Island of Demons Read online

  A sheet is suddenly dropped – ooh la la! – to reveal Resem, Oleg and Alit beneath a banner bearing the legend “Anthropology in Bali”. Resem is straining astride a ceramic toilet of European manufacture, bent forward, his fine teeth set in agony, and suffering Alit’s fingerwagging rebuke. Alit grips a pipe between his own teeth, some of which have been coloured down in black, and wrestles with a camera tripod, adjusted to comic collapse at every turn. Frowning Oleg holds a watch and scribbles copious notes then thrusts his hand under Resem’s sarong and it re-emerges, suddenly revealed as gripping a tape-measure. He makes an astonished, then arch face and holds up a length of some thirty centimeters to the audience, rolling his eyes in envy and flapping his scorched hands. Notes are written, photographs are taken of Resem, of the toilet, up Resem’s skirt, of the contents of the bowl, of Oleg’s scorched hands, of the tripod. Alit has a conversation in High Balinese down the toilet bowl, cupping his ear to hear its response. Oleg and Alit shake hands in mutual congratulation, raise their arms, like triumphant prizefighters, over their heads. They are fine fellows and march off arrogantly with their haul of knowledge tucked under their arms. Resem collapses back on the toilet and a loud fart is heard from offstage.

  Beryl was immensely pleased by the piece. “Reminiscent of dear Aristophanes.” It had not been thought necessary to invite Margaret – which meant that we lost the pleasure of Greg – but Jane was there, looking initially haggard and somewhat lost but actually laughing at the sketch and seeming not at all to feel the need to show partisanship with Margaret and her feud. As the party staggered towards its end and the musicians shouldered their instruments back into the storage room, we sat in the garden – her on a chair, myself on the chill toilet rim abandoned by Resem – under stars that seemed, that night, mysteriously golden, as if upgraded for the evening, side by side, a final Baboon’s Arse gripped in our hands. Above us, as we talked, a hornbill that habitually slept in one of the trees honked disapproval like a disturbed householder.

  “Does Walter not like the idea of female researchers?”

  I chuckled. “Quite the contrary, he always says he heartily approves of women in academe – after all it’s scarcely a job for a grown man.” There was a pause – not quite long enough – before I asked, “How are things with Mc – Colin?”

  “Oh my! He’s very sad. I worry about him. He needs looking after.” In the distance, faint sounds of singing lingered on the wind. It could be our players, companionably stupefied with Walter’s arak and roast pig, continuing their revels. I could visualise Oleg executing a witty version of Beryl’s bellydance before an appreciative audience. But it was a full moon and there would be temple ceremonies and music all over the island and, anyway, Balinese always sang while walking at night to scare away witches. “We all need looking after.” She slid her hand onto my knee. At first, I thought it was a misplaced sexual overture, then realised she was working according to Balinese rules of contact. I was a child. She was a grandmother. “Poor Rudi. You aren’t very happy either are you? I sometimes think there is something wrong with our whole generation.”

  “Me? There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  She looked sadly into the water like a diviner. “I mean … the way things are between you and Walter.”

  I was astonished. “Me and Walter? But we are good friends.”

  She squeezed the knee. “Yes dear. Of course you are. In other cultures, sex is organised rather better. I’m sure you know of the American Indian berdaches, men who assume a female role in society and are often the most highly prized and honoured wives, or – amongst other peoples – have important spiritual powers. And here in Asia, amongst some peoples of Java, inverts are allocated major positions in society and their relationships are recognised …”

  “Look,” I said. “What is it you’re trying to say?” Fireflies pulsed among the trees like cats’ eyes staring at us in the dark.

  “You shouldn’t be sad about Walter, Rudi. Walter is a wonderful person, a unique person but, as he sails serenely through life, he doesn’t always realise what waves he’s making that can swamp other, shallower lives. Let me pass on to you something that Margaret said to me that you might find helpful. She said that her trouble in life was that people with whom she had passionate friendships, always ruined things by treating her like bread – to be enjoyed plainly in everyday life on a daily basis – instead of like wine – to be tasted as something heady and unusual on special occasions only. Walter, too, is like wine, not bread. Once you accept that, there is no need for you to be sad. And the fact that you and your kind have no honoured place, that your love is not recognised, is not a fact of nature, merely of our own rather odd culture.”

