~
A decade passed before I returned to Indonesia.
I found myself marooned in Jakarta on my first night. It hadn’t changed much since my last visit. Still the monsoonal air, black-windowed cars, Soviet-era monuments, schools of small blue taxis, beggars overrunning intersections, blocks of car yards littered with smashed-up minibuses – and the smell, fetid, tropical.
Restless, I tracked down a dark padded bar I remembered from my last visit. I found it unchanged. In the gloom I began talking to a young Englishman named Peter, who turned out to be a teacher. Peter had some drinking companions: Arna, a bubbly, talkative, Hispanic-looking Californian, and Donna, a thickish forty-something Londoner accompanied by her twenty-something Indonesian boyfriend, Sawung.
‘Only now do I realise what an impoverished place the West is,’ Arna was saying eagerly as we sat in a line crouched over the bar, ‘the West is spiritually bankrupt. It always has been. All through history it’s only gained spiritual energy by importing it from the East. It’s a debt the West can’t bring itself to acknowledge, but you only have to come to the East to realise how deep a debt it is.’
Peter, new to the country, listened attentively. I listened to catch an echo.
‘The West needs a periodical spiritual influx from the East to satiate its spiritual appetite,’ continued Arna, black eyes flashing, ringed hands animated, ‘because it’s incapable of generating its own spiritual ideas.’
‘Arna always talks like this,’ Donna groaned. ‘Hey, Arna, you left your comparative religion thesis in the drawer at home, remember? Anyway, this isn’t the East. It’s South-East Asia, and it has imported its religion too.’ She cackled, and kissed Sawung, rudely returning him from his thoughts. Sawung either leaned forward trying to keep up with the rapid English, or sat back, eyes straying to other parts of the building, smiling blandly when he thought smiling was required.
‘We’ve grown ashamed of the gods,’ said Arna, ‘ashamed of the whole idea of the divine in the West. We’ve become so limited by our obsession with our individual selves – an obsession born from spiritual bankruptcy – and feeding that same bankruptcy. Now we can’t accommodate a notion of the divine at all, and that’s eroded us, undermined and isolated us. But it’s different here. In Indonesia you can feel the gods, you can feel spirits everywhere, you can feel otherworldly energy –’
‘Rubbish!’ cried Donna, pouring everyone more beer from a jug. ‘Listen, Arna, this country is not what you crank it up to be. This place is filthy, unjust, and it couldn’t be worldlier. It’s a fucking hole where people treat one another like dogs and you know it. Don’t you think so?’ she suddenly asked me.
‘No.’
‘Oh?’
‘Indonesia is a magical place,’ I said, ‘a fateful place.’
The drinkers stared down the line at me, Donna with a sour look.
‘Just when you’re really low something wonderful will happen in this country. Every day something unbelievable happens. That was my experience.’
‘That’s so true!’ cried Arna. ‘What’s your name again? Joel? There’s a kind of free, molten energy here, untamed, running just below the surface, moving and changing all the time. At some point in every day the energy breaks through, and chaos erupts – like it did in a big way in the late sixties, and in the late nineties. Westerners are spellbound by that wild, free energy, because it’s become so rare where we come from. We’ve tamed it, watered it down with our heads and our instruments and our laws. Here there’s a magical energy, a transforming energy –’
‘It’s not bloody magical,’ countered Donna stoutly, ‘I don’t know what you lot are going on about. Are we talking about the same country? Go out in the street – it’s a pigsty!’
‘That’s what your eyes will see,’ said Arna. ‘But for me this place makes us whole again. Only the other evening my friend Wayan took me to this cave in the hills to watch the sun set – it was simply amazing – we’ll have to take you there, Joel – it was the most spiritual experience I have ever had, you could just feel the energy.’
Donna made vomiting motions.
Peter wanted to know more about my experience of Indonesia. Growing maudlin – and these were maudlin days for me, having recently lost my job, and then my partner of the last few years – I told him the story of Danu. ‘I still wonder about her, almost every day. That’s the truth.’ I did not say, because I could not articulate it yet, that I never quite recovered from being inside a fairytale, or rather, failing a fairytale: fairytale reality has an unstoppable resonance.
‘Why didn’t you marry her?’ asked Peter.
‘She loved my brother.’
‘My Indonesian teacher in London told me that she fled an arranged marriage.’
‘Really?’
‘She’s a dish, too. Married to an Englishman. She’s Javanese. Absolutely super teacher. Lovely lady.’
‘She’s Javanese? What’s her name?’
‘Danu.’
The bar, Peter, the glass in my hand, became distant, muted. I was outside of time, above time, the new moment emerging from a sequence of other moments I had thought gone.
‘Danu – your teacher’s name is Danu?’
