Singapore Dream and Other Adventures Page 7
However, Friday morning and also Friday afternoon came and went without the Maras arriving, and also I spent the night from Friday to Saturday listening for many long hours for the whistle of an incoming ship; and all of Saturday went by as well. It was not until Sunday morning that the news came that it was finally here, and if it was not raining too much, it would perhaps depart tomorrow.
On Sunday I was on the river from morning until evening. I had joined a crocodile hunt and was sitting in a small boat with a heavy old Dutch military rifle on my knees, my eyes burning from the heat and the reflection of the sun on the water, waiting in ambush. But on days like that, a person has no luck. We never had a chance to take a shot and we had to be happy, since the water level was so high, that we even got to see a few crocodiles.
In any case, my ship was leaving tomorrow, and after that as far as I was concerned all the crocodiles in Sumatra could ——! When we got back to the city, I learned that the Maras would maybe be leaving early tomorrow morning, or maybe also in the afternoon or in the evening, and I packed my suitcase with anticipatory thoroughness and love. The Maras, which did not leave in the morning, also did not leave in the afternoon, but I was told that I could go aboard in the evening and that I had better be on board by ten o’clock at the latest if I did not want to be left behind.
In order to be sure it would not leave without me, I set out for the ship at nine o’clock, moving through the dense night (in Europe we have no idea of real nocturnal darkness!), and groping over alien boats and sleeping oar coolies in the lanternless darkness, I sought and found a pathway for myself and my baggage to the unlit drop-down stairway and pulled my way hopefully upward. The ship was heavily loaded. The holds were all full of yeloton and wool, yet there remained twenty or more boats loaded with rattan by the ship, and the loading was still going on. A hundred coolies swarmed over the overfull dark deck, where I had to climb over boxes and beams, and when the coolies came near one of the few lanterns, their naked yellow sweat-covered bodies glowed warmly out of the shadowy tumult.
A Dutch captain appeared and I was given a cabin, but it was as hot as a steam bath, and as I took my boots off, I immediately discovered the reason. The floor was so hot from the neighboring furnace rooms that it was painful on the soles of my feet. The porthole was just slightly bigger than the crystal of a pocket watch. By way of compensation, there was an electric ventilator and an electric light, but these had not functioned for years, and the room was lit by a small, smutty oil lamp.
The departure was expected and promised from one hour to the next. Until one o’clock I sat stiff from fatigue on a chair on the upper deck and stared in a daze out of my swollen eyes down at the ship. Then I went into the cabin and lay down, listened to the perspiration falling in heavy drops from my down-hanging hand onto the floor, got up again and smoked a cigar outside in the rain among the coolies, wandered around through the dark ship, stumbled over sleeping bodies, overturned a cage with live monkeys in it, bumped into the corners of boxes, and found myself at dawn broken and exhausted once more on the upper deck.
I had never in my life drunk Bordeaux and smoked strong Indian cigars at six o’clock in the morning, but today I did, and now I can already keep my eyes open again almost without pain or effort.
Now as I write these notes, the ship is moving. It has been traveling for an hour, since noon, and I would gladly do something else besides writing if that were not the only thing left I can do. The cabin is impossible; there is only one chair available for me on deck. I stop writing, and here comes the captain, who wants to draw me into conversation. He is a likable fellow and has his wife with him on board. They live on the upper deck in the captain’s cabin. He has an unbelievable stamp collection and a mangy Chinese dog, which unfortunately is disloyal and stays close to me. And his wife has five young cats and ten or eleven songbirds in cages. In addition, we have four live monkeys on board (the same ones whose cage I overturned in the night), of which the smallest is quite tame and allows me to hold and stroke it. Unfortunately they stink like the devil.
We are sailing slowly downriver and will reach the sea by evening, and we will be in Singapore in maybe thirty-two hours.
* * *
Evening postscript: I take everything back. When I stopped writing, I was not bothered by anybody, quite to the contrary I was invited to a very good midday meal. Afterward, the captain’s wife set up a field cot for me forward on the upper deck, where I could rest for a couple of hours. Then everything began to look better. The Chinese dog, I now think, is not mangy; he only has some hair loss on the rear end like all dogs in the tropics, which is a pity because judging from the rest of him, before that happened he must have been a quite handsome, reddish blond little guy. The porthole in my cabin is now as big as the crystal of a modest wall clock—the pocket watch was an exaggeration.
I thoroughly soaped up and then poured river water over myself—the first fresh bath in ten days! Now I can see out of my eyes again without straining. It is five in the afternoon and already starting to get dark. We have arrived in the broad river mouth and before us lies the bright yellow of the shallow sea. The pilot who was doing the steering can leave us soon. Across from us, beautiful with its long high mountain chains, all deep blue, lies Bangka Island.