  “But … but …” I sputtered, dithered. How dare this woman whose own private life was in such disarray, whose own sexual proclivities … should thus presume … should condescend … It is hard to be on one’s high horse when astride a white toilet bowl in the middle of what I must now learn to call Indonesia.

  “I do not love Walter,” I protested testily. “We are merely friends.” She ignored me, filtered me out. She had been professionally trained after all and I was not saying what she wanted to hear.

  “I think we have something to learn from the Balinese,” she lectured the river, “their lack of emotional engagement that allows them to bear things unbearable for us, their passivity …”

  “Nonsense,” I snapped. “They’re not like that.” I thought of Putu. He was like that. But tonight, he would be with his wife and little daughter. Balinese thought it important to have sex at the full moon to increase the chance of conception. It suddenly occurred to me that, all over this little island, comely brown figures were rutting like rabbits. Every breath of the wind seemed to bear the dying sound of an orgasmic gasp and the musky waft of discharged semen. The conceit excited me. I thought exasperatedly of Walter, fondly of Resem, of Dion – there was a quiver of sadness over Dion – perhaps he, too, at this very moment was somewhere plodding the hill to dutiful ejaculation … But I would go home alone to face a cold empty bed. No. Wait. Not cold. A hot, empty bed. More biblical. Even worse.

  ***

  The success of Miguel and Rosa’s book was not without its consequences. Suddenly, there were tourists everywhere, clutching it and Walter was awash with them, for everyone who bought the book felt they had purchased intimacy with him. The Duke of Sutherland – formerly the British War Minister and a friend of Charlie’s – and his Duchess passed by and promised to return, whisking Walter away in their new yacht. (“Enough of the have-nots, Bonnetchen. I am joining the have-yachts.”) Ruth Draper – the Australian cabaret comedienne – spent a week whilst on her Asian tour. She had the curious gift of being able to ape the sounds and mannerisms of the speakers of any language while having no actual knowledge of it at all. Her “Russian” sent Walter into paroxysms of nostalgic delight and for days he roamed the house growling vowels and rolling “r”s. Two more guest rooms were hastily constructed, more boys hired. The world was knocking on Walter’s door and Bali had become a business. Every mail delivery brought more enquiries about his paintings and a lesser man would have settled back into the comfortable mediocrity of self-repetition. But in Walter’s case, success, as usual, went to his feet and his first reaction was to run away. They wanted paintings? Right. He would become exclusively a musician again and off he went on an extended concert tour of Java with Colin, repeating their performance at the Little Harmonie, to packed houses. In his absence, a new cottage, rather like the little studio in which I lived, was constructed for him at remote Iseh, in the mountains near the Besakih mother temple, and there he would flee – “to be mothersoulalone” – with one or more of the boys to paint or zoologise or intensively do nothing at all. If anyone sought him out and pestered him with questions about Bali, his answer now lay ready to hand. “No idea,” he would mutter abstractedly. “My own knowledge is minumental. I should look it up in Covarrubias, if I were you.”

&nb
sp; It was at this point that he made one of the worst of those errors of judgement that characterised his life. So that he could flee the press of tourists, he hastily appointed two passing German painters to run what I can now only term his hotel at Campuhan. Walter Dreesen and Fritz Lindner he possibly judged to be compatible souls – of the faith, artistically inclined, embarrassingly enthusiastic for all things Eastern and exotic, yet – somehow – just not very nice. With fat bellies and small heads, they bullied and bossed and strutted about and, I am almost sure, engaged in gross peculation. The coffee became thin and metallic, the rice of evil quality, the addition on the bills became of an almost Italian unreliability. When they invited over the Neuhaus brothers of Walter’s akvarioom, the place was a very Wagnerian hell. I suddenly spent a lot of time at my own house. The boys, always a trustworthy touchstone of strangers, hated them all and felt themselves callously abandoned by Walter.

