Island of Demons Read online

  He looked at me, bright-eyed. “Oh, someone else would have to do the actual writing. It was never intended that I should do the writing.”

  “Me? I’m sorry Walter …”

  He shook his head. “No, Bonnetchen. Not you. Beryl. Beryl de Zoete.”

  “Who?”

  He pointed. Two of the most bizarre women on the island were coming through the door towards us. Manxi’s leisurewear dress appeared to have been inspired by one of Margaret’s own maternity smocks but cut from material of gross patterns and loud contrasts. I wondered how she would have fared with the schizophrenia tests. With her, was a painfully thin woman in her fifties, in height appropriate to be Greg’s partner, but clad in a sort of superannuated flapper’s outfit of beige tule and wearing a look of constipated discomfort on her face and a huge ring on each finger of both hands. It struck me immediately as the sort of gesture that resulted not from mere bad taste, unlike Manxi’s frock, but a deliberate determination to confront. Her hair was bobbed in what was by then an old-fashioned style.

  “’Allo Walter. Me and Beryl’s been ’avin’ a luvverly chat. I din’t know you two was such old friends.” Walter smiled happily. I had never actually spoke to Manxi before and realised that I was already judging, disliking, disapproving and preparing to condemn. It was not immediately obvious that hers was a voice that would go on to charm the airwaves.

  “Do you remember my friend Rudi?”

  Manxi giggled. “Oh yes. Everyone ’ere knows Rudi from that bit of rough field over the other side of town. Likes a bit of rough our Rudi …” I grasped her hand and, intending to shut her mouth, somehow shut my own by stupidly kissing it, catching a whiff of onion smell as she shrieked, “Ooh inne a gent?”

  “Bonnetchen, this is Beryl de Zoete.” Having performed one act of hand-kissing, I was now obliged to perform another but for Beryl it was somehow appropriate. In response, she etched the briefest ghost of a smile and swooned ectoplasmically into a chair. “Beryl and I are friends from my student days in Hellerau. She is one of the world’s premier eurhymicists.” Across the room, the two airmen had simultaneously inserted the necks of their beer bottles in their companion’s mouth and watched, with awe, as they were dribblingly drained and licked. Manxi was over there in a flash, spoiling the moment, demonstrating their emptiness, demanding they buy more drink, shouting for more animated music.

  Premier eurhythmicists? Where had that come from? “What,” I heard myself ask, suddenly wooden-tongued, “is a eurhythmicist?”

  She regarded me with pity and batted tired eyelashes. “It is a system devised by my teacher Monsieur Delcroze. He was a genius. It brings us into contact with our bodies and our bodies into a greater musical response through a series of visceral gymnastic exercises that harmonise us into immediate enraptured improvisation of dance.” Right, so it was clear I would never know what eurhythmics was. I could live with that. The voice was spoken as though through an extended sigh of disappointment as though its owner could not bear to finish the sentence.

  “Beryl is going to stay with me for a while. We shall have such fun! We must tour the whole island, show her every single kind of dance for our book. There are so many.”

  “Are you married, Beryl?” I was becoming very Balinese in my bold use of personal questions. A brave look slid over the pained one. I gestured waggishly at her hands. “Or perhaps, from all those rings, you already have eight husbands.” The brave look was displaced by an even more pained one and she inhaled the frail smoke of a “Passing Clouds” and blew it, unheeding, in my face as Balinese gods are said to extract the essence from temple offerings and return the coarse matter to their worshippers.

  “I once entered into what was to be a chaste and vegetarian union with a man but, unfortunately, he developed a brutish taste for beer, beefsteak and breasts, creating a rock on which shattered the fragile barque of our tryst.” Goodness. Fragile barque, no less. “I have always felt that unions of the soul are more enduring than those of the flesh. My most moving act of consummation was perhaps that with an ardent young man, of a similarly poetic disposition, in my youth. We slaked our passion by removing our clothes in the moonlight, climbing two pliant poplars, side by side, and allowing our quivering leaves to gently interpenetrate.”

