on his rice.
One morning he went out on to the sawah, not to work but to see how things were going and to gladden his eyes with the sight.
All he saw was the stalks—the ears had vanished as though evil spirits had made off with them.
Pak felt as though the edges of the sawah rose under his feet; the sight turned his stomach and he vomited. He looked a second time, but there was nothing to be seen but the bare stalks and no ears at all. He crouched down before the altar, which he had built to Sri, and he felt a cold sweat run down his temples, and down his sides, too, ran a cold sweat. He shuddered violently and felt sick as he looked at his fields with all the grain gone after all his labor. He sat down by the edge of the field with his feet in the muddy earth, for his legs gave beneath him, and held his head in his hands. Then he noticed a strange movement among the haulms and saw a large rat disappear into the mud and then another and another. And then he saw that all the ground was heaving with rats. The stalks rustled and stirred with them and now and then he could hear the nibbling of their teeth.
After some time Pak stood up and looked about him. He found that the fields of his neighbor, Bengek the fisherman, were eaten bare and so were the crops on all the fields around. It is as well I planted yams on the new sawah, he thought gloomily. The rats have come to my fields, he thought. Why do the gods punish me, he thought, now that I have done all I ought and had my mother burned and offered up every offering to the Lady Sri? We shall die, he thought, for when there is no rice people must die. What shall I do now? he thought. He bent down to pick up a clod of earth and threw it at a rat and it scuttled away. There are the souls of evil men in them and they will leave nothing. Darkness had fallen before he thought of returning home.
The men of the village were sitting outside the town hall talking in undertones as Pak went gloomily by. They called out to him, but he did not hear. When he got home he found they had heard the news. Puglug brought him his food, looked at him with pity and said nothing. Her look annoyed him; he longed for consolation. “Is it not Sarna’s month to give me my food? Why do you push yourself in?” he said.
“Sarna is sick and cannot wait on you,” Puglug replied, “and Siang, too,is feverish. We sent for the balian and he has given him medicine. Now eat, father of my children.”
It went against Pak’s stomach to take food; he still felt bad from the blow he had had. He got up and went to the fine house he had built for his second wife and stepped in. Sarna was crouching on the couch, holding her little son on her lap. Her eyes were hollow and when he touched her he could feel that she was hot.
“Have you got the heat sickness?” Sarna was smeared on the breast and shoulders with a yellow ointment and the child, too, had a whole lump of it on his forehead.
“It hurts me to breathe,” Sarna whispered, “and I feel I shall die.” Pak let his hands fall and did not know what to say. Why doesall this happen to me? he thought in a daze. He went out to find his father. The old man was asleep in the kitchen. “He was shivering for cold and came to lie down by the fire,” his aunt whispered, making room for Pak. His father had heard him come in in his sleep and sat up. He drew Pak to him as though he was still a child and put his hand on Pak’s knee.
“Many years ago we had rats in the fields and nobody knew why the gods punished us,” he said. “Then the priests found that an old temple had sunk from neglect into the earth of the sawahs. The men dug it out and built it up afresh and the rats were caught and killed. We made little towers and burnt them so that the souls imprisoned in the animals were set free, and we carried the ashes to the sea. Next year we had a fine harvest and no more was seen of the rats.” Pak cheered up; it sounded consoling and he could fancy to himself the rats’ little funeral towers.
“Many people say that the souls of children who were not burnt because they died before they teethed inhabit rats and mice,” he said thoughtfully, “but why should the souls of children do us such mischief?”
“That is rubbish,” the old man said. “The souls of children fall on the earth as dew; that is not disputed, and they are kindly and freshen the sawahs with their moisture.”
Puglug now came into the light of the kitchen fire. “A runner of the subak has come to say that the men are summoned to a meeting to discuss the disaster,” she announced. The kulkul sounded through the village in short quick beats. Pak sighed heavily, wound his head-dress about his head and set forth.
As the whole village this time was involved in the misfortune and no one knew what the reason for it could be, although many connected it with the comet and the presence of the two Dutch ships, the council decided that the gods ought to be asked about it.
