Island of Demons Read online

  Drawing inspiration from the beret clutched in his hands, he launched into a rambling and befogged explanation of his dilemma, turning it into a dramatic performance with slow and exaggerated gestures. He had been brought from afar to teach them what was art. Yet that is what he, himself, had come to Bali to learn from them and was only beginning, even now, to discover. For, in truth, there was no thing called art – it was like those indefinable Balinese words sakti and guna that they understood only through encounters in life – there were merely artists, and the secret they were all seeking lay not outside themselves but within, for they all grew to the recognition of it in their own works. And no art was good, none was bad. It required great effort to understand these things, yet effort brought no necessary reward for they must paint not from their heads and eyes but their hearts and livers, which alone brought wisdom. And learning to make real art often involved forgetting everything that one knew, for the work of the artist was to create his own world.

  They sat and frowned and understood not a word in all these twisted thoughts whose unintelligibility merely proved to them that there was something indeed worth knowing here. He put his beret on his head. He would leave them now to Tuan Rudi – one of the greatest artists in the whole of Holland, home of painting – since he had been called to make art for the government and the great white queen and such a call could not be ignored, though he loved them dearly in his liver. In this his royal art he would seek to explain the soul of Bali to the Dutch and Bali’s own art, of which it had yet to become aware, for only when its roots and origins were secure and it was truly Balinese, could it safely evolve and move forward to embrace the art of the world.

  Walter withdrew, throwing me an unhelpful wink like a lifebuoy to a man in the middle of an ocean storm surrounded by sharks, and it was left to me to look at those rows of confused and trusting brown eyes, several glistening with manly tears at alleged parting – though Walter was only going a hundred meters up the road. I felt horribly the responsibility of forming pliant young minds, not knowing where to even start. Balinese, I knew, learned best by constant repetition and imitation of a master. Everywhere, you would see children, racked on the bodies of their dancing teachers as they led their muscles through the motions of their own. I could see on the pads in the laps of some that they were had even been encouraged to experiment in oils which was both absurdly costly and incorrect, since technique is best learned, first through drawing, second through watercolour and only, at a late stage, through the medium of oils. Only when one had truly mastered rule and method might one throw it away like Michelangelo on the Sistine ceiling.

  “What Tuan Walter means is that we must begin at the beginning and slowly become masters of drawing what we really see, the shock of the real. I shall teach you the secrets of the West. I shall explain the tricks of perspective – how to show things far away and close – about light and shadow to give depth within a flat piece of paper and about the human body, for you must understand your own bodies to be able to paint them. You must put away the ideas from the wayang kulit, the shadow plays, where people move their limbs only from left to right and up and down.” I flapped my arms stiffly like old men do their walking sticks and they laughed. I had them. I must draw a line under Walter before I lost them again. “It is no longer good enough to just put the gods at the top of your pictures and the demons at the bottom. There must be style, composition. It will be a long journey but we shall make it together. So, for next week, I want you to do something at once very simple and very complicated. Look at your own hands which move as puppets do not. Really look at your hands and how they move. Really see them. Then, with your right hand, draw your left. That is all.” In Walter’s house I had seen an extraordinary fragment of a Batak woodcarving, showing the interlocked hands of a priest. Already my mind was constructing paths leading them from graphic to plastic.

  They sat there in silence, staring wonderingly at their hands, perhaps defamiliarising them into the alien pseudopods of strange sea-creatures. Balinese children are the only children in the world who can bend their fingertips back to almost touch their wrists. Then the little one with the surprisingly developed torso for his height, raised and fluttered a very human hand. The hair in his armpits was provokingly black and curly, the voice alarmingly deep.

  “Please Guru Rudi. Does that mean you will tell us what is right and wrong, good and bad? Guru Walter always got angry when we asked him that.” They nodded. Yes. Yes.

  I smiled soothingly. “In time. In time I will teach you what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad.” I would too. They all sighed with relief and began chattering happily. I could see that having Walter as one’s teacher might be hard work.