  Dreesen caused endless confusion by insisting that he was the Walter who lived at Campuhan, even accepting artistic commissions on this doubtful basis. From somewhere, he dug out a “von” to preface his name and unwisely made the boys call him “Baron” which – given his endlessly flapping jaws and straggly beard – swiftly became “Barong”. I spoke to Walter about it and he was, as always, airily dismissive. It was a purely temporary arrangement until Miguel and Rosa blew over. If I was serious about this, why did I not myself step into their shoes and so spare the boys? If they were unhappy now, it simply showed how happy they would be when things returned to normal. But for the moment another Barong occupied us.

  “Have you heard the big news?” asked Walter, pulling up a chair to our table. We were at Manxi’s – empty at this hour, save for Greg, myself, now Walter, the endlessly jolly Javanese barman and a lugubrious youth who studied us with anthropological intensity. The patronne was mercifully absent. Greg pointed to a newspaper, lying steeped in beer dregs on the floor. “Japanese defeat in Battle of Lake Khasan”, it declared. “Russia extinguishes Japanese imperial ambition in Asia!”.

  Walter looked, made a face. “No. Not that. Newspapers aren’t real news.” He signalled for beer. The youth, having studied us, wound the grammophone and began to sift through the records on the bartop.

  “Do you mean the new constitutional arrangements,” I asked, “giving Bali self-rule under the traditional kings? Should be good news, shouldn’t it? Directing a bit of cash back to the palaces for cultural purposes? Are you perhaps in charge of the cerebrations – I mean celebrations?”

  Walter shook his head. “Yes. No. By news, I mean the cleansing of the McPhees.”

  “Ah.” Greg drummed his fingers on the table. He had clearly not brought his pipe and was at a loss what to do with his hands. “I heard there was to be a big bash. I like a bun fight.”

  “What’s this?” As usual, no one had told me anything. The barman brought beer. Walter slipped his arm fondly round his waist, interrogated him minutely on the state of his family and asked after his children by name. When he had finally gone back to the bar, Walter grinned at me and answered.

  “The McPhees are having a calonarang.” He said it with enormous self-satisfaction. I nearly missed the last word, drowned under a deafening squeal of – of all things – Scottish bagpipe music. The barman looked over and did a quick thumbs-up, returned by Walter. Greg and Walter exchanged a glance and laughed.

  “Holy mother of God! His job,” explained Greg, biting at his nails and indicating the youth, “is to take a squint at the punters as they come in, guess who they are and what they like and pick out the music that suits them. Usually, when I’m here on my own, I get ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, which I take as something of a compliment. Walter gets ‘Night and Day’ and Margaret ‘Felix Keeps on Walking’. I can’t imagine what you’ve done to deserve this.”

  “Calonarang?” I asked. Neither of them could ever stick to the matter in hand. “Whatever for? The battle of Barong and Rangda, of good and evil? You’re always on about calonarang. You show it to tourists at Rawa’s village. It’s in your films. Now you think it will do something for the McPhees?”

  “It’s always interested me,” Walter drank and made a face, “that the idea that the gods cause misfortune, sets evil safely outside the human community whereas witchcraft sees it as originating in men’s envy – so all that rage goes back into the search for witches and their punishment and makes it all hotter – Greg’s schismogenesis. Balinese have it both ways by making Rangda the witches’ queen. Very neat.” He looked at Greg, hopefully, in search of comment but Greg was covering his ears with his hands.

  “Do you, perhaps, have any Scottish blood, Rudi?”

  Walter pouted. “Why should it not help the McPhees? Who can tell? It is not my decision but the diviner’s and so Bali’s view of them. I’m sure you remember that, against everyone’s advice, they never finished the boundary wall and so they are exposed to all the demons and bad spirits that live both in the graveyard and the gorge, on either side of them. With all the jolly, nocturnal picnics they hold – with or without teddy bears – feasting on entrails and afterbirth, singing and dancing to Rangda, I’m surprised anyone in that house gets any sleep. The well has run dry. Several of the boys have had nasty falls. Tinned food went bad and exploded – spaghetti bolognese all over the place, apparently, and mistaken for blood and entrails by the staff. You know for yourself that their marriage is far from good and that there has been disharmony in that household. Now blue lights have been seen at night. A bit of wallbuilding, then a calonarang ceremony will take care of all that.” The lugubrious youth, having detected that the record was coming to an end, energetically rewound and reset the needle at the hissing beginning. Greg rocked up and down on his chair and groaned.

