Among the Dead
My friend Hannes was a diminutive dandy with a noble- looking cranium, thick black swept-back hair, and a ring with a skull on it. Above and beyond being my friend, he was also my mentor, who would occasionally deliver mumbled monologues on such subjects as the portrayal of death on Mexican sacrificial mounds, the mummified corpse catacombs in Palermo or the necrophiliac wood engraver José Posada and his prints of the Dance of Death. Hannes was an avid collector of images of death from anywhere and everywhere: in folklore, scrapbook pictures or in kitsch items from the turn of the nineteenth century.
His entire flat, in an old building with winding corridors, a real warren of a place, was peopled with skeletons – grinning, dancing, riding, grave-digging, guarding, copulating, always grotesque figures with large, reproachful eye sockets. Friends and visitors had differing views on the collector’s passion that had brought this assemblage of objects together. Yet Hannes, who wasn’t much given to introspection, had little interest in the theory behind them; he was merely objectifying his own fear. His real motivation in assembling this collection, rather, was to observe the human imagination in its preoccupation with letting death run riot in the world while remaining somehow oblivious to its own mortality.
As a direct result of this, Hannes set great store by everything corporeal. It was just that he invested greater trust in the body in its spontaneous manifestations of life than he did in any moral code. He ascribed a certain intelligibility to functions like sex, puking, shitting, pissing, coughing, farting, blushing or getting an erection; blood, semen and other bodily fluids, they all meant something to him, they were all quite literally expressions of life.
Then, one day, I was preparing to set off to Southeast Asia for a year, where Sulawesi – or Celebes, as the island was still called back then, just as Jakarta had once been called Batavia and Ujung Pandang Macassar – was also on my itinerary. I said goodbye to Hannes, who got up from his desk, which was covered in death’s-head netsukes, to let me hug and kiss him farewell, and in return he dispensed the following advice:
‘If you really do make it to Sulawesi, then you’ve got to go to Toraja Land, in the Rantepao region! You’ll see the famous pile dwellings there with their brightly painted saddle-shaped roofs, and if you get the chance you must attend one of their funeral ceremonies. They’ve got a couple of the most original death cults in the entire world there.’
For sure, I’d heard of those tall pile houses, swooping dwelling-ships with bamboo roofs and built entirely without nails; they also boasted painted friezes on the gable ends, extensive carvings and buffalo skulls hung on the façades opposite the rice stores. The Toraja were a fabled people, descended from a race of Cambodian seafarers who had fled their original home on the coast when they were threatened by Muslim invasion and made their way into the interior of the orchid-shaped island, where they finally settled in a series of remote valleys.
They fell between various religions. Though basically animistic, espousing the belief that the dead lived on in the places they had inhabited in life, they did assume some elements of Islam into the practice of their religion, and likewise some Christian elements too with the arrival of the first missionaries.
I travelled most of the long route from Ujung Pandang, the capital of Sulawesi, to the highland region of Tan Toraja sitting on the roof of the public bus, amidst pieces of luggage, two cages containing valuable turkeys, and three youths playing cards, whose interest in me quickly evaporated when we found we had no language in common. The only person I struck up a reasonably fluent conversation with was Michael, an earnest student who was heading back home to attend a family celebration.
‘So, what brings you here?’ he asked me.
‘I wanted to disappear.’
‘And are you managing to?’
‘Like a shadow.’
‘But a shadow doesn’t cut stone.’
We kept on talking in this curious vein. He bade me farewell in a very cosmopolitan way when, at the first bus stop on the territory of the Toraja region, I clambered down from the bus roof to try and find somewhere to stay. I was very close to getting sunstroke, and for the next two days the severe sunburn that I’d suffered while sitting up on the roof laid me low with a fever in a losmen, one of those family guesthouses you find throughout Indonesia.
Determined to press on into the more remote village areas, I set out on foot on the third day. The rice paddies were shimmering so brightly in the sun that it hurt my eyes; the fresh, bright green of the new plants seemed to be alive with the constant breeze that blew through the grasses and the monochrome paddyfields. Nowhere was the elegant asymmetry of Southeast Asia displayed better than in this landscape, and I ventured, sometimes walking and sometimes hitching a ride from one village to the next, ever deeper into the rural life.