  ***

  No one ever saw Walter put brush to canvas but, over the years, we all got to know the signs. He would go broody, like an old hen, silent and withdrawn. He would sigh and groan for no apparent reason, look infinitely glum, shift his limbs as if there was no position that brought him comfort. Then, one day, he would clap on his head the old half-calabash hat he always wore to paint and stump woefully down the steps that led to his studio at the rear. He might be gone just a few days or it might take months and he would withdraw from society as completely as the ancient monks whose cells he had explored in the Elephant Cave with Stutterheim. Only Badog was allowed to disturb him with food and drink. Then, one day, he would be back, purged, drained, but smiling like a man whose fever has just broken, and with a new addition to the family.

  Just inside the doorway of Walter’s living room was a space flooded with light reflected down from the open eaves. It was here, on a sere ledge of hardwood, that he displayed small gee-gaws, carved kris handles, amulets, betel-boxes and the like. It was here, too, that his new paintings were publicly auditioned. The first surprise is that they were so small. When you saw photographs of them, as I had, you thought they would be the size of those enormous Douanier Rousseau canvases that had been his jungly inspiration. And they always seemed to be getting smaller. It was, I suspect, less the difficulty and expense of securing supplies of proper canvas and oils in the Indies than the discovery that he got much the same price for small as for large paintings. His own explanation was, of course, less succinct. “When you are painting the Balinese landscape, Bonnetchen, everything is small.”

  It is no exaggeration to say that I had lived in fear of this moment. Artists regard their own works much as mothers do their children and for the same reasons. Conceived in the madness of passion, torn from their bodies in agony, even the dullest, most indifferent progeny are regarded as exceptional and uniquely flawless. His dismissal of my own work might be seen as a running joke, an ungainly pose calculated to avoid sentimentality and hiding a deeper respect. But it rankled. From what I had seen of his earlier work, the archived photographs in his studio, I knew I should not like it. Derivative of Chagall and Rousseau, with its multiple horizons, depiction of the same scene at different hours of the day, contempt for perspective, hysterical use of colour, repetition of the same motifs within the frame – it all showed a talent of substance but one that had lost its direction and was drowning in a mass of modern whipped cream. Unlike Walter, I could not be brutally frank. Like most artists I was schooled in articulate insincerity.

  It was a shock and a relief that I liked it. “Holy forest near Sangsit” took my breath away. The subject matter was simple enough, the stand of ancient nutmeg trees up in Mengwi, light flooding through their leaves and trickling down their great, close-packed trunks, with the hoary Bukit Sari temple crouching in their midst. I had not, at that time, visited the forest and the reason why was also included in the painting. In the foreground hunkered a Balinese peasant, back to the viewer, the horizontality of his great hat cutting through the soaring verticality of the trees. One arm was casually stretched forward to feed or otherwise engage one of the particularly nasty monkeys that live there. Popular fancy connected them doubtfully to the army of the monkey genera
l Hanuman of the Ramayana legends. But it was the style that was so unexpected – gently naturalistic, unforced, coherent, no part of the painting shouting for disproportionate attention and arguing with the rest. It seemed to have emerged whole, assured, a calm assertion in oils. I recognised, sadly a larger talent than my own but one that would never be great because he possessed it not the other way around. Later, when my chicks came to see the picture and have Walter explain it to them, they would offend him by crying out in sincere admiration, “Beh! Wonderful. Just like a Japanese photograph!”

  Walter looked at it with paternal content, not overweening pride. A satisfactory painting, his face seemed to say, but at least done, finished, laid to rest, signed and simply framed in black by the little old man who had built the cupboards.

  “Where did you get the idea?”

  He made a face. “Works of art are like sausages. It is always best not to enquire too closely where the ingredients came from.” He grinned. It was, I could tell, a line he had used before. Then, more kindly, “Inspired by yourself Bonnetchen.” He laid an arm securely round my shoulder.

