Island of Demons Read online

  “What,” I asked, “is it about?”

  Walter groaned and grimaced, grasped at the air as though trying to force it into solid form. “Oh god! Look Bonnetchen, the problem with understanding Balinese culture lies not in the answers but the questions. It may be hours before anyone lets on what story we are talking about and they are not here for a story but a performance. The thing is, most of the dialogue here is as unintelligible to them as it is to you. Think only of the form. It is oddly like the cinema, less movement than a series of static poses that they switch a couple of times a second.”

  I gave up.

  The smallest girl, surely not more than eight or ten, took her place in the centre of the clearing and, as if electrified by a sudden chord from the orchestra, contracted her body into an intense pose – arms raised, knees flexed, hands spread and fingers curled backwards into claws. At a sign from the drum, she careered rapidly, whole body trembling, round the circle of onlookers, fingers aflutter, eyes flashing back and forth in perfect discipline. Her face fixed in an empty stare, she came to rest and contorted her body into jagged patterns of physical counterpoint, then scooped up two closed fans lying on the ground and danced, her whole body transformed into angular geometry. The other two were suddenly animated by the music, snapped into rhythmic harmony with her – fingers, eyes and feet blazing in the gathering darkness. Then the fans were handed to the two main dancers who flipped them open and transitioned into a dance à deux as the musicians crashed into a thundering new theme, their hands a blur but their faces totally calm and remote, the rest of their bodies detached. A wall of sound buffeted our faces, like the wind at Uluwatu, the two sides of the orchestra resonating against each other, the air itself become an electrified force that raised our hair and seemed to draw sparks from our flesh. Former performers in the audience fell silent. Eyes blank, they undulated their shoulders in sympathy as their bodies resonated to the remembered motions literally drummed into them in childhood. The two dancers snapped necks and eyes back and forth, fans an invisible blur, approached their faces to each other, shuddered their shoulders. They swooped and dived, limbs in constant zig-zagging motion and perfect synchronicity, yet remaining, themselves, cool, remote, perfectly adult. I was transported, expunged of gross matter, swallowed into the golden shower of music and movement.

  Walter smiled. “You see. Bonnetchen. The Balinese have no word for ‘artist’. These are farm girls. Those musicians there are just illiterate farm boys. They come every night and practise after hours of driving a buffalo through the mud or ripping out weeds with bent backs. In the old days, aristocrats studied music but less now than before. The point is, when they play together, distinctions of caste are suspended. Lord and labourer sit side by side and both are told what to do by a penniless drummer. What you see here is a thousand little details, endlessly perfected over hundreds of hours of repetition so that whole thing can seem effortless and unstudied. Art here is a way of life, a form of communal understanding – not just for madmen like me and you – a means through which the whole hamlet expresses and feels itself.”

  My face, I knew, was white and drained. I had seen, perhaps, too much at one sitting, a sort of visual and conceptual indigestion. His hand was gentle on my arm.

  “Enough for now. You’ve had a long day. You’re watching as if we were in a Western theatre and that’s not the way. Time we left.”

  We walked back to the car, the music still zithering in my ears. Resem and Badog tumbled with bony adolescence into the back. A man in some sort of tinsely theatrical costume, clearly one of the actors out of role, approached and pressed a package, wrapped in banana leaves, into Walter’s hands.

  “Spit-roast pig.” He waggled his eyebrows. “How very kind. Our dinner. And now home with quickety.”

  “With quickety?” Already I was dozing.

  “With the allgreatest quickety.”

