Singapore Dream and Other Adventures Page 6
In a daze I staggered to the window, which in the light of the lightning flashes wavered about in my vision, causing its outlines to flicker and shift like the row of windows in a swiftly passing train. Out there, two paces away, the forest looked back at me, an agitated sea of forms, tangled branches, myriads of leaves and vines billowing, desperately defending itself, subjugated by the lightning and rudely wounded to its quivering heart, crashing about and furious. I stood at the window and stared out at the chaos, blinded and deafened, and felt with overly heightened senses the raging life of the earth gushing forth and wasting itself. I stood in the midst of it with my European brain and sensibilities to which the mad uproar failed to submit. I watched in a state of curiosity and thought of all the many nights and days of my life, of all the many, many hours in which, as presently, I have stood somewhere upon the earth and observed strange things and phenomena, driven and drawn by the same intoxication with watching as I felt now. It did not for a moment seem strange that I was standing in the south of the primeval marshland forest of Sumatra watching a tropical nocturnal storm. I also at no time felt a feeling of danger, but rather I felt a foreshadowing—I saw myself a hundred times again, in places very far from here, standing alone and filled with inquisitiveness, watching, wonderstruck, something incomprehensible that spoke to that which is incomprehensible and beyond concept in myself, to which it was akin. As a little boy, exactly with the same sense of being caught up in watching but detached from all responsibility, I had seen animals die or the chrysalises of butterflies break open. With the same feeling, I had looked into the eyes of dying persons and into the calyxes of flowers—not with the desire to explain these things, but only with the need to be there and, yes, not to miss any of these rare moments in which the great voice spoke to me and in which I and my life and sensibilities disappeared and were of no worth, because they became merely a thin, superficial overtone of the deep thunder or the even deeper silence of inconceivable occurrence.
The moment had arrived, the rare, long-awaited moment, and I stood and saw the primeval forest forget its mystery in the white light of a thousand lightning bolts and shudder with the fear of death. What spoke to me there was exactly the same thing as I had heard tens or hundreds of times in my life—at the sight of an abyss in the mountains, sailing through a storm at sea, at the onrush of a powerful downdraft on a ski slope—something I cannot express and nevertheless must strive again and again to experience.
And suddenly it was all over. And that was more wondrous and uncanny than all the clamor of the storm. No more lightning, no more thunder, only dense, nameless darkness and the crashing down of a wild, voracious, suicidally angry rain. All around, nothing besides that deep, raking hiss and the ruttish odor of the churned-up forest floor, and such a profound fatigue and sleepiness that I fell asleep on my feet and tumbled onto my mattress and did not reawaken until, with the yellow forest sunrise, came the echoing, hundred-voiced bellowing of the apes.
* Tauschnitz was a Leipzig publishing house of the time.—Trans.
PALEMBANG
Palembang is a city built on stilts of about seventy-five thousand inhabitants in the southeast of Sumatra, located on the marshy shore of a large river, which has received from superficial travelers the highly unsuitable name of the Malay Venice, which says nothing more than that the city lies on the water and its main traffic is on the water.
Palembang stands in water from noon until midnight, and from midnight until noon in swamp—in a gray viscous filth that stinks phenomenally. The sight of it and its odor pursued me for a week after my departure, even out into the open sea, as a light fog of repulsion and feverishness. In the meantime, through this fog I experienced this beautiful, remarkable city as an exciting adventure.
The river and the hundred still, canal-like side streams, on the banks of which Palembang lies, all flow in the opposite direction in the morning from the direction they flow in at night, for the whole utterly flat area lies only two meters above the level of the sea, which is seventy or eighty kilometers away, and whose high tide comes all the way up here every day, reversing the current of the rivers, turning the swamps to seas, the dirt city into a magnificent fairy-tale scene and making the whole area livable.
During this time of high tide—which changes day by day and during my time here began at midday—the thousand stilt-built edifices are reflected gently and enchantingly in the brownish, faintly stirring water, and a hundred sleek, painterly small sailboats swarm past each other on even the smallest canal with quiet nimbleness and astonishing skill. Naked children and veiled women bathe at the foot of the steep wooden stairways that lead down from every house to the water, and the lanterns of the ornamental-looking Chinese shops, afloat on rafts, carve wonderful cutouts of Asian evening and aquatic life out of the darkness.