  “It’s wonderful, Walter. Is it really for me?” I was entranced. I would hang it across from the bed. It would be the first thing I saw every morning. He barked an expectorant laugh rather like one of the monkeys.

  “For? Yes, in one sense. Dedicated to, inspired by … ‘for’ like that. But it is already sold, I’m afraid. It goes to mend the car. I have to go to the big garage in Denpasar. Nothing works on that car. No steering, no horn. Now, the brokes are break and I am broken.”

  I thought about that. “You mean the brakes are broken and you are broke?”

  He laughed and slapped me in comradely fashion. “Possibly.”

  “How are you getting there?”

  He looked at me as if I was mad. “Driving of course. Do you want a lift?”

  “Er … no thank you.”

  He paused and considered, lip-puckering. “Anyway. If I gave you one of mine, you would give me one of yours and then I would have to say I liked it.” He threw his arms apart and shrugged. “Where would it all end?” Already he was walking away.

  7

  The filmmakers came with the rains and three grey truckloads of equipment. They even brought their own Javanese cook. Whenever I think of that time, I see splashing mud and money. In overall charge, as the source of the funding, was Baron Viktor von Plessen, adventurer, hunter, painter, cineast – owner of an ancestral estate in Holstein and a pencil moustache. Everything apart from the moustache was big and he stood habitually in the pose of eighteenth-century swagger portraits with one leg thrust out and hands in his pockets. A few years back he had lived in Bali and, curiously, it was an interest in the birds of Nusa Penida that had brought him and Walter together. Once they had billed and cooed over their ornithological collection, argued pigeon classification and fallen out over the calls of the native Balinese duck, they realised that they both knew Murnau, Walter’s old friend from the UFA studios in Berlin and, of course, Walter’s earlier film, Goona-Goona.

  By some strange irony, von Plessen, fresh from a European visit, was the only one of us that had actually seen it. Walter had worked with Andre Roosevelt, a vast, shuffling wreck of a man who somehow had, with a camera, the empathy that Walter had with musical instruments. The actual shooting had to be fitted into the ever-shorter periods of lucidity when Roosevelt was not incapacitated either by drunkenness or resultant hangover and it glorified in the standard bare-breasted charms of Balinese womanhood and sexual allure. The story was about the chemically enhanced love between a handsome prince and a servant girl and it had to be stringently re-edited to meet American censorship laws. The resulting version, dehydrated and flavourless, was appropriately dubbed Love Powder. Walter had adored the whole process, shamelessly prancing around the set with a megaphone, directing, changing the script, rehearsing the actors until the real director, Armand Denis, threatened to leave in a huff. But ultimately, there was little they could do since Walter was the only one who could communicate with the performers. I would see it in the Italian theatre in Denpasar later that year and it would go on to be a worldwide hit, not least in the Indies pavilion at the Paris World Fair of 1931. Goona-goona became, briefly, a term for illicit sex amongst the glitterati of New York and, of the foreigners I subsequently met in Bali, I think at least half had been first attracted to the place by that film. All this may well not have been poor Walter’s fault. He certainly made no money out of it. Much of the original footage was lost in a fire (alcohol-fuelled?) during processing in Surabaya and clumsily re-shot in a great rush without him.

  Film people are loud, opinionated and eat and drink all the time, a little like armies. The process of the making of Island of Demons, barely three months in all, seems now like a protracted barroom brawl. Many of the duties were fluid and discharged by the ubiquitous and darkly sardonic Dr Dahlsheim. Having worked principally in Africa, he was convinced that every river must conceal a hundred forms of sudden death, that the soil must boil with lethal parasites that sought only to bore through the soles of his feet to destroy him and that every form of kindness or beauty was a snare masking savagery and hostility. In theory, there was a director, producer, cameraman, soundman, scriptman; then all the assistants: director, producer, cameraman, etc. doubled up over again. I asked Walter what an assistant producer did. “Usually sleeps with the producer,” he replied cheerily. They were all crammed into the rain-soaked house in Campuhan, sitting endlessly hunched over the forest giant table that swarmed with papers, photographs, bottles and ashtrays, all waving fists and shouting to get their way or sulking because they hadn’t. Oddly, Walter told me this insensitivity to noise was a common feature of technicians who had learned their trade in the “silent” movies.