But one evening, as I was walking down a narrow sunken lane overgrown by high grasses on either side, I was pulled up short by an apparition: there, motionless on the crown of the farm track in front of me like a great white buffalo, stood the unlikeliest of vehicles – a limousine. The wide-eyed Indonesian driver, who sat with both hands gripping the steering wheel, really was wearing a chauffeur’s uniform, and he too was paralyzed with astonishment, perhaps because the sight of me coming along this hollow lane was just as surprising to him as he was to me, sitting there in his UFO.
I started to approach the car, but halfway there the rear door was opened, though I couldn’t hear or see much else. The driver turned his head to face me, but did not signal to me in any way. When I finally drew level with the open door and bent down to peer inside, I was met by the sight of a slim American dressed in a white suit sprawling elegiacally across the back seat, clutching an ice-misted glass of mineral water in his left hand and wearing the expression of someone truly decadent and elegantly depraved.
After a brief exchange of words by way of examination, which I evidently passed, my bag was stowed in the boot and I was permitted to sink back into the air-conditioned depths of the back seat alongside the American, sipping ice-cold water and giving him my take on travel.
As I did so, the man, a heart surgeon with an abundance of money and phobias, kept casting glances out of the window, like he was duty bound to do so. But he soon grew bored of this. He was mildly interested, but clearly quite pleased with himself in a disgruntled kind of way, and in the one week of annual vacation he had remaining had hired an Indonesian chauffeur to drive him through the jungle. The driver came from nearby Rantepao, but was resident in the USA at present as a student, so he no longer came across as quite so Indonesian.
‘Anyhow, I’ll start again,’ the driver said, at which the doctor gave a pained smile. ‘So there’s this guy sitting on a pump at a gas station …’ The doctor smiled at me apologetically. ‘And jerking off.’ The doctor shrugged his shoulders indulgently, as if to say okay, in for a penny … ‘And this woman comes along and says: “Tell me, is that normal?” No, the guy replies, it’s Super.’
‘Very funny,’ said the surgeon lugubriously and sank back into the protection of the limo, which, I later learned, he didn’t like to step out of, even when visiting temples.
But when he did get out on one occasion, to take a photo from the top of a hill, the chauffeur lost no time in rattling off his litany of woe to me: he scarcely got anything to eat, and definitely no meat on any account, he wasn’t allowed to smoke even out in the open, he was required to tell gags on a running basis, and on top of all that it was by no means clear what his passenger wanted from the trip. I must admit, the idea behind this journey was a bit of a mystery to me too; he seemed to be deliberately avoiding all the well-known sights and taking in everything else from the protecting cocoon of the limo.
When the surgeon came back, he asked the driver:
‘What shall we go and see next?’
Ineptly, the chauffeur began to describe a nearby temple, and the surgeon listened with half-closed eyes, while pulling a face. The tireless man behind the wheel brought his florid narrative to a close with the flourish: ‘… an unforgettable moment!’ But the traveller would no doubt just let this wash over him as well; scanning the paddyfield landscape for some fixed point, he asked:
‘And this evening?’
‘This evening we’ll climb Mount Pedang, where you’ll get a view over the whole of Rantepao, and we’ll see the sunset too. And this will be another unforgettable moment.’
It now dawned on me that this was the whole point of the trip. The surgeon found himself in the merciless grip of the chauffeur, who was leading him round by the nose; the driver had found the magic formula by which he could keep dragging the lukewarm traveller around, making him endure the hardships of a long-distance journey: namely, the great promise of moving from one ‘unforgettable moment’ to another. Ultimately, then, he’d be back in his hospital in his home town of Denver, Colorado; the operating theatre doors would swing shut behind him, but he’d still have these personal ‘unforgettable moments’ packed away in his hand luggage, and he’d tell his colleagues about the trip, and as he recounted it he’d begin to find everything he’d experienced ‘unforgettable’ himself for the first time. For, after all, who wouldn’t wish to snatch a moment worthy of this description from the stream of experience, and how might one tempt a person who had no time for any conventional tourist sight or anything of architectural, cultural or historical significance? With a nameless and unforgettable sight, that was how.
For the duration of twilight, in the company of the clueless medico, I enjoyed the splendour of an unforgettable sundown, which in fact on that particular evening turned out to be eminently forgettable. Banks of cloud stolidly closed over the horizon and refused to part to give us an unrestricted view. And so the sun set morosely. I took my leave of the surgeon and also bade farewell to his driver, who gave me a complicit smile as we parted.