‘Yes.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Middle, late thirties. Looks younger, though. Stunning – really tall.’
I put down my glass (my fourth or fifth), trying to focus my thoughts.
‘Her husband teaches at the same school back in London. He used to teach English in Indonesia, perhaps about the same time you were here, Joe.’
‘Her husband? What’s his name?’
‘His name’s Tom. They are an odd couple – mismatched, you’d have to say. Poor old Tom. Not the most charming man to look at. But a heart of gold. And he obviously adores Danu.’
‘Tom? Tom – a guy with a big hooked nose –’
‘Yes, that’s him. Lived all over the world, used to teach here in Java, in Bandung. Says Indonesia is the easiest place in the world to live. Yeah. You know Tom?’
The next day I caught the train to Bandung. The train left the station with a reluctant sigh, pausing, nosing through suburbs, trundling through shanty slums, clattering into rice fields. Villages began flitting past. Well-groomed attendants brought trays of miniature orange juice containers and honey roasted peanuts in pint-sized packets of foil. Wherever the train stopped children, crones, people with glazed eyes ran up to the windows, and jiggled snacks, drinks, trinkets, souvenirs, plastic travel pillows. Nothing had changed. Rolling hills, deep ravines, fast-flowing red rivers, glittering green valleys, caldera lakes, fresh volcanoes. The train slid on under steep terraces, the thousands of padi reflecting like scales in the sun. We climbed into higher country, through the tea fields. At intervals the land fell away and we crawled over spindly bridges, far above some red river. Then down again, into flat, all-suffusing equatorial daylight.
I felt guilt about Danu, I realised, as we climbed another mountain side. I had not trusted her enough; I could have helped her more.
I soothed my conscience with the pang of not having got her for myself.
The train began another ascent.
Once I had caught a minibus into the hills with Aki. We were still getting to know one another. We climbed uphill on a narrow red path, away from the road. She wanted to show me a war graveyard. On either side of the path splayed the fingers of forested ridges, reaching down into the caldera of Bandung. The entire city nestled in a bowl below, encircled by hills. The muddy path was embedded with blue stones, liverish from sun showers. Yellow butterflies flitted from stone to stone. The valleys steamed, occasional khaki-coloured clove trees standing out like raised stitches in the canopy. Click, click, the men by the road went to Aki. ‘Mau ke mana, Mister, mau ke mana?’ they called to me.
Rain was hitting the window as the train slid into a siding, alongside a string of shops selling human-sized puppets. Each puppet was a replica of the same image, a devil baring its fangs, and I knew we were close now. Where was Amelia these days?
The train lurched forward again, and I returned to Aki leading me through the hills above Bandung. In a little steamy valley foamed a cloud of dandelions. Aki stooped to pick one, and her face emptied in memory, buttery at the edges. She was standing in the shade of a bamboo thicket, her face moving up and down against the blades of bamboo leaf. In shadow she was green-featured, her lips and eyelids like putty, almost liquid. Behind her the thicket was dense with piping frogs and shrilling insects. Water trickled somewhere close. She puckered her lips, and blew away the frothy-headed dandelion. Beyond the bamboo was revealed a plateau, stretching to a long-sloped volcano in the distance: tiny women dressed in green and gold bent in rows across the watery, shimmering flat, one hand clutched behind their backs. Stringy bare-chested men plunged behind long-horned buffalo, horns that held the sun. We came to an open hut selling drinks by the path. The bottles were stacked in rows – two of crimson, two of lemon, two orange, two lime, the sun illuminating the suspension and the sediment of the lolly drinks. Naked brown children stared, swinging from bamboo poles, as Aki led me behind a screen of gigantic bamboo, to a large and abandoned house.
‘This place was used by the Japanese army,’ she said, and I followed her up the wide wooden staircase.
‘Why so abandoned?’
Because of the ghosts, she said.
The rooms were stripped and graffitied. Monkeys sat in the glassless window panes, suckling young. The joints of bamboo squealed. Geckos dashed over floors and walls. The hallway of animal scats seemed endless, medieval, northern European, of saga-like proportions.
‘Come out of the house,’ called Aki. In a dream I descended the rat-pellet staircase, taken along by her hand. She led me through watery, streaming light, into the dark and darker shadows of the bamboo.
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ she said. ‘It’s not like home.’
Nobody I knew then will be here now, I told myself as the train drew in to Bandung. Except the Idas. And perhaps Ibu.
I visited Ibu the next day. Although a little more stooped and spotted, she was dressed in her familiar green sarong. She called me Emile, sat me down, and said nothing as the maid served us tea. Her house was unchanged. The plastic Sydney Harbour Bridge I had given her ten years before sat on the shelf, dustless and untouched. After I had set her straight about my identity, she asked me what had happened to Emile, who seemed a much clearer figure in her mind than I was. He had done his disappearing trick again, I replied, last heard of in Port Moresby. She called me Emile again as I left.