  The airmen had slumped against the bar, their elbows in the barslops and their hands jointly up under his/her frock, surprisingly innocent, rather sweet, smiles on all their faces, eyes locked and feet still shuffling in the alibi of dance. From the phonograph came high-pitched male crooning of something from Cole Porter, “You’re the top. You’re a dance in Bali. You’re the top. You’re a hot tamale”. If they kept on in that fashion, the hot tamale would be, all too soon, publicly revealed. I felt tired, old, embittered. The groping hands paused, appraised, like a blind man feeling the hands on a clock. One airboy whispered in the ear of the other who looked briefly surprised, then shrugged and hugged tighter with eyes closed, arms now stretched to encompass both him/her and his friend. The friend reached round to jointly stroke his neck in tandem tenderness. Tears started to my eyes. I envied them their shared immersion in a circle of love below the waist that involved nothing above the neck, a deep oceanic flow of accepting primordial human affection. I had a mental flash of waking in a pose of crucifixion, stiff-muscled and sated on early morning sand cooled with dew, and feeling both emptied and redeemed. Whether that was memory or intuition, I could not tell.

  “This book will be my legacy. I shall not,” he looked at me sharply, as though I had refused him that service, “make any babies and an individual painting can easily disappear but books are like cockroaches. The more you try to kill them, the more they proliferate”. He had been reading something. Of course, probably about the Nazis and bookburning. Vicki had just written to say that her latest, on Bali, had been accorded that treatment again. It was not a political remark. Walter was incapable of politics. During the war, for him, the British emperor and the German Kaiser had been the same man, with the same face, wearing different hats. Bookburning, for Walter, would be a sign of a healthy interest in literature. When he heard of the Anschluss, Germany’s annexation of Austria, he innocently remarked how nice it was that he and Vicki were now fellow Landsmänner. Walter always produced these throwaway remarks as if they were the tip of a vast submerged iceberg of wisdom, whereas that’s all there was. “Dance,” now pronounced Walter gravely, deploying all the eloquence of a hectoring index finger, “is quite uniquely able to cross cultural boundaries and language difference and appeal to something that moves us sympathetically across the races.” For the first time in my life, I wanted to hit him. “The Balinese have a natural aesthetic sense and turn even imported novelties to that purpose. Consider the new dance genre of janger …” I tuned out but smiled at the recollection of an occasion when we had returned home early and surprised the boys playing with the new, brighter – but very noisy – petrol lamp borrowed by the countess. They had decided to use it in a revised shadow play, a contest to manipulate their genitals so as to cast the closest approximation of the silhouette of Queen Wilhelmina – as seen on silver coins of the realm – on the sitting room wall. Little Resem even managed to cunningly counterfeit her tiara.

  “Time to go home,” I urged yawningly. “Whatever you do, don’t forget your book.”

  ***

  “The nyonya,” I explained to the boys, “eats no flesh, no prawns, no eggs, no chicken.” They looked astonished. “ She drinks no beer or coffee or arak or gin.”

  “Can we still add pig’s blood to the sauce?”

  “No pig’s blood.”

  “May we give her a Baboon’s Arse?”

  “No, keep your Baboon’s Arses away from her. She only drinks much water like a camel.”

  “What is a camel?”

  “Never mind.”

  “If she eats no meat, how is she to make babies?”

  “She has no babies, wants no babies, does not sleep with men.”

  “Be
h! Beh! Beh!”

  “She does not like babies? Is she, then, like Rangda, Queen of the Witches?”

  “She is like Rangda except that she does not drink human blood or eat the stillborn or feast on hot afterbirth.” I smiled as I said it. Who, after all, could be sure? “Perhaps,” I added foolishly, “she will become Rangda if you give her any of the things that are forbidden.” Foolishly, for, in Bali, one does not joke about such matters and now her nickname within the house was fixed for all time and the boys were nervous at meal times, warning this unnatural woman elaborately of possible violations of her many taboos, hovering at her elbow and whipping dishes back to the kitchen before anyone had properly finished, whispering, “Rangda nearly got it – roast pig – imagine!” Propitiatory incense sticks smoked at their door and onions and garlic became favoured decorations of bedroom walls.

  “Your boys are so attentive to me, Walter,” she breathed. “They watch me to detect my every need. Only Hindus understand the importance of the diet and its purity.”

  “I think they’ve taken a shine to you, Beryl. We must go and watch the local orchestra later.”