They waited for a day that was favorable for matters of magic and this chanced to be the fourth day of the next week. Meanwhile offerings were offered up somewhat at random and the rats devoured what was left of the ripening crops. When the day came they all waited impatiently for the evening and then assembled in the village temple. The gamelan played and the unmarried men and girls went in procession to the pedanda’s house to fetch Teragia, for it was through her mouth that the gods were to speak.
Teragia looked serious and composed and she had put on a black kain and a white breast-cloth. Two servants followed her, one carrying a basket of offerings and the other holding her sleeping child. Ida Bagus Rai did not join the procession, since it is better for the pedanda not to have anything to do with affairs of magic; but the village priest and Teragia’s father were already waiting in the temple. Two umbrellas were held over Teragia and the gamelan preceded her as she advanced along the street, for she was holy.
“Where is Raka?” some of the men asked, and the women looked about for him in the crowd. But Raka was nowhere to be seen and someone said he was at Badung with his friend, the lord.
Teragia was conducted up into the balé Her father had already filled the water jar and got the smoke started, and Teragia sat down cross-legged before it. No one spoke to her, but two women supported her on each side and held her when, soon after, her head fell forward. The gameIan played on and then ceased, and in the silence that followed the crowd began to sing, the women at first, and then a few men joined in in the guttural tones of the old chants.
Teragia had fasted for half the day, for she knew from experience that this made it easier to fall into a trance. She shut her eyes and inhaled the smoke of resin and sandalwood, which rose up at her feet, and extinguished herself as she might put out a fire. She could feel how she lost and forgot herself, and how a vacancy spread within her as though she were not a person but a barrel. She knew nothing of time and place; she soared and hovered and there was nothing around her but the singing. Her eyes were shut and she would have been unable to open them if she had tried; her limbs were heavy at first, then light, and then they disappeared, as though her body, too, had left her as soon as her soul had made room to receive the divinity.
She did not know how long it took to reach this stage; but everything was then yellow on every side of her, a yellow that did not exist in the real world but only in her trance; and then she knew nothing more.
As soon as her eyes became fixed and her head fell forward, they knew that she was ready to take the divinity into herself, and the old women crouching behind her supported her. Her hair lay so close to her finely shaped head that she might have been a priestess and her face was beaded with sweat as with a lustreless dew. When her limbs began to quiver and she sank into the old women’s arms, the singing ceased and everyone kept completely still and waited for the message of the god. In the stillness a bird could be heard singing in the cambodia tree in the temple court, and this made the stillness all the more profound.
Suddenly Teragia’s lips received the afflatus and she began to speak. A murmur ran through the crowd when a strange, deep, ringing voice issued from her mouth in a speech they could not understand—Kavi, the old Javanese tongue, which only pedandas and scholars knew. Although they could understand nothing, the people of Taman Sari listened breathlessly, for this was the critical moment which was to bring them the sole remedy for the misfortune that had overtaken their sawahs. The god spoke slowly and for a long time out of Teragia’s mouth. The old women supported her rigid body and her father sat close to her in the balé, listening with rapt attention, for he had to report the message later in the common tongue. Here and there in the crowd others fell into a trance, men and women and even two half-grown children. They, too, began to talk all at once. While the burble of voices grew louder and the excitement increased, Teragia’s message seemed to have come to an end. She lay back silent in the women’s arms, but her soul had not yet come back to her. Her father sat opposite her and waited, since it is not good to break a trance. When some time had gone by and she still did not come to herself, he dipped his finger-tips in the holy water and sprinkled her with it. Slowly the fixed look in her face relaxed and she opened her eyes and smiled at her father. She was very tired and somewhere in the crowd she could hear her baby crying in the arms of the servant; it had woken up and was hungry. She struggled to her feet with an air almost of embarrassment and vanished in the crowd. There she unloosed her breast-cloth and gave her child the breast.
Meanwhile her father gave the chief men of the village the message which the god had spoken through her mouth and everyone crowded round him, not to miss a word. This was what the balian said:
There were in the hands of the people of the village certain precious objects which belonged to the gods and were wrongfully withheld from them. The gods would not be reconciled until these objects were restored to them. Moreover, a new shrine was to be built in the rice temple at the confluence of the two streams north-east of Taman Sari and every man must contribute labor, money and taxes; also everything that had been stolen must go towards the building of the shrine. Thus had the god spoken and enjoined, threatening them with misfortune if the command was not obeyed and promising good fortune and good harvests if they did as he said.