At ebb tide, however, the same city becomes a half-black gutter. The little houseboats sit canted and skewed on the dead swamp, brown people bathe innocently in a mush of water, sludge, market garbage, and dung. The whole scene looks dull and lackluster under the merciless heat of the sky, and the stench is unspeakable.
However, I should not do the indigenes injustice. They can do nothing about the fact that their river has no gradient and therefore no clean water, that the garbage from cooking and the excrement from the privies remain standing around the houses, and that the savage sun causes the sludge to putrefy so quickly. As much as it sometimes horrifies the foreigner to behold the level of hygiene prevailing here, as proudly as he may feel of his superiority over the Malays, renouncing bathing for days and brushing his teeth with soda water, nevertheless the fact remains that the East Asians are much cleaner than the Europeans, and that we have learned our very modern European cleanliness from the Indians and the Malays. This modern cleanliness, which begins with requiring a daily bath, comes from England and it came to England under the influence of the many Anglo-Indians and other people who returned home to England from the tropics, and those people had learned bathing, frequent mouth rinsing, and all these many skills of cleanliness from the natives of India, Ceylon, and the Malayan world. I have seen simple women of the folk here clean their teeth with fine wooden picks and rinse their mouths with fresh water after every meal, which among us is done by only 5 or 10 percent of the population. And in Württemburg and Baden I know farmers enough who bathe at the very most two or three times a year, whereas the Malays and Chinese bathe at least once a day or more. And they have been doing it for a very long time—at least we already find such cleanliness practices described as being a matter of course in very ancient Chinese books. For example, in the Lieh-Tzu, we find: “When he arrived at the inn and was finished with washing, mouth-rinsing, drying off, and combing….”
In Palembang, in this unique city, yeloton and rubber, wool and rattan, fish and ivory, pepper, coffee, wood resin, native weaving and needlework are sold. Imports are imitation sarong fabric from England and Switzerland, beer from Munich and Bremen, German and English knits, sterilized milk from Mecklenburg and Holland, canned fruit from Lensburg and California. In the Dutch bookshop you can buy translations of the most trashy literature in all languages but you cannot find Multatuli’s Havelaar. For the use of the whites, the most out-of-the-way gift articles from European smalltown stores can be found, whereas the natives are served by Japanese junk stores with cheap rubbish from Germany and America. A thousand meters from here, tigers prey on goats and elephants root about wrecking telegraph poles. Above the swampy land swarm magnificent waterbirds, herons, and eagles, and under the canals, invisible and silent, for hundreds of miles, raw petroleum flows continuously in iron pipes toward the refineries in the city. I bought an old Chinese silk shawl here for one and a half times the sum the merchant was charging for a box containing a gross of European steel springs. And strangely enough, the cost of living in the tax-free English ports of Penang and Singapore or Colombo is twice as high as it is here, where the extremely high Dutch taxes, which cripple
commerce, as does the Dutch colonial administration altogether, pretty much give the impression of shortsighted exploitation of the natives. On the other hand, the Dutch-Indian rijsttafel, while not marvelous, is nevertheless in the worst of cases paradisiacal when compared with the cuisine the English serve in the expensive, palatial hotels of their colonies. It is a pity, because the English would be the number one people on the earth if they did not lack two elementary gifts that a people of culture surely cannot do without: a sense of fine cuisine and a sense of music. With regard to these two elements, in the English colonies the lowest expectations are in order. Everything else is first class.
The local people here have that frightful groveling servility that the European officials and merchants like so much but which some of us occasionally find upsetting. At the same time, however, the subservient Malay is extremely apt at adopting European comforts, pleasures, and upper-class manners. The coolie on account of whose hardship in his servitude you felt so deeply sorry for an hour ago, you may soon encounter proud in his white suit (which perhaps belongs to you but has been rented to him by your laundry man), on a rented bicycle (ten cents an hour), or as a habitué with lordly airs in yellow shoes and a burning cigarette entering the billiard hall. After that he returns to his hut, puts his sarong back on, makes himself comfortable, and brushes his teeth with canal water on the wooden steps on the bank, exactly in the same spot where, just a minute ago, he relieved his bodily needs.