I had a coffee at the Cafe Vermeer, also oddly unaltered. The next generation of orange waitresses grew sleepy with the afternoon. I decided to put off my visit to the Idas until the next day.
In the cooler hour or so before dark I found myself walking toward Babette’s. Under the monkey tree I looked up. Only a hanging chain remained, and a few slats of rotted wood. I came to the little bridge I had first crossed as a young man.
‘Mau ke mana, Mister, mau ke mana?’
‘Babette’s.’
‘Ah, Ba-betz. Hati-hati, ya?’
Thick woody hibiscus flourished where roses once bloomed. The rose bushes remained only as delicate skeletons. A fresh strand of barbed wire skirted the courtyard wall. The older wire beneath now doubled as a trellis for an orange-flowered creeper. Music tinkled in the evening.
I knocked. In the same movement I turned to go. Too late.
‘Ya, mister?’
‘I’m sorry, I’ve come to the wrong house. I was just going –’
‘Mister Joe! It’s you, you’re back! Don’t you remember me? It’s me, Mira, grown old. Apa kabar?’
‘Baik baik saja … but you look the same, Mira!’
‘Oh, you were always so polite, Mister Joe!’
I tagged along through the courtyard, down the colonnade. Children’s toys were still scattered about. Again an animal stirred in the gloom. On through the door with ironwork on it, then down the stone hall, where a golden-haired girl skipped under candlelight. She stopped before me, large-eyed, green-eyed.
‘Amelia?’ No, Amelia would be older, much older. This girl was nine or ten.
The girl danced through the drape, which had changed to a dark blue material. Mira spoke my name.
‘Come in, Joe,’ called a chiming voice I missed the moment I heard it.
Babette sat where she had always sat, her back to the tapestries. The third tapestry, the one of the lovers, hung where the space had been, yet appeared equally aged as the other two. In the candlelight Babette’s hair showed silver at the temple, otherwise she was unchanged: perhaps her eyes were larger and more luminous than I recalled. I saw and remembered her coral pendant.
The girl sat at the end of the table and stared.
‘Juliette, this is Joe, who we’ve often talked about.’
‘I know all about you,’ announced the girl.
‘Didn’t I tell you that Daddy would be back one day?’
So this is how the story ends, or repeats, or begins. In the years I had been away I had thought of my time here as a long dream. Now that dream was expanding to accommodate a larger dream. The girl would stare at me, and I would look about the room – at the tapestries, at Babette, at the silverware – until my eyes must return to the child. I would be slow with shock. Yet not so slow. After all, hadn’t the scene been rehearsed? The child would grow too tired and be told to go to bed; she could talk to me in the morning, and I could talk to her. And these things happened, until Babette had left the room to kiss Juliette goodnight.
She returned after ten minutes, or ten years. She seemed to expect that we would leave the house together, as if proceeding on something said earlier, something I had not registered. My mind had shrivelled. All I could think was that Babette had changed into something new – yes, she had put on different clothes, although perhaps not new …
‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘I need to get out, Joe. And I’d rather not talk here. Not after all this time.’
‘That dress –’
Babette put her finger to her lips.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked in the courtyard.
‘Where would you like to go?’
‘Somewhere we can be alone.’
‘If you can think of somewhere without people,’ she said, opening the door onto the garden.
‘What about the Japanese caves?’
‘I’ve never been there. And it’ll be dark soon.’
‘It makes no difference in the caves.’
She laughed, and took my hand in the garden, making me light in a way I had thought long dead.
‘Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts, Babette?’
‘Haven’t I met one tonight?’
I must have blanched.
‘Sorry, Joe. Okay, we’ll go to the caves. It doesn’t matter where we go.’
‘We don’t have to go in. I’ve been in, and they’re scary. But they’re in a park, not many people go because – because of the ghosts, and we can walk, and talk. I want to say –’
But Babette put her finger to her lips again. As if I had shouted.
‘All this can wait – first I want to know you again.’
The moment we appeared on the street, a van veered diagonally across several lanes, screeching to a halt at our feet.
We could barely squeeze in. Two facing benches ran either side of the interior: twelve or fourteen faces stared at Babette. Beside us a bug-eyed man equipped with only eye teeth smiled and talked to us eagerly in a dialect we could not understand. He was barefoot, wore threadbare clothes, and clutched a cardboard box, through the top of which an indignant rooster had thrust its head. The head pivoted about. Opposite, two women stared at us coolly, or contemptuously, only their eyes and the broad smooth bridges of their noses showing beneath their head coverings. The eyes were made-up. Four or five youths glowered at the back, baseball caps tugged down hard.