A murmur of dismay ran through the people, for this was a hard message, as hard as the fate that had befallen the sawahs. Most of the men crowded round Krkek, for he was head of the Subak and the building of a new shrine in the rice temple concerned him first of all. But after a few minutes their depression gave way and some even began to laugh; after all, it was good to know at least what the gods required of them. The wag, Rib, chaffed the men nearest him and asked them, one after another, whether they had any of the stolen valuables, imitating as he did so the self-importance and inflated dignity of the punggawa of Sanur. And the men all laughed and said they had nothing they ought not to have and had always paid the gods and the temples their dues in offerings and taxes. Yet they eyed one another covertly for any sign of conscious guilt.
By degrees the crowd dispersed, keeping together in knots with torches alight to ward off lejaks and evil spirits. But Krkek resolved that the building of the temple should be begun on the next auspicious day and that it should be built of free-will offerings; and he told the other men to bring their contributions to the large townhall before the next full moon. A number of men went back with Wajan, who had invited them to his house to drink palm wine and discuss the new situation.
Pak and Sarda, the fisherman, carried the heavy gong between them behind the rest of the gamelan players to the building where the instruments were kept. He had been in a strange state all the evening, with cold hands and feet and a fevered buzzing in his head and his ears. It seemed to him that the divinity had unmistakably spoken to him personally and that he alone was the guilty cause, not only of his own misfortunes, but of the disaster that had befallen the whole village. He was the man who had wrongfully withheld stolen treasure from the gods, it was he on whom the penalty fell. In his vanity and blindness and conceit he had taken the plates away from the goddess Sri; he had dug them up out of the earth of his sawah in order to give his house the splendors of a palace and to win a smile from Sarna. He slunk along with the bamboo pole, from which the large heavy gong was suspended, eating into his shoulder and his whole body burned with shame. His fields were laid waste and at home Sarna with his only son lay sick and near to death. But the guilt was his; it was his folly and wrongdoing that were the cause of it all; he had lied to himself for the sake of the plates which were not really his.
He refused Wajan’s invitation to drink palm wine, for it was no time for palm wine, and he did not hear what Rib said to him when he put away his gong with the other instruments. He was afraid of going on home alone, although he had a torch and had prudently put a piece of garlic in his ear before starting. However, he got home without any untoward encounter and saw that the offerings to the demons were in their place at his gate and that Rantun had also put glowing coconut shells beside them to show him the way. The sign of there being sickness in the house hung from the offering niche beside the gate and reminded him of the danger that threatened Sarna and Siang. He stepped over the bamboo grating in the gateway and started at the sight of his own shadow as it fell on the piece of wall beyond that served to confuse the spirits. Holding his torch high in the air he went to Sarna’s house. The door was shut and Rantun lay asleep on a mat in front of it, a trusty little guardian of the sick. Pak’s heart warmed at the sight of her, and bending down he covered the child with his loin-cloth, for the night air was chill and misty. Then he raised the torch to the plates in the wall and looked long at them.
They were as beautiful and precious as on the first day and the roses looked like real ones. The porcelain was white and smooth and there was not a crack to be seen. And yet these plates had brought dire misfortunes to Pak and his household. He sighed heavily and opened the door and went in.
Sarna lay on the couch with her child beside her, but her eyes were open. Pak held the torch over them both and looked closely at them. Sarna muttered feverishly and he could not understand what she said. He crouched down beside her and touched his son’s body and found it burning with a dry heat. A wooden bird was suspended over his crib and on it were offerings to Kumara, the goddess of children, and more offerings lay on the roof-beam.