And, without turning round, I made for the first obvious losmen on the main square in Rantepao.
‘Hey, Mystère!’
This piercing and pushy, imperious sound is constantly in the air whenever you enter a square here. ‘Hey, Mister’ is what they mean … ‘come here, buy this, listen, buy me, be mine …’ But this time it had an ironic tone. Michael, my serious-minded travelling companion from the bus roof, had caught sight of me and was hailing me from the veranda. That evening, we dined on pili pili with a heavy peanut sauce, and the next day I went with him to his grandfather’s funeral, which was due to take place in his home village half a day’s journey away.
By the time we arrived, the ritual of slaughtering buffaloes had just begun. For two years, the family of Michael’s grandfather, who had been eldest man in the village, had stored the old man’s embalmed body, while saving up money to buy water buffaloes – fifty of them no less, and expensive white ones at that – which in the Afterlife would embody strength, influence and prosperity. While the female family members performed loud lamentations over the corpse, the men sat up on a raised dais and looked down on Golgotha, the place of the skulls, where the magnificent beasts were being sacrificed beneath the slashing knives of their slaughterers, who wielded them in dance-like arabesques.
The blade opens up the animal’s neck. The bull rears up like some swaggering hoodlum and gives a haughty stare. Initially its reaction is one of perplexity, displaying unbridled joy like a dog greeting its returning master, leaping up, stretching and flexing its body in the air. Then, with a violent twist of its head, it notices the pain of the wound, tries to correct its stance but can now only dance clumsily, much to the amusement of the seated onlookers. It lowers its head, as if searching for something on the ground, or wanting to plough the ground, then flings it back like it’s in a catatonic fury. This movement only serves to open up the wound still wider, like a wet mouth, before the animal presses its neck down once more between its front hooves like it’s trying to stem the flow of blood.
But the blood spills out all the same, and the animal’s musculature, spasming violently, manifests itself first as a shudder, then a shaking, a trembling and finally just a faint flickering motion across its flanks. And the buffalo bull falls to the ground, slumps down, bellowing into the pool of blood that’s flowing out of its own massive bulk, with its eyes wide open, displaying pathetic astonishment, and a swishing tail and panting lips. And there, lying in a puddle of foamy, frothedup blood mixed with gravel and saliva, the light in the beast’s trusting eyes finally falters and fails.
Eventually, death passes across its features like nothing more than a minor discomfort. The kids cut the switches off the tails of the colossal stranded beasts, and tread with their big toes on the animals’ death-dulled eyeballs, pressing them down into the sockets. Later, they dig the eyes out completely, and play a barefoot version of marbles with them. But before long they’re all covered in sand and won’t roll properly anymore. So they swish them around individually in a dish of water. Sometimes, the buffaloes’ backs keep on twitching after their death. The body appears to have abandoned itself entirely to the flight of the soul, and just dies away to nothing.
The men look on unmoved. An easy thing to do provided you’re not the young man who cleaned the afterbirth off the new-born calf when it emerged from its mother’s womb, or who led the young animal out onto the pasture and watched it grow to adulthood, or who nursed it through sickness and lavished it with tender care, who put its nose ring in, and who, finally, led it by this nose ring to the slaughtering festival. Only as it’s dying does the animal perhaps exhibit anything unfamiliar, which was hidden deep inside while it was still alive: a temper, a feverishness, a wantonness. This fervour that evidently lay dormant inside the animal is totally out of place, the young man reckons, and this readiness to twist its body as far as it will go, to the utmost degree, ultimately makes the animal seem quite alien to him.
We were sitting up on the gallery, eating meat from the freshly slaughtered buffaloes with black wild rice, drinking fermented palm wine from a bamboo tube, and testifying through our presence to the importance of the deceased. The cacophony produced by the wailing laments of the mourner women, the death bellows of the buffaloes and the cheering of the children did not abate for quite a while. At around two in the morning we went down to the river to wash ourselves:
‘The spirits have taken the fat off our skin into the rivers,’ Michael whispered, which I didn’t understand but which I could feel nevertheless.