  The film was very much Walter’s child and dealt with the primordial battle of good versus evil. Beautiful Balinese farmers dwell beatifically in a sunlit natural paradise of hard work but plenty. But their happiness enrages an embittered old witch who jealously uses her magic to create an epidemic bringing death and misery. Only complex public ceremonies and the ancient wisdom of the priests can cleanse the island and bring an end – possibly, it is intimated, only temporary – to evil and a return to the goodness of the life in harmony with nature that is Man’s true goal and right. The actors, of course, were not actors at all but ordinary Balinese who had garnered a little acting experience from their own ritual drama at the village level. The old witch was a widow from just down the road who was not considered immune from such allegations in real life and had what Walter termed a “good” face, i.e. one full of character, framed in wild, grey hair and as scored with ruts and ravines as a relief map of the island. The young lovers, Wayan and Sari, retired dancers, on whose beautiful shoulders all this hung, exuded a breathtaking purity that somehow redeemed the whole of flawed humanity, provoking awe rather than lust. The formal movements of the eyes are an important element of Balinese dance, at least as central as those of the feet, and Walter was able to use their schooled control of them to great effect in the film. All this to the new thing of a soundtrack incorporating not just the incidental music of the gifted Wolfgang Zeller but Balinese gamelan and the genuine sounds of redeeming nature in the Indies – the wind in the bamboo, running water, etc. The world was briefly in a period that was language-poor, where barking speech had been displaced by music and gesture. We had no inkling of the deluge of words that was shortly to knock us all off our feet. Island of Demons would be marketed in Germany with a poster of a bare-breasted, grinning woman with tropic fruit plonked on her head.

  Much of the shooting took place at night, using the new high speed films that had just come on the market and stretching them to their limit. Hans Scheib puffed endlessly on cheroots, despite the lethal inflammability of film in those days, and coaxed magic out his lenses and apertures while swearing relentlessly in Bavarian dialect. Walter organised flickering oil lamps and torches, smoke that lay arou
nd the feet of the actors and – of course – elaborate Nosferatu shadows to add drama and foreboding. The rain, at this stage, was only intermittent so rarely interrupted the schedule but hauling equipment through the muddy roads was a nightmare. “Like a re-enactment of the Somme offensive,” puffed von Plessen, cinematographically punctuating out heat and palm trees to see only the desired muck and water that he could use in such a scene. “We should have armed guards,” opined Dahlsheim, “like in Africa.” Transport was the responsibility of a big, raw-boned young man with a mop of thick blond hair and endless good-nature. It was at least a week into the shooting before I realised that this was Conrad, Walter’s young cousin – come, confusingly, with the crew from Java and found employment out of such almost-nepotism – for I heard them call each other Walja and Kosja and knew that Russian diminutives of affection were obligatory in that family.

  The highpoint of the film and the big set piece of the whole shooting schedule was the magnificent kecak dance. It came two months in, when everyone was already exhausted and homesick for potatoes and cabbage, when camera shutters had begun to stick, mould to sprout in camera gates and when no word had yet come back from Java confirming the integrity, or even arrival, of shot footage, so that Walter and Viktor were prone to squabble over the enormous unpaid bill at Campuhan that had exhausted Walter’s always limited liquidity. The two had much the same lack of respect for the processes of normal accountancy. There was crazy talk of Walter’s taking time off from the film to paint another historical picture for Stutterheim just to keep the crew fed and watered. They were all a little mad by now and I really did not know what I was doing struggling off with them, one late afternoon, into the fat, hot rain towards the village of Bedulu where the crucial scene was to be shot. It was probably the romance of the silver screen that had seduced me, though, as it turned out, there were other seductions enough.