“How are you, mother?” Pak asked, putting his hand on Sarna’s brow. But she only went on muttering and did not know him. He took the child from her side and laid him in the cradle. It frightened him to feel how limply he lay in his arms, almost as if he were already dead. The smoke of the torch filled the room and Sarna coughed painfully without ceasing to mutter feverishly. He opened the door to air the room, but then it occurred to him that the damp night air might be the death of Siang; so he shut it quickly behind him and stood in the portico beneath the plates. He sighed deeply as he reflected that he had never in his whole life been so overwhelmed with grief and care as at this hour. His heart in his breast was as tight and small as a clenched fist. He put out the torch and found his way to his father in the dark. The old man had taken to sleeping in the kitchen near the embers in the hearth, for his blood grew chilly with advancing years. Pak lay down close to the old man without venturing to wake him. But after a short time his father knew he was there and stroked his face with his hand. “Son, why do you cry?” he asked. “My misfortunes are more than I can bear,” Pak said, and sobbed without shame, for when he was with his father he always felt that he was still a little child. “My wife and my son are going to die, and what will become of me then?” He secretly hoped that his father, who always had comfort to give, would contradict him. But the old man only went on stroking his face and said after a long pause, “It must be as the gods will.”
He took a corner of his kain and wiped the tears from Pak’s face. Pak sobbed a little more and then, creeping closer to his father, he nestled against his old hide which was as dry and rough as the bark of a tree, and finally fell asleep and dreamt of his sawahs.
It was no easy job chipping the plates out of the wall. Pak got to work early next day and tried one tool after another. But the plates were firmly bedded into the wall and he was afraid of breaking them. It might only anger the gods further if he offered damaged and broken plates for the building of the temple and he could not go too carefully. When all his attempts failed, he decided to pull the wall down in order to get at the plates without damaging them. Nearly the whole day was spent over this task and the family stood round in astonishment watching Pak at his incomprehensible labors. As Sarna shrank in pain every time a fragment of the wall crashed to the ground, Puglug offered to take her young sister and the child into her own house. Puglug was glad to do it and she nursed them with the greatest care. She is a good wife, Pak thought, not for the first time. However unpleasant Puglug might be when things were going well, she was a tower of strength whenever disaster threatened the household.
Pak wiped the plates clean on his own kain and took them to the town hall. He left the wall in ruins, promising himself to make it good next day. He was in haste to hand the plates over for fear they might bring further misfortunes.
Krkek was not very much surprised when Pak handed over the plates to him, for everyone in the village knew of the treasure with which Pak had adorned the house of his second wife. “The pedanda has helped us with the plans for rebuilding the temple,” he said. “We shall build three new shrines, one for our forefathers, one for Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva and a throne of stone for Suria. Every man in the place must contribute one ringit and work two days of the week. The pedanda has promised to carve the stone figures for the gateway himself. I will ask him where your plates shall go. They are very beautiful and perhaps they might do well for the base of Suria’s throne.”
Pak’s heart was lightened once he had handed over the plates. There were a number of men sitting round; some had brought their cocks along with them so that they, too, might enjoy what was going forward, and others played a gambling game on a mat. The rebuilding of the temple was a source of pleasure and soon they were all ready to forget that the rats had eaten all the rice off the sawahs. Pak inspected the heap of things which the first day had produced and marvelled in silence. There were boards and small bits of iron and even smaller pieces of a reddish metal he was not acquainted with, which had gone green in places. There were several paper parcels of rusty nails and some pieces of sailcloth which might do for a skilful hand to paint pictures on. There was also a small heap of money, coins of all sorts, ringits from Singapore, a good number of kepengs, and Dutch money as well, stamped with the young, high-bosomed, long-nosed goddess of the white man.
Pak was not very quick in the uptake, but as he stood there inspecting the first results of the requisition, it dawned on him to his great astonishment that he was not the only one in the village whom the sea had enriched with the property of the gods. Even though they had all, when interrogated by the punggawa, indignantly disclaimed any part in the plundering of the Chinese ship, it was clear all the same that many of them had somehow come into the possession of stolen goods. When Pak had finally arrived at this conclusion his conscience was appeased and a broad grin of relieved surprise spread from ear to ear.
Now that he had delivered up the plates, he went so far as to expect that Sarna would be well again by the time he got home, and he made haste to get back. But Sarna and the child were still unconscious and their souls were not with them. Teragia was sitting beside them looking anxious. Her father had sent her with an ointment which she was rubbing over Sarna’s and Siang’s limbs. “Will it help?” Pak asked.