  ***

  I slipped a long shirt over my bare and tingling body and tip-toed from my room, out into the warm night, the air like velvet on my face, all my senses sharpened, slipping into the skin of Luigi, renowned landing lizard and great deflowerer of virgins. My heart pounded and I felt as if I had been long marinated in some sweet southern wine. My whole body throbbed with incipient tumescence as I slithered with bare feet – “chicken feet” in Malay – over the dusty concrete paths and touchtoed silently down the steps outside the boys’ hut and, there, paused to listen. From inside came a faint but reassuring snoring. Then through the arched doorway of the living room, carefully across the floor, avoiding, this time, the sharp table edge, and up the stairs with mounting excitement and proud erection, hugging the wall, shirt carelessly snagged by the fangs of a carved monster and to the door of Walter’s room. That door, you will recall, had been carved, like many of the other doors of the house, by a master of the art, this one with a representation of the bodiless demon, Kala Rahu, eating the moon and so causing an eclipse, rendered merely temporary by the monster’s absence of body and digestive organs. Much later, a German writer would visit Walter and spend a morning going round the house asking the boys to tell him the tales of legend and folklore engrossed on each door. He wrote them down, added a few quick Beardsleyesque sketches, banged it all together as a book, and – behold – become an acknowledged world traveller and expert on the Balinese – enjoyed a bestseller. Yes, I am delaying opening that door, for I know all too well what lies beyond. The Balinese do not make complicated door fastenings, a simple hasp and loop, the flap pushed open to reveal a room bathed in bright moonlight, the great bed stark in the midst of it, and there in the bed … the mosquito net pushed up – because of the altitude there are seldom mosquitoes in Ubud, hence my being sent here by Dr Stove in Denpasar. There in the bed … designed by Walter, unhappily built in and so a refuge for cockroaches, scorpions and other undesirable experiences – I never would put my hand in any cupboard of that house without checking first for infestation. There in the bed, the sheets thrown off from heat, not one form but two. One Walter, quite naked – I had time to note the scooped pelvis and finely corded thighs – the other a young, slender, brown body preserving its modesty in a sarong, one arm around Walter, the face buried in the pillow and obscured by the mass of tousled, black hair. I stopped dead.

  It must, surely, be one of the boys – Badog or Resem – Oleg would be too chubby and too young. I was embarrassed, an intruder, but could not tear my eyes away. Perhaps this was not a sexual propinquity, mere Balinese comradely affection, like Resem with his head in Badog’s lap at Uluwatu, or had it been the other way round? But then I thought back to Walter’s loud announcement to the boys at dinner – we ate most practically off banana leaves that were then dropped in the river – that they should make up the bed in the room at the back – my room – and ensure I had towels. It was not, as I had assumed, the boys being thrown off our trail, it was the hint being dropped – to them – that Walter was now available for nighttime visitation. Which one had been in the room? I could not now remember. They stirred in sleep as if feeling the weight of my gaze but perhaps they were simply lost in fevered dreams of angels. I moved, as in a dream myself, back past the eclipse, back to the landing, sat on the top step with my knees about my ears, my head in my hands and my future plans in ruins. My erection shrivelled and tried, hooded with shame, to creep back inside me to die. How had I dared to imagine that this was it, my spiritual soulmate finally found, my lifetime destiny finally made clear? My night with Walter had been no more than my free welcoming cocktail at the Bali Hotel, the basket of complimentary fruit about to putrefy if not swiftly bestowed, the chocolate placed, with corporate insincerity, on my pillow. Walter had said that in Bali he loved humanity in general which meant, I now saw, that he was in love with no one in particular.

  6

  This was my sixth day at Walter’s place. We had roared all over the island in the Whippet. I had seen palaces and temples in the northern style, the archaic style, the water style. I had seen an
tiquities – confidently appraised as pre-Hindu, early Hindu and Buddhist. I had seen temple festivals and tooth-filing and naming ceremonies. I had seen warrior dances and sacred drama and masked dances – women dressed as men, men as women. Yesterday, Walter had needed to go down to Denpasar and I had refused the proffered generous offer of a ride fuelled by the petrol I had paid for, preferring a quiet day at home – that is at Walter’s place.