A FAIRY TALE ON THE WATER
I would like to take the trip I took yesterday again sometime with a woman I love—out of Palembang in a small, narrow boat.
Our tippy little boat had a draft of no more than a hand’s breadth and could therefore float in even the smallest of runlets. Toward evening when we still had the tide, we went up a small brown side stream, where among the huts on stilts, the usual innocent, busy life was going on—net fishing of every kind, at which the Malays, as they are at bird catching and rowing, are true masters; multitudes of naked screaming children; small-time merchants on rafts with their soda water and syrup; sellers of Korans and tiny Mohammedan devotional pamphlets softly hawking their wares; and boys swimming. One seldom sees people fighting or arguing here, one never sees drunks, and the traveler from the West feels shame that this stands out to him.
We moved along in a leisurely fashion. The stream became narrow and shallow, the huts fell by the wayside, and we were surrounded by swamp and bush, green and still. Trees grew here and there on the bank and in the water itself. Gradually, unnoticeably, they became more numerous, stretched myriads of stilt roots out toward us, and above us, getting more and more dense, hung a green vaulted network of foliage and branches. Soon no tree could be picked out individually, every one of them being hung with roots, aerial roots, branches, twigs, creepers, all tangled and woven into each other, all embraced and bound together by hundreds of ferns, lianas, and other parasitic plants.
In this silent wilderness from time to time dazzlingly colored kingfishers, of which many nested here, flew by; or gray, darting snipes; or black-and-white magpies, the fat blackbird-like songbirds of the primeval forest. Otherwise, no sound was to be heard and there was no other life besides the fervent growing, breathing, and interweaving of the dense vaulting trees. The stream, often hardly wider than our boat, took another capricious turn every moment, any sense of measure or distance we had completely disappeared, and we moved in rapt silence into a tangled, green eternity, roofed over by densely intermingled trees, hemmed in by large-leafed water plants. We sat there mute and amazed, and none of us could conceive of when or how this spell could ever be broken. I have no idea whether it lasted a half hour, an hour, or two hours.
But it was unexpectedly broken by a wild, multivoiced bellowing over our heads and by a great waving about in the crowns of the trees, and suddenly we were being goggled at by a family of large, gray monkeys, who had been insulted and shaken up by our intrusion. We remained there motionless, and the animals began to play and chase each other again; and then a second family appeared, and then another, until above us the thick vegetation was teeming with big, long-tailed, gray monkeys. From time to time they looked back down at us, angry and suspicious. They snorted wrathfully and growled like dogs on a chain, and as well over a hundred of the animals were sitting over us and were beginning again to snort, and the ones nearest us to bare their teeth, our friend from Palembang gave us a warning sign with his finger. We kept warily still and were careful not to so much as brush against a branch, for to have been throttled by a tribe of monkeys in a jungle swamp an hour from Palembang would have seemed to all of us, perhaps not disgraceful, but nevertheless an ungentlemanly and inglorious end.
Cautiously our Malay dipped his short, light oar into the water, and holding still and ducking down, we carefully headed back beneath the monkeys and the many trees, then back past the huts and the houses, and by the time we had reached the main river again the sun had already gone down and out of the swiftly falling night from both sides of the mighty waters we saw the magical city aglow with its thousand small faint lights.
THE GRAVES OF PALEMBANG
On that beautiful morning I went out beyond the edges of the city immediately after breakfast and stayed out for two or three hours in order to breathe some pure air, see some green, and catch the occasional butterfly. All the cities, even the big ones such as Singapore, are surrounded by villages, hamlets, farms, and the most primitive of rural life, which then melts away silently without any clear boundaries into the fertile green wilderness. You start out in the humming big streets with commercial buildings, trucks, hawking merchants, and cigarette-smoking street urchins, then you turn onto a quiet side street where you find bright, friendly bungalows standing alone far from the street in their gardens, and then unexpectedly you find yourself, wonderfully awakened, fully in the country—you are the object of the snorts of pasturing goats or cows, or you hear in the wild woods the sounds of monkeys leaping.