Teragia smiled to console him. “I will pray to the gods that it may,” she said. Pak sent Lantjar to the garden for three papayas as a present in return for her trouble.
Next he went to offer his help in the levelling of the ground for the new temple. It was hard work and he wanted to do it. He carried some young trees along over his shoulder and helped to plant them. While the work was going forward, Meru, with the help of his stick, came to the site where the streams joined and sat there with his newfound smile on his blind face. The men asked his advice about the decorative work to give him pleasure and held out pieces of wood and stone for him to feel and say how they could best be used. Meru ran his fingers over them and the pedanda told the men what gods and demons and beasts they were to carve or chisel out of them.
“By the way, has the fisherman, Bengek, the husky man, handed anything up?” Pak asked desperately. Krkek, who was always wide awake, looked keenly at him. “Why do you ask that?” he said slowly.
“It seems to me that Bengek, whose mother is a witch ought to contribute something to the building too,” Pak said, and said no more.
“I will inquire in Sanur,” Krkek said.
Three days went by; Pak knew that Krkek had been to Sanur, and when he saw him again at the site, he came to a stop beside him after unloading his planks from his shoulder and wiped the sweat from his face and waited. As Krkek made no remark, he asked when he had recovered his breath, “Has the fisherman Bangek handed up anything for the building of the tower?”
“No,” Krkek said. “And what has it to do with you?”
When he got home Pak sat down to think. What was the good of building a temple with the sweat of their brows and giving up all they possessed? he thought. As long as the husky man kept what was not his, the gods would continue to punish them. It is not my place to speak, he thought, but sooner or later Bengek must give up what he fished out of the sea.
Hours went by while he thought this over and at night he went to see Krkek and talk to him again. “There are people,” he said, “who believe that all the trouble comes from the house of Bengek and his mother, the witch. If the people of Sanur would ask the gods properly, they would be bound to find out what had to be done about it.”
For the first time Krkek allowed it to be seen that he understood. “It is possible,” he said, “that Bengek ought to hand over more than many others, since he lives close to the sea and is a fisherman and all is fish that comes to his net, and his mother takes the left-hand path.”
Pak went home and waited. He sat beside Sama, who was delirious and so weak and worn out that she could not speak. Also rice was now getting short and the yams on the new sawah were not ready yet; and besides, it was possible that a diet of yams might be fatal to his sick wife and child. Puglug grated coconuts and mixed them with the milk of the young nuts and tried to make Sarna eat, but she only turned her head away. The flow of her milk was stopped and Puglug had great difficulty in keeping little Siang alive from one day to the next by giving him mashed pisangs to suck on her fingers.
“Why do you keep on calling out after Bengek the husky in your sleep?” Puglug asked her husband.
“Do I?” Pak said in alarm. “It must be because his fields are next mine and he neglects them. I am afraid that more vermin will infest the sawahs. If his fields are sick, how shall mine flourish?”
Puglug shut her lips tight and stared him in the face until he felt quite uncomfortable and turned away to go to his buffaloes.
No one knew who started the rumour nor how it spread, but within a week all the villages round about—and all suffered from the plague of rats—were saying that Bengek’s mother must have something to do with the disaster. Many who had always feared her up to now took courage and told fearsome tales of her. She had been seen at night in the cemetery, offering up the blood of slaughtered fowls. Her eyes watered and children to whom she had given presents of food fell sick. The watchers who spent the nights in the watch-huts in the sawahs brought strange and dread things to mind. Fireballs had hovered like living things over the rice and one-legged lejaks with pigs’ heads had rushed with peals of laughter through the sawahs.
Bengek the husky was now mentioned only in a whisper. He had never put in an appearance at the building of the temple tower and Pak never saw him on his sawah. He had made no contribution and he had not been present at the last cock-fight. Sarda the fisherman said he had not seen Bengek on the sea for a long time; his boat lay high and dry on the beach and the planks were starting in the heat of the sun. The men thought it over and reckoned it out and made inquiries in one place and another; finally it was ascertained that no one had seen Bengek for three weeks—not, in fact, since the rats began to lay waste the fields. The last person, it appeared, who had spoken to Bengek was Meru. He had come across him in Pak’s bamboo thicket by the stream. Meru had made his way there to bathe and also to cut himself a new stick.