Later we climbed up the chicken ladder into one of the saddle-shaped hut roofs, disappearing through a hatch cut in the carved frieze. The loft-space smelt of warm blood, which was still steaming up off the sand below. The aroma of the slaughter had got trapped beneath the eaves. Two candles burning in candle-holders next to our bunks illuminated a dreadful picture of a bare-breasted Andalusian woman riding on a donkey, a painting which Michael’s parents had hung up ten years ago, since they feared that the guest who had once given it to them might return and wonder where it was.
We were already lying in bed when Michael suddenly sat up again:
‘Do you want to meet my grandmother?’
We each took a holder, lit the candles, and groped our way into the adjoining room, where she was lying immediately behind the door in a cot, embalmed for a year now, and with her torso so caved-in it looked like she’d been eviscerated. Her cheeks glowed with a yellowish-brown patina. From her closed eyes, the old lady stared into the light cast by our candles.
‘You can take photos,’ Michael whispered.
Only when enough money had been collected to purchase an appropriate number of sacrificial buffaloes – and under no circumstances should there be fewer than twenty – would the family be able to bury the old woman. Then she’ll have been properly provided for in the Afterlife, and only then will they begin to mourn her death, as keenly as if it had only happened yesterday.
The next day we escort the oldest man in the village – whose black coffin is splendidly adorned with a white cross – on his final journey, a loose procession that wends its way through the rice paddies, a rivulet of mourners, which sometimes became strung out and at other times came together in a cluster once more, where a stream was difficult to ford. As the coffin made its way across, it swayed about on the shoulders of the pallbearers before straightening up once more. But all the while the sun was shining, the larks were singing and the idyll was perfect.
A good hour later, we came to the foot of a cliff, where human skulls lay piled high, while above, in niches cut into the rock, wooden idols stared down; one of them depicted a missionary wearing a solar topi. My guide, though, had declined to come with me.
‘I’ve got a sick child at home,’ he explained, ‘it’s best I don’t walk past the cliff burial site.’
Now the coffin was lifted into one of the recesses in the cliff face and the ceremony was concluded. The long period of waiting for this moment finally, then, had an end. A sense of relief hung in the air, and on the return journey Michael expounded his theory of why Western women had larger breasts than Asians: it stood to reason, he maintained, since the former had originally carried their babies around on their backs, that in order to feed them they had to be able to sling their breasts over their shoulders. He burbled away happily to himself on the subject as we walked. The procession had dispersed by now, and a disordered ragbag of small groups made their way back to the village, and as the veiled sun sank behind the line of hills, I sensed that an ‘unforgettable moment’ was in the offing in these final hours.
A few days later – in the meantime, I’d pushed on to the north of Sulawesi – I began my homeward journey by taking the night bus to Ujung Pandang. Eight hours’ travel lay ahead of me, which I’d have to endure on the back seat of this ancient, rugged vehicle with its peeling yellow paintwork and its leatherette upholstery in ox-blood red. The passengers got onto the bus carrying woven baskets, canisters, rattan furniture, sacks of cloves, huge clusters of colourful plastic bags, fruit and eggs. Water ices, slices of coconut, sticky rice, and biscuits were passed through the open windows, and the pater familias sitting next to me spread a rug out over his own lap and those of his two small sons. Then he put a handkerchief up to his nose, as did other locals on the bus, because many Asians can’t endure the smell given off by Europeans.
The bus hadn’t been rocking through the night for very long before one of the boys next to me sicked up his water ice, closely followed by his brother. They didn’t vomit out their food extravagantly, nor did they cough it up; rather, what they had eaten simply fell out of their faces and into the rug, which their father had clearly laid out for this very purpose. It wasn’t long before the woman on the seat in front of me followed the kids’ lead, and from the front of the bus too came the soft gurgling sound of people being sick. The slipstream carried the smell of vomit out of the window, where it swirled around and re-entered the bus two windows further back. All this, however, did nothing to disrupt or dampen the cheerful atmosphere, or the ebb and flow of chat and laughter.
The next time the bus stopped, the children were given their next portion of water ice, and I fell to wondering how I might explain to the father that this would in due course go the same way as all ice. But the terms ‘stomach’, ‘empty’, ‘nausea’, or ‘get well soon’ didn’t seem to be in my Indonesian–German dictionary; instead, all I could find was a series of obscure archaisms and hilarious misspellings, including the mysterious phrase ‘a stunted footprint’, which I’ve never encountered anywhere else, before or since. So, when I tried to get my meaning across to the father by miming it to him, all he did was smile benevolently at me, say ‘no harm done’, and, when the next wave of nausea announced itself, roll the sick-rug up a bit more so that the boys would have a clean piece of material to relieve themselves into.