* * *
Postscript, ten in the evening: The dog is mangy after all. Touching him has already cost me two of my precious mercury pills. In addition to him, the cats, the dogs, and the monkeys, there are two armadillos, a porcupine, and a beautiful young jaguar on board, all live. They are shut up in cages, but they get much more air than I do in my cabin. The evening meal was quite pleasant and sociable. The captain has a big, heavy, functioning gramophone, on which in honor of my presence he played Die Dollarprinzessin* and Caruso. All Europeans in the tropics have gramophones, and thus already before my return to Singapore I had been soaked in the atmosphere of operettas, which since I first set foot on the Lloyd company ship in Genoa has shown itself to be characteristic of European life in the East.
* The Dollar Princess, a still popular operetta by Leo Fall.—Trans.
KANDY PROMENADE
The famous city Kandy lies in an oppressively narrow valley on a miserable, artificial lake. Apart from its ancient temple and its, of course, marvelous trees, it has no merits, but it does boast all the problems and deficiencies of a small foreign city that has been systematically spoiled by excessively wealthy English people. By way of compensation, however, leading from Kandy in all directions into the marvelous surrounding landscape are the most beautiful walking paths in the world. Unfortunately I saw only half of these despite a long stay there, since the rainy season was late, and Kandy lay constantly under gray, rainy, overcast skies and thick fog, like a valley in the Black Forest in late autumn.
In a light downpour one afternoon, I took a stroll along bucolic Malabar Street where I was able to enjoy the pleasurable sight of the half-naked Singhalese youth. I did indeed feel a kind of atavistic ease and home-like feeling—which to my disappointment I had never experienced in relation to typical tropical landscapes—at the sight of the carefree primitive nature folk. Such folk flourish and thrive here in India in a much more beautiful and convincing fashion than they do, for example, in Italy, where we usually look to find the “innocence of the South.” In particular, what is totally absent here in the East is the unbridled pomposity and joy in violent noisemaking with which in the Mediterranean coastal towns every newspaperboy and match seller proclaims himself as the noisy center of the universe. The Indians, Malays, and Chinese fill the countless streets of their populous cities with an intense, colorful, vigorous life, which, however, proceeds with an almost ant-like noiselessness, and in that way puts to shame all of our southern European towns. Especially the Singhalese, as otherwise unremarkable as they may be, all go through their simple, mild, monotonous lives with a lovable gentleness and quiet, deer-like dignity that is not to
be found in the West.
In front of every hut, as though floating between the wall of the house and the edge of the street, was a very small, naive garden. In all of them bloomed a few roses as well as a small tree with “temple flowers,” and before every threshold a couple of handsome, dark brown, longhaired or else oddly shaven-headed children gamboled about, the smallest completely naked, but with amulets on their chests and their wrists, and ankles adorned with silver bangles. What struck me as contrasting with the Malay children was that they are without shyness toward foreigners and even coquettishly seek to draw our attention. They learn the beggar’s call of money as their first English word, frequently even before they learn Singhalese. The girls are often wonderfully beautiful, and all the children without exception have beautiful eyes.
A steep side road disappearing into the thick, tangled greenery attracted me, and I climbed up through a ravine amazingly lush with vegetation, which had the odor of ferment of a greenhouse. Thereabout on countless tiny terraces were marshy rice paddies, in the mire of which naked laborers and gray water buffalo toiled at plows.
All of a sudden, after a final precipitous decline in the path, I was standing over the bank of the Mahaweli. There the beautiful mountain river, swollen by rain, streamed in a rapid descent through a narrow passage between banks of dark primeval stone. Small wild rock islands and large boulders, black and shining like polished bronze, stood out from the brownish foaming water.
At a broader part of the rocky bank, a raft-like ferry was just landing. An old blind man was led onto the shore, and with a patient face and yellow withered hands, off which the rainwater ran into his clothes, began groping his way up the steep bank. Quickly I climbed onto the small raft and was taken across the river amid the reddish rocky landscape of the shoreland. On the other side, I climbed over stone steps on a path through more jungle darkness, once again passing by huts and terraced rice paddies. The people had just harvested and now without a pause were again plowing the swampy ground so they could immediately sow it once more; for in this good climate and in this primeval mud, harvest after harvest is brought in, year after year. In the spattering rain, the narrow valley with its red earth and boundlessly opulent growth gave off an odor of hot fertility, as though everywhere the soft mud was seething with mysterious primal creation.