“Who’s there?” he had asked when he heard someone rustling through the branches. And he had heard Bengek’s husky voice reply, “It’s me.” Meru had felt his way towards him as he wanted to know whether the husky fellow was stealing his brother’s bamboos. But Bengek had had no bamboo poles in his hands but only two of the worthless bracts that grow at the joints of every bamboo shoot. He remembered it particularly because, as he blindly felt the leaves, the tiny hairs that grew on them ran into his fingertips and made them inflamed for days afterwards.
It could not be said that Meru was the last to have seen Bengek since he could not see at all. But he was certainly the last to have known anything of him. Pak heard his brother’s story with astonishment and a vague shudder. He could not get the picture out of his head—the fisherman stealing out of his bamboo thicket with the two large leaves which there was only one use for: to kill someone by mixing the fine prickly hairs with his food. This tallied in a remarkable way with the memory of the swarm of rats in the mud of his sawah and the feeble whimpering of little Siang who was starving for lack of milk.
The whispering in the five villages became a murmur and the murmur became an outcry.
“Where are you going, son?” Pak’s father asked when he saw Pak putting his knife into his girdle on the day before the new moon and shouldering a long sharpened bamboo pole, though he had no load to carry.
“I am going to Sanur to look for Bengek the husky,” Pak replied briefly.
“Peace on your way,” the old man said with ceremony. “And may no evil come to you.”
Every road was thronged with men carrying bamboo poles; they came even from Intaran and Renon, although no kulkul had summoned them. More and more joined them, but the fathers sent back their children who ran inquisitively along beside them and no woman thought of following them. When they reached Sanur they turned aside and followed the course of the river behind the village. They forced their way through the bamboo hedge and waded the marsh, both of which served to protect the village against evil spirits, and approached the witch’s homestead.
The walls shone with bits of red coral and three dogs bounded from the gate barking furiously. There was no sign of sickness or death posted up outside, but the knowing Krkek stopped and sniffed the air. The homestead was close to the sea and there was a smell of seaweed and salt and fish. They saw, too, the Dutch ships out at sea, and they had been joined by two more, so that there were now four in all. The men stopped and sniffed the air. Mingled with the tang of the sea there was another smell they all recognized—it was the smell of death.
They kicked the dogs aside as they flew at their legs and crossed the bamboo grating and entered the yard. The smell grew stronger.
What first met their eyes was a number of holes dug in the yard, some quite fresh and moist and others already beginning to dry in the sun. In several places the outer wall had given way owing to the ground having been excavated beneath it and two bread-fruit trees lay uprooted; they, too, had had their roots loosened by the digging. The whole aspect of the place was incomprehensible and senseless, as though some unknown beast had made its lair there, or a madman.
The men stood and stared without moving and many of them felt afraid. Pak felt afraid. Krkek stooped to pick something up and threw it down again. It was the head of a chicken; and when they looked around they saw several more lying about. Of Bengek nothing was to be seen.
Krkek went forward alone to the main house. Apart from all the diggings the yard was in order—the implements were in their proper places, the fishing nets were stretched between two trees and the large water barrel was full. And now a fighting-cock crowed from his bamboo cage and that took the eerie feeling from the place.
“How are you, brother?” Rib said aloud to break the silence, as he squatted down beside the cock. The halves of coconut shells were supplied with maize, and water, too, had not been forgotten. Nevertheless, Pak did not venture to budge. He was expecting to see in one of the holes that strange chest which Bengek had fished out of the sea on the night of the wreck.
Krkek sniffed the air again and went round the house to the eastern balé. They found there what they had dimly suspected. Wound in linen and enclosed in a framework of bamboo poles lay a corpse, ready for burial. A few clumsily prepared offerings were beside it; the awkward attempt to decorate them with leaves showed that there was no woman in the house.