  She looked pained. “Thank you, darling, but I must lie down. I have already seen much today. I cannot bear to see anything else until I have rested my eyes and thought about it.”

  But all that was as nothing compared to the excitement the first time she rose early to do her ecstatic Dance to the Dawn in the garden for, despite her air of utter extenuation, she was like those ancient prima ballerinas one has read of, who have to be carried to the wings, so that the spotlight can warm their faces, at which point they revive and leap around the stage like young gazelles.

  “What is she doing?” the boys had asked. “Has she been driven mad by her learning?” It had been explained that she was dancing. “But where is her gold? Where are her beautiful decorations?” This was a mere rehearsal. “But why then is she dressed as a monkey without a tail?” It was true. In Bali, only animal parts wear tight costumes like the outrageous leotard she flaunted. She was thin enough to make it bag so that the whole became a bony dance macabre that did nothing to undermine the boys’ terror.

  She and Walter roared around Bali, photographing, interviewing, arguing and then he swam – buoyantly, boyishly – as she wrote in longhand – silver rings clicking out a fandango rhythm – or interviewed dancers in the garden and put them through their movements at bassadanza pace. As she worked, she would call out questions to him until he tired of it. Then, a query about dance genres would evoke: “Oh, I don’t know, Beryl. It’s really the music that interests me.” About music: “Oh, Beryl. Ask Colin. I’m only a painter.” She never repined, merely looked pained. Apparently, she lived with an orientalist from the British Museum, therefore expected little from men. One of his irksome peculiarities was to insist on the use of roller skates to avoid taxi fares.

  Occasionally, at big festivals, as in a rondeau, they would bump into McPhee and Jane or Greg and Margaret, or the Mershons from Sanur, or Made Kaler, or me and we would all whirl briefly together as in that absurd Matisse painting in the Hermitage. Bali sometimes seemed very crowded. Margaret and Beryl hated each other on sight.

  It was unfortunate that Walter had arranged for us all to converge on a sanghyang dance in Selat. He was not firing on all cylinders. The day before, had been a big concert he had given with McPhee, two pianos playing transcribed Balinese music in a concert at the Little Harmonie. The concert itself had been a relief after the sheer business of shifting two grand pianos from hill locations to Denpasar and retuning them but Walter, as usual, had not cared a fig for practicalities.

  “Play it on the flute,” I had suggested with brief malice, “better yet the piccolo.”

  “Concert harps,” he responded in joke wistfulness. “I see a wall of great concert harps, each one specially tuned, plucked by virgins.”

  It had been a great success with the burghers, Bali scrubbed up, its face wiped and made to stand up straight for polite society. The Resident had applauded and spoken a few encouraging words on the positive role of Dutch civilisation in benignly developing the native gifts – though what that had to do with McPhee and Walter remained mysterious. The audience was otherwise a predictable mix of bored ladies and unwilling husbands suffering an hour’s enforced sobriety, a few Balinese nobility and half-castes. The notable exception was Father Scruple and his secretary, an extraordinarily handsome Javanese who sat, straight-backed, at his feet with Scruple’s papers, hat and cane clutched professionally across his knees and immaculately clad in starched and pressed shirt, knife-edged shorts and brilliantined hair. I could not forbear to steal the odd admiring look at his very fine legs and it seemed to me, tantalisingly, that there was a certain shy reciprocity of awakening interest. Scruple had seen me and decided to ignore me. He was tapping his foot to the music, his knee rubbing against the young man’s back. That might just be accidental or it might be more than that. It was only halfway through the second piece, a recreational work entitled “Black Goat”, that I suddenly recognised him. It was Dion. I gaped, gawped, gasped. When I next caught his eye, I executed the swift and exaggerated sideways eye movement that Balinese dancers call sledet and sidled, crouching, from the room like broken wind at a tea party.

  It was some ten minutes before he joined me on the verandah and asked for a light. He was being careful. Other native servants were hanging about there, not being granted entry to the main room. We nodded to each other and watched a man by the gate, very deliberately booting a horse up the backside. I thought of intervening but the fact that the man wore no shoes and clearly hurt his feet in the process, mitigated the cruelty, made it part of native life. Then our eyes locked – velvet eyes – and a sudden dry mixture of lust and compassion choked me.