In Palembang my promenades mostly led past the fish market, past the gruesome sight of living fish of every kind lying about and massive heaps of lopped-off fish heads then past the houses and warehouses of major merchants, then as far as an old mosque, the whole way parallel to the river. Then I would make a right-angle turn toward the interior, and this is where the typical mixture of villages and the wilderness of the bush begins. Small, beautiful cows graze everywhere, crossing the road through traffic in a very carefree and trusting manner. At some hours the traffic on the road is very heavy with pedestrians, porters, lots of bicycles, horse-drawn carts, and even already some automobiles. Ten meters from there, in the heavy bush, you are in the primeval wilderness, surrounded by squirrels and birds in multitudes, growled at by monkeys, and from time to time terrified by monstrous, sometimes poisonous millipedes and scorpions. A person with forest skills can also often find tiger spoor here.
But you cannot go a hundred meters in any direction without running into graves. Overgrown and forgotten lie the graves of Malays and Arabs, quite similar to our own, the new ones adorned with wilted bundles of grass that are laid on them on Fridays by the Mohammedans. Sometimes a small grave site is surrounded by a wall with portals shaped with exquisite arches and finely profiled pillars. High grass has grown around them and they are overhung by gigantic trees. Shady and lonely in their romantic state of neglect, they are as beautiful and noble as a lovely, still corner of some Italian ruin.
Among them you often find a Chinese grave, huge and with large golden characters glowing on the pillars, a walled-in semicircular terrace on a slope five, ten, or twenty meters in diameter, depending on the importance and wealth of the buried person, with blue and gold inscriptions in the beautifully upswept walls—the whole thing precious and ceremonious and beautiful like all Chinese work, though perhaps a bit cool and vacant—and everywhere, to the right and left and all around as well as in the air above, is the dense tangle of bush and trees that has shot up.
I spent many a wondrous and beautiful hour by the graves of Palembang, alone in the densely intertwining green bush, with purple emperor butterflies fluttering about, listening to the many cries of the forest beasts and the wild fantastic songs of the great insects. I sat resting, exhausted by the heat, on the low walls of the Chinese graves, which are so large and so solidly and richly built, but nonetheless are soon overtaken, overmastered, and overmantled by the savage life and growth of this earth. I was visited and observed by black-and-white goats and small, gentle, red-brown cows, eyed by monkeys taking their rest, or ringed by shy and curious Malay children. I knew but few of the trees and animals that I saw around me by name, I was unable to read the Chinese inscriptions, and could exchange only a few words with the children, but nowhere in foreign lands have I felt so little like a foreigner and so completely enfolded by the self-existing naturalness of life’s clear river as I did here.
THE MARAS
Anyone who has been in Palembang for a while and lived on the rear side of the Hotel Nieukerk that gives onto a darkish little canal, who has been plagued by the stench and the mosquitoes without possibility of bathing in pure water—such a person eventually falls prey to an ardent longing for departure, for anywhere else at all, and begins to count the hours till the next ship leaves. Having been a month without mail, feverish with sleeplessness, fatigued by the life of this unique city, worn out by the heat and a lack of baths, I had booked myself a place on the Chinese steamer Maras, which was supposed to arrive on Friday and then leave for Singapore sometime on Saturday. And now I lay in a state of hope under the mosquito net and waited for Friday morning. It had already been a good while since I’d had anything to read. My big trunk was in Singapore, week after week no news arrived from home; I could find nothing to do but wander around in the city every day until I was tired and then lie and wait for many hours, leaf through my notebook, and learn Malay vocabulary. But now the possibility of a ship had appeared on the horizon, and I would be able to leave in two or three days. And soon, as our experiences of consolation have taught us, everything unpleasant in those days would wither away and vanish from my memory and only the many gay, happy experiences would remain.