The men crowded round the balé and Krkek, who showed great courage that day, pulled the linen winding-sheet aside to see who the dead person was. They bent forward and saw the face of Bengek’s mother, the witch, and it seemed to them that she laughed. Krkek covered her face again and hurriedly wiped his hands on his kain.
“Now we’re unclean for three days and can’t go on with the building of the temple,” Rib whispered in Pak’s ear. The men stood there, wondering what to do next. “It’s high time Bengek buried his mother,” Rib went on in a whisper, for he could not resist a joke, and screwed up his nose. The smell was almost unendurable.
“Bengek, where are you?” Krkek shouted across the yard. But there was no reply. The cocks began crowing again and a little titjak lizard cried out from the bamboo wall of the house. Suddenly the three dogs ran past the men, all in the same direction, wagging their tails. Krkek hesitated for a moment and then followed them. He looked round at the rest and they came on behind him, carrying the sharpened poles as spears.
They passed the pigsty and the granary, which was empty and looked utterly desolate, and came to the plantation of palms behind the house altar. A tjrorot uttered its note; otherwise there was no sound. The stillness was intolerable and took away the breath.
Suddenly Krkek came to a standstill. “There he is,” he said softly, pointing in front of him. The men pressed round him. They had set out full of courage and enthusiasm, eager to bring peace to the villages and to kill the witch and her son, if it had to be. But at the weird look of the yard all dug up, at the smell and the sight of the corpse and the emptiness and silence and eeriness of it all, their courage had oozed out at their heels. Some—and Pak was one of them—thought it possible they were bewitched and attributed to this the lethargy in their limbs and the leadenness of their feet.
They could all see Bengek now. He was digging at the far edge of the plot of ground where the palm suckers grew right up to the wall. The dogs jumped up at him.
“Bengek!” Krkek called out again, and the husky man looked up and saw them.
They were still a good distance from him, and they did not stir from the spot. They merely held fast to their bamboo poles and breathed hard. Bengek stood motionless for a moment, spade in hand.
“Get out,” he shouted as loudly as his husky voice could. “Leave me alone. I did not ask you to come here. I want nobody’s help. You can go. I won’t speak to you. Go.”
The men were now crowded so closely together that they formed a small compact knot, although there were nearly a hundred of them. Suddenly some of them broke loose and started running for Bengek; they covered the expanse of ground in great bounds, tailing out their knives as they ran. The rest followed, scarcely knowing what they were about. Pak ran, too, and found himself among the foremost with Krkek close at his side.
Bengek leapt on to the wall and swung his spade. “Go,” he shouted, and this time his voice was husky no longer but a loud deep roar. “Go, and leave me alone. This is my place—get out!”
Krkek stopped dead as he ran. He caught hold of the man nearest him and gripped him fast. Those behind charged on and nearly fell over those in front, who stood rooted to the spot and stared at the fisherman.
“Don’t touch him,” Krkek said in a low, breathless voice. “He has the great sickness.”
They stood with their eyes fixed on Bengek, who crouched on the wall ready to defend himself with his spade. Slowly they retreated, for now they could all see it: he had the great sickness—the frightful sickness whose name might never be uttered. They stared at him and they saw his face. It was without eyebrows and bloated, and his thick, swollen ears started from his head; and more terrible than all, he had stuck two large red hibiscus flowers behind those leprous ears.
The men slowly retreated. “The great sickness?” Pak whispered incredulously. “The great sickness, the great sickness, the husky one has the great sickness and the witch is dead,” they all whispered. Krkek looked round and saw a heap of stones, which had broken away from the coral-stone wall. He stooped and picked one up and threw it at the leper. Pak, too, picked up a stone—it was rough and heavy to his hand—and threw it. All the men flung themselves on the stones and hurled them at the wretch on the wall. The dogs jumped and howled when they were hit.
Bengek gazed at the men for a moment as though he did not realize what they were doing. Then he threw away his spade and jumping off the wall ran in great bounds to the beach. They did not follow him and he was soon out of range of their stones, His figure grew smaller and smaller and vanished at last in the prickly scrub which bounded the beach. The tjrorot still uttered its cry and a gust stirred the palm-tops and died away.
“The gods know whom they punish,” Krkek said softly. “We will go to the pedanda and be cleansed.”