  Badog and Oleg and the short dark woman, Mas, who cooked and performed other kitchen mysteries had gone with Walter and the house was limpidly calm in their wake. In the early morning, Mas had pottered about disposing little trays of flowers, joss sticks and other offerings at doorways and other strategic points to ensure safety from demonic molestation. The air was heavy with the scent. Pigeons fluttered and cooed on the roof. The Balinese set little tubes of bamboo under their wings so that, as they fly the birds play a sort of susurrating music. Resem had brought me – unrequested – a cup of coffee on an exquisitely woven tray. Milk was too complicated in that house so we all drank our coffee black but, in the corner of the tray, he had set a perfect, long-stamened hibiscus blossom, freshly plucked. Another was tucked behind his ear. I sat and sipped and watched the dust motes dance in the air and savoured comforting warmth and straw and wood smells from the building and rested my eyes on the muted gold of ancient carvings and soft-hued cloths. Faint sounds of village life filtered in from outside, shouts and laughter and the happy cries of children or the clop of horses’ hooves on the road all steeped in the cleansing rush of the river. The evil monkeys had been lured away by their wild comrades on some mischievous expedition into the fields and none of them had been seen for days. Later this morning, when I was soothed and steadied, I must, I knew, get down to drawing. I had taken in so much that was new and produced, as I saw from flipping through my sketchbook, virtually nothing – a few outlines of ornate temple gateways, the odd bare-breasted female study – mere doodles that could be worked later into some bigger project. I was bloated and distended with novelty and too many emotions.

  Outside reality burst in as the clatter of boots on the steps and a rapping at the door and a Dutch voice calling whether anyone was at home. Clearly Mas’ offerings did not work against Dutchmen. I thought at once of bailiffs. Resem appeared and hovered nervously, I looking at him, he at me, as if to say that Dutchmen must be my business. Sighing, I went to the door where stood a short fat man, red-faced and sweating into his moustache. I recognised Smit, the controleur of Gianyar. My face was the only licence he needed to push his way in.

  “Bonnet, I think. Wondered where you’d got to. Thought to find you at the resthouse. We don’t too much like our nationals coming here and getting lost. Makes paperwork if nothing else.”

  Walter had adopted the Balinese practice of removing shoes at the door. None of that for Smit. He stamped in roughshod, hobnails ploughing into the floor like a tank crossing a field, and sat down uninvited in a creaking rattan chair, throwing his hat onto the table and revealing cropped, grey hair. The hat had left a red line all the way round his head, making him ridiculous.

  “Coffee!” he barked at Resem who looked at me. As resident European, therefore substitute householder, I shrugged weak permission and he bustled off to the kitchen. Smit slid a packet of Thomas Bear’s Elephant cigarettes out of his side pocket and lit one, no pretence of social manners, dropping the expired match on the floor. “No Walter?” he asked.

  “You just missed him. He’s gone to Denpasar.” I tried not to sound pleased at his inconvenience but then it struck me that if he had been at the resthouse, he would have heard the car just leaving and known he was not here. He reached for my sketchbook, without asking leave, and flicked through, pausing and puckering his lips ruminatively at the bare breasts.

  “That reminds me,” he smirked. “We had a complaint about you.” Resem glided in bearing coffee without benefit of artful tray or hibiscus flowers and set it down.

  “Me? Are you sure?” I was genuinely shocked. Who could have complained? No one even knew I was here.

  He smiled happily, set down his cigarette, sipped coffee, making me wait, swallowed and burnt himself, not having waited long enough. “Damn and blast!” He spat back hot coffee through scorched lips. “It seems there was some incident involving a half-caste, man called Niemeyer. Seems you knocked up his daughter on the boat on the way over.” He leered. “Well, he’s made a complaint, accusing you of moral degeneracy.” He shook his head sadly and smiled on. “This is not Holland you know. Here we have a duty of care, have to protect the natives from bad influences.” He looked down at the sketch as if it provided clinching evidence of bad influence.

  “Niemeyer? But that was nothing to do with me. I don’t … didn’t. I suggest you look elsewhere for the penetrator … the perpetrator.” I blushed.