Babette and I were pressed together, and I could not help remembering her through the skin, while watching the van’s boy in the open doorway swinging and crouching and straightening and soliciting, shredding his voice, his free fist quilled with notes and jingling coins. Every time Babette moved with the van, or I pictured the child sleeping in a room of her house, I altered almost physically, as if the parts of me were falling into place.
‘Is this it?’ I asked. The way to the caves had been coming back to me in stages.
A chorus in the van agreed, this was the park, these were the caves, the fellow travellers were suddenly all for us, and the rooster made his burst for freedom, and was nabbed by the tail feathers.
We stepped into the dusk, following a downward path under trees. The tail of the last call in the last mosque withdrew over the dark. Above the path the trees gave way to sheer, bald rock, and we passed the lightless arches of the first tunnels. This was the place I had taken Danu’s hand.
Babette’s hand was shockingly present. She played with my fingers, as if remembering or recognising them, or kneading them into new shapes. She said, ‘I would like to go in.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I want to go in the caves. We’ve come this far.’
We had arrived at the end of the path. Before us rose the dark mouth into the mountain. ‘Hati-hati,’ said the last seller squatting by the way, as we bought candles and matches. The boy looked genuinely worried for us.
The candles would not light. A breeze must have been coming out of the mountain. We had to step aside from the tunnel before the wicks would take. Inside, I was struck by the sonic length of the tunnel: our movements and words echoed far ahead, then increasingly far behind. We walked over a dark, powdered earth, in an air dank and sultry. The roof, appearing when the candles were held high, smoothly arched down to the white plastered walls. No spiders, no bats. Nothing seemed to live down here, although perhaps life went on in the further darkness.
Somewhere earth slid and pattered to the floor, and an hourglass echo relayed from tunnel to tunnel. Babette clutched my hand rather hard, wringing out the past. How soft and limp Danu’s hand had been, as if deboned.
‘It’s a very haunted place,’ Danu had said, smiling.
‘No Indonesian will be here now,’ said Babette, smiling.
‘Does everyone here believe in ghosts?’ I had asked Danu.
‘Do they all sleep with the light on? Do they all refuse to stay in a house alone overnight? Yes, most! You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?’
‘Until I came here I didn’t. But this country is full of them.’
‘People keep encouraging them,’ Danu had said.
‘Look, Babette, there are big rooms and chambers off to the side. That’s where the Japanese kept their stores and ammunition.’ I heard myself repeating Danu’s words. ‘And look, I remember this. Now I know where we are. There’s a painting here I want to show you. It’s been in my mind all this time.’
We had come to a turn in the tunnel. Somewhere about here, Danu had held high the candle, revealing a painting on the wall. I had not noticed it at first. I was taking in how we were reduced to simple features, flashing eyes, indistinct noses, shadowy mouths; how our steps and the brushing of our clothes echoed.
At last the candlelight had settled, and it became clear that the whitewashed walls were covered with paintings. Some merely scribbles, but others constituted an art form of their own, a form developed for this place, a speleological art of banished spirits and inhumed gods. Many more than I remembered.
‘Here it is!’ I said. I held the candle higher.
‘Look who’s here! It’s Ganesh.’
The crowned elephant’s eyes seemed to twinkle, to laugh at being found. Ganesh, at least, remained unaltered.
‘The witch Rangda’s down this tunnel.’ So again Danu was speaking through me. She might be here now, moving the candle across my face, before walking confidently down a passage, familiar with where she was going: the lower half of her face smiled, and for the first time I looked at the two dark points rising under her shirt.
‘I can’t believe you don’t have to have a religion in your society,’ said Danu, cerebral to the last, ‘but then what do people believe in?’
‘Desire seems rather popular these days – that’s what a lot of my friends and acquaintances seem to believe in, at least.’
‘They say all is clouded by desire.’
‘“As fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust.”’
‘Oh, very good. I knew you were spiritual.’
‘No, just a reader.’
‘My candle went out.’
‘See Babette, that’s Rangda. Remember when Amelia cursed me as Rangda? What?’
‘Don’t step on it.’
I followed her finger, pointing from our joined hands.
A butterfly, double aqua, had unfolded at our feet, and stood puttering in silence, as if for take-off.
Wind gathered inside the mountain and came the enormous butterfly’s way. A run of debris rippled, and the wings set. Danu got blown out into the night, and I had landed in the cave with Babette.
‘You’re changing before my eyes, Joe.’
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t look.’
‘Do you want to go back?’
‘I do want to go back.’
Back to peep at the tropical child.
But first to be pinned in the black, fathoms below, with all the colours.