  “Dion!” He put his finger to his lips and looked around warily.

  “I’m not using that name at the moment. I’m Hendrik”.

  “But you used to work here for God’s sake. Everybody knows you.”

  “They knew a Muslim with holes in his underwear. To Balinese, all Javanese look the same. Now I’m Catholic and, as you see, velly good Chlistian boy.” He was very bold, confident, cool. I remembered that smile, that slight sheen on the cheek.

  “Are you? What are you really up to? I came back and looked for you, you know. They mentioned the police, politics. Oh I don’t know.” Any attempt to construct a conversation collapsed. “Look, it’s good to see you.” Jealousy gnawed, sharp-toothed, at the back of my brain. “Scruple. Is he? Do you? I mean …” He looked shocked.

  “Father Scruple is chaste, rather like myself at the moment. When you have something important to do, sex just clouds the brain. The Catholics know that. You should learn that too.”

  “Should I?” His teeth were very white, his tongue very pink. “Perhaps I never really had anything important to do.” Then, “What is it that you are doing.”

  He threw down the cigarette, crushed it out like a bug. Shiny, black shoes. Sweet, white ankle socks. “You don’t want to know. Just politics. We Indonesians are going to have a hard time in the next few years.”

  “Who? What was that word?”

  “Indonesians. This is Indonesia. It’s not the Dutch East Indies any more. Sooner or later, we’re taking it back, one way or the other. You know the Volksraad is supporting the call for local autonomy but the new Governor General will oppose it? You don’t know? Do you even know there is a new Governor General?” Wearily. “Ask your friend Sampih, he knows.”

  “Do you know Sampih? Is he part of it?”

  He shot me a look of pity. “Look. Rudi, You’re Dutch so that makes you the enemy from here on, no matter how hard you try to stay neutral. You’re not a bad man. You took what you wanted but you were nicer to me than you needed to be. You’re just irrelevant to what we need right now. You should go home before things get nasty and people walk all over you.”

  To my surprise, I felt a stirring of anger. “I had hoped that what pa
ssed between us was more important than all that, that it was more real than all this damned politics.”

  He sighed, reached out and plucked one of the huge bird of paradise flowers growing in the cosseted border and shredded it into confetti. “You’ll never understand. This is the future”. I was considerably taller than him but somehow it was as if he was looking down on me. “I have to get back before Scruple wonders where I am. This job is useful for getting me around and meeting people.” He looked at me and something in his eyes softened. “I made you a promise once – to show you something. I’m afraid you’ll just have to take my word for it now.” He executed a twirl. “No holes any more. You see? When we’re good boys and smile nicely, they dress us Indonesians up as their schoolchildren. Goodbye, Rudi.” He shook my hand with the loose, pressureless shake of the Indies – Indonesia – and left, smart, even immaculate, disconcertingly purposeful, sadly delectable. I did not go back in. As he opened the door, I could hear the pianos showering down notes, working towards their inevitable conclusion, bringing all the threads busily together and then a pause and the first spatter of applause like rain. Absurd to see a man in early middle age with tears of senile emotional lability already in his eyes. Evening swallows were dive-bombing through the tired arches holding up the roof, soaring up in a steep climb, wheeling round and coming back again for another strafing run. No wait. We had not yet heard about strafing and dive-bombing or experienced the fissiparous tendencies of the new Indonesia. That lay still the future. But I had no more appetite for the future …

  “… Bali’s past,” said Walter in his flat, deliberately boring lecturing voice and pulled down his hat against the wind. “The sanghyang is the uncorrupted witness of that past, perhaps the origin of all the other forms of dance.” He had to shout to Beryl. A gasket, or “tightring” had blown. The Overland Whippet was getting old. Anywhere else, it would have been scrapped but in Bali, when a part broke, they did not even send for a spare, just sat down, often by the roadside, and made you a new one over a fire. “Its principal feature is that the dancers are definitely in a state of trance, often little girls who otherwise cannot dance and claim never to have even practised. But whilst they are possessed they do things of extraordinary skill and balance and so protect the whole community against the forces of evil.” I tuned out, having heard and seen it all before. Sanghyang was something of an obsession of Walter’s, it was in his film.