Two miles farther up there was supposed to be a Buddhist rock temple, the oldest and holiest in Ceylon, and soon I saw the little monastery and the small vegetable garden the monks have worked into the mountain slope. Now the temple appeared, in front of which the hollows in the rock floor were full of rainwater. There was a run-down vestibule with arches of naked stone from recent times; the whole of the place seeming neglected, dark, and grim. A young boy ran and fetched a priest for me and the first door of the shrine was opened. Two tiny wax candle stubs in the hand of the priest flickered erratically, incapable of lighting the black, silent rooms. Only the gray, simple head of the priest floated in the faint, red luminescence, which here and there awakened a fragment of the ancient painting on the wall. I wanted to look at the walls, so we now moved the two weak, sooty little lights along them and down to the floor—inch by inch, as though the huge fresco were a stamp collection. In ancient primitive contours, faint yellow and red in color, emerged countless, lovely, delightful, and also humorous figures from the legend of the Buddha. There was the Buddha leaving his ancestral home, the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree, the Buddha with his disciples Ananda and Kaundinya, and so on. Unbidden, the thought of Assisi came to my mind, where in the great empty upper church the walls are covered with Francesco Giotto’s fresco of the legend of St. Francis. This was in exactly the same spirit, only here everything was small and ornamental, and in the drawings and the small images, though there was indeed culture and life, there was no personality.
But now the old man opened the innermost door. Here it was completely dark—in the rear of this space the rock cave ended. There was something uncanny in the air in here, and when we came closer with our candles, from the play of their faint glow and the shadows, waveringly a gigantic form emerged, bigger than the circle of our dim light; after a while, with a shiver I recognized the recumbent head of a colossal Buddha. The face of the image shone pale and huge. Our little bit of light allowed us barely to sense the shoulders and arms; the rest was lost in the darkness. I had to walk back and forth a great deal, urging the priest along and working with the two candles, before I was able dimly to see the entire figure. The lying Buddha I thus gained a glimpse of was forty-two feet long, covering the wall of the cave with his gigantic body. The top of the rock wall rested on his left shoulder, and if he had stood up, he would have filled the entire mountain.
And here too, unsought, a similar experience of mine came to mind. Years ago I had gone into a small Gothic chapel in an Alsatian village, where the weak light, faintly colored, barely penetrated through the painted, dusty windowpanes, and looking up I saw with a great shock of fear a huge carved Christ hanging over me—on the Cross, with grim red wounds and a bloody forehead.
We have come a long way, and it is very good that we—a very small fraction of humanity—no longer have utter need of either one of these two, either the bloody Cross or the smoothly smiling Buddha. We must go further in overcoming them and the other gods and learn to do without them. But it would also be very good if one day our children, who have grown up without gods, should again find the courage and the joy and the energy of the soul to erect such clear, huge, unambivalent monuments and symbols of their inner life.
KANDY DIARY
It is evening. I am lying in my hotel room. For the last few days I have been living on red wine and opium, and my intestines must possess either tremendous life force or desperate, fearless courage, because despite everything they still give me no peace. This evening neither my courage nor my force are quite sufficient to allow me to get up and move around. In addition, the rains are here, and outside drenched, pitch-dark night reigns, even though evening is only just beginning. I must somehow pull myself out of my current frame of mind, so I will try to note down what I saw two hours ago.
It was about six o’clock and already almost night. The rain was pouring down. I had gotten out of bed and gone out, weak from lying about and fasting, numbed by the opiates with which I have been fighting my dysentery. Without thinking much about it, I turned in the darkness down the road to the temple and after a while found myself standing over the dark water at the entrance to the ancient holy site, where beautiful, luminous Buddhism has developed into a truly curious form of idol worship, compared to which even Spanish Catholicism seems quite spiritual. A dream-like, muffled music came to my ears. Here and there knelt dark worshipers, bowing to the ground and murmuring. A sweet strong fragrance of flowers came over me, with stupefying effect. Through the temple gate I saw into night-dark rooms in which many scattered thin tapers burned like so many mind-fuddling will-o’-the-wisps.
A guide had taken hold of me and pushed me forward; two youths in white clothes with kind, gentle-eyed Singhalese faces, each with two burning little candles in his hands, hurried over to help guide me. Walking ahead of me, their bodies bent low, they painstakingly lit each little stair and every protruding pillar that I might bump into, and, my senses benumbed, I got caught up in the adventure as though I was entering a treasure cave in an Arabic fairy tale.
A brass bowl was held up to me and a donation for entry into the temple was requested. I put a rupee in the bowl and walked on, the candle bearers before me. White, sweet-smelling temple flowers were offered to me. I took a few and gave the purveyor some money. I then laid the blossoms in various niches and before various images as offerings. Following the guide, as the darkness before my eyes danced with a hundred little golden points of candlelight, I moved past small stone lions, many images of lotus flowers, and carved and painted pillars. Next, climbing a dark stairway, I came to stand before a great glassed-in shrine, whose panes and woodwork w
ere full of dirt. The