  He blew slow smoke. “Thing is, a complaint’s been made and it stays on your file. Now Niemeyer, being Eurasian, is not, strictly speaking, a native and I’d be the last to begrudge a young man the right to give his tubes the odd blow through, just for his health’s sake if nothing else. Nothing wrong with a bit of brown. Stimulates the appetite. We all like a bit now and then. We don’t ask you to be a saint, just to show a little discretion, old man, keep up a bit of front, if you see what I mean. If you can’t control which way you point that thing, I suggest you get yourself a Johnny Hancock.” I was back with my father on the docks, engaged in embarrassing intimacy, or at school learning about rutting rabbits. At any moment, he would move to the blackboard and draw diagrams. His wife, I knew, was an aridly Christian creature. I wondered how she would take his advice.

  “Is that what you do?” I snapped. “Thank you,” I said stiffly, “I have already made all necessary arrangements.”

  He got up and began to inspect the furniture and fittings like an impertinent prospective tenant, then went and stood on the terrace, looking down at the river, thrust his hand deep into his pocket and juggled his balls as one might a handful of loose change.

  “You know why this house is here, don’t you? It’s not for the view or the peace and quiet. They gave Walter this land because it’s near the graveyard and in the river valley, both areas for demons, witches, that sort of thing. Makes you wonder just what they think of him, doesn’t it? It’s the sort of place they chase off lepers to live in. No Balinese would ever live here at any price. Be scared to death and get ill just from the worry, like as not. Seen it happen loads of times. How does he get his boys to stay, I wonder? What is it he’s got?” I thought maybe I knew precisely what it was that he had but wasn’t about to tell Smit. He returned to the table and drained the now-cooled coffee and turned on his heels with a smug driven-by-duty look on his face. As he reached the door, he turned.

  “Of course, it cuts both ways,” he remarked as if the thought had just struck him. “With your record, I mean. Records out here often get lost. I often wonder exactly what goes on this household.” He waved his hat around the room. “As a loyal Dutchman, I’m sure you’ll let me know of anything untoward.” He did a bit more of the ball juggling and clapped his hat on his shaven head. I shook his proffered hand with deep reluctance and his feet clumped up the steps, leaving me feeling defiled and demeaned.

  Resem returned to clear the cups with deft, coltish motions. I was aware of the exaggerated tilt of his thigh, the extraordinary length and thickness of his eyelashes.

  “Resem is a dancer?” I asked.

  He smiled with downcast eyes. “Before. Now I am too old.” Bali, it seemed, was full of elderly youth. I offered him one of Walter’s cigarettes, a Mascot No.7, from the elegant sandalwood box on the table. He hesitated, then accepted, received the light with grace. I did not smoke myself, but took one and lit it and mimed smoking for companionship’s sake.

  “Has Tuan Walter ever painted Resem?”

  He exhaled through dilated nostrils and looked at his cigarette in appreciation. “He does not paint people, only places, fields, volcanoes. Sometime
s there are people there but not real people, people from Tuan Walter’s head only.”

  “How would it be if I drew Resem’s portrait?”

  He was aghast, hand to bare chest in a gesture from the silent films. “Why would Tuan Rudi want to draw me? I am ugly.” He held out his forearm in proof. “I am dark.”

  A simple, flat statement. This was no coyness on his part. He genuinely did not know he was beautiful. Now it was I who was aghast. I carried a bamboo chair out onto the terrace, arranged it in the light, dragged over one of the slender, fluted, but solid wood Nias stools for myself. I arranged him in the chair, one arm behind his head, one leg drawn up, looking down at his own knee.

  “Loosen the sarong a little.” It sagged sufficiently to show strands of incredibly shiny, black, pubic hair below the navel. I settled, my pad on my knee and drew a few swift, defining strokes with dark pastel fixing the basic contours. I formed the elfin face, softened the chin with a rubbing finger, placed the huge eyes, gave them direction, caressed the curved neck, the soft, full lips with a suggestion of pink tongue, the lift of one shoulder. The chest was strong muscles on light bones.

  “Tuan Walter,” I said. “Is he good to you? If you smoke please move nothing but your arm. Don’t change your expression.”