In the meantime, night had drawn in, and the stars were so low in the sky that you could have mistaken them for light on the hills. The kids had fallen asleep. Anyone who got up to stretch their legs in the corridor took care to lift their feet up high to avoid the streams of vomit on the bus floor. The driver hurtled down the dirt roads at breakneck speed. He was keen to get the journey over and done with as fast as possible; after all, he only had to set off immediately again at dawn to do it in the opposite direction. For ages, we didn’t see any street lights or settlements, but just kept heading directly towards the faint, distant point of light that danced in front of the speeding vehicle. I hunkered down on the step next to the driver; he was happy to let me sit there in exchange for a few pleasantries and the sense that we’d help keep one another awake.
Nevertheless, I found myself woken with a start from halfslumber by a sudden bang, dull and metallic in equal measure, and when the driver reacted by abruptly swerving to try and compensate retrospectively for the force of the impact, I hadn’t yet regained my senses sufficiently to brace myself, and was flung across the bus floor.
The bus came to a halt on the edge of a maize field. The gravel road shone brightly in the glare of the headlights, the bank was a lush green colour and the sultry wind tasted in its top notes of flowers and grass. Yet in the right-hand ditch was a black gents’ bicycle with twisted handlebars and a sack lashed to its carrier, while on the left-hand side of the road lay its rider, an old man, who’d been killed on the spot. He was bent, too, contorted into a Figura Serpentinata like on a Mannerist sculpture, with his bare head twisted toward the moonlight and an unfocussed, vacant face. A wet patch was spreading across his crotch.
The other passengers now stumbled out into the road behind the driver and me. One of them went up to the body and turned it over out of respect; the old man’s face was frozen in an expression that looked like a pantomimic rictus of toothache. Others only glanced over briefly at what had happened, shook their legs or stretched themselves, while the pater familias walked over to the ditch to clean off his sick-rug.
As there was nothing more to be done for the dead man, a few maize leaves were laid over his face, the bike was placed at his side like it was his wife, and a note made of where the accident had taken place, so that we could inform the police when we got to Ujung Pandang. Then we set off again.
When we arrived in the capital of Sulawesi in the early hours of the following day, it was my birthday, so I indulged myself by opting, for the first time in ages, for the first good hotel I could find. It was all I could do to maintain my composure when, after taking my passport and noting down my details, the receptionist extended his hand across the counter and said:
‘Happy Birthday!’
After showering, I strolled down to the main post office, took delivery of fifteen letters that were waiting for me, and opened them one by one lying on the soft hotel bed, reading them slowly so that I didn’t get through them all too fast. The last letter was from a familiar address in Cologne, and I laughed the instant I pulled it out of the envelope and saw from the decorative border that it was a wedding invitation.
But at a second glance, it turned out to be a death notice, which succinctly and starkly informed me that my friend Hannes had passed away a month ago. Nothing more, no explanation. The funeral was of course now long past, but I read the few words printed on the card over and over again, trying to fathom what had happened, but I got nowhere. For the first time, I looked homewards and saw nothing but emptiness; I pictured a funeral parlour, where all the mourners were turned away from one another, I saw the cortège, with everyone looking at the ground, and the tear-streaked faces, and I imagined someone putting on a Charlie Parker record at the graveside. We had our rituals in Europe too, after all, and Hannes was a mischievous character who’d be bound not to observe them.
I could never have guessed it, but now it struck me that I’d been gravitating towards this piece of news right from the outset, down a flight of steps, from the killing of the buffaloes and the attendant rituals, through the viewing of the mummified grandmother, to the dead cyclist by the roadside. Hannes would have approved of the theatricality of the story, not least because of the abundance of cadavers and corpses, the slaughter and the puking, and the stupid phrases in my bilingual dictionary, and because of the simple, slightly sentimental symbolism: a dead man is left lying there, while the others journey on.
I didn’t leave the hotel again that day, because this terrible ‘unforgettable moment’ just dragged on and on and seemed to have no end.