  “I read somewhere that, before they drowned Rasputin, the Bolsheviks tortured him by playing a record of ‘Yankee-doodle-dandy’ outside his cell day and night. I confess I’m already ripe to be pushed beneath the bloody ice. I suppose the only way to stop the lad, without hurting his feelings, is to ask for something else.” He shuffled off. Records were fanned out and discussed and he shuffled back, arms beating time as in a slow drunkard’s dance, to the warbling tones of “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic”. “Better. Much.”

  “Do you mean that you support the ceremony simply to make the Balinese feel better or that you actually expect it to cure their problems? Do you mean that demons are real? What do you mean?”

  Walter sighed. “We can argue bout this until the cows come home to roost. When you live with another people, Bonnetchen, there is only one way to do it. It’s a matter of all or nothing. You can’t pick and choose. You must believe everything.”

  “Drink up, chaps,” urged Greg in a welcome and very sudden silence. “By the time we’ve got through calonarang, I predict that we’re going to be very tired little teddy bears.”

  ***

  “Aw Jeez, Maaahgret. Them must be the bleedin’ pudenda priests.” Greg’s acerbic version – I assumed – of her second, New Zealand husband, Reo Fortune. He was deliberately provoking her, playing with fire, what Walter termed “putting the bat among the pigeons”. They had had a bad day, yesterday, showing Balinese Rohrshach blots. In the smeared symmetries, villagers had seen nothing at all or demons, their standard response to any violation of the forms of nature. The McPhees’ houseboys, in their greater sophistication, had assumed they were being handed the Tuans’ used toilet paper. Margaret’s grumpy ill-humour was the price she now paid for her assumption that every day was an opportunity for discovery and development, as opposed to Greg’s view of its being just another damned thing to be got through.

  “Stop it, Greg. You know full well the word is pedanda priests. And drop that stupid accent.”

  I imagined this was all something to do with the goings-on between Jane and Margaret, a sort of contagion of dysfunctionality between the two married couples. I regretted coming so early. The sky was still etched with the portents of dawn. Made Kaler and I exch
anged mute looks of sympathy. Walter was lost in thought, watching guests and visitors struggling up the hill, bearing musical instruments, costumes and ritual paraphernalia, offerings of food and bamboo tubes of drink, corked with clumps of grass. Clouds the colour of a black eye coiled and twisted on either side and the ground was still slick from a nighttime downpour. But there would be no more rain today. Magic against disruptive precipitation was part of the package, bought and paid for. Bare Balinese feet gripped the slippery rock as our tyres had not. The Willy’s Overland Whippet was parked off to one side, abandoned halfway up the bank, uncovered, for there would be no rain. It had developed a new quirk, refusing to start until pushed, following a collision with a buffalo from which only the beast had lumbered away intact. “Thank God it was unhurt. I have,” Walter lamented, “no unsurance.” At first, the small boys of Ubud had found pushing the car down the hill a heady comedic experience. After two weeks of it, the charm had palled and they tended to disappear at the sight of us.

  The priests trooped disdainfully past in shoulder-length hair and twirled topknots, swaying white parasols held above their heads. In Bali, priests may be either male or female – pudenda, then, not entering into it. Female priests, if anything, have more assistants since they are not permitted to carry anything on their heads, otherwise the usual way for a woman to bear burdens. The McPhees were busy, offstage, with the musicians, so other guests were unctuously welcomed by our white faces – automatically surrogate hosts – with silent gestures of respect and by Made with hyperbolically exalted language and the stretched vowels of subservience. Three men, one woman, led by the renowned Ida Bagus Gede, a man of great age, archepiscopal aplomb and magisterial distaste. Most Balinese do not care to be drunk since it brings them to that near-panic state called paling where they lose awareness of where their sacred mountain is and thus their place in the world. Yet rumour had it that Ida Bagus’s white-haired dignity was of the careful kind that drinkers use to mask their befuddlement. It did not matter. He was a man full of sakti, spiritual power, one of those explanatory principles – like “culture” and “personality” – that all peoples have and are central to their world and remain quite untranslatable and incoherent. The priests trailed off to purify themselves, change and scramble for the highest seats in the house. The existence of a minstrels’ gallery above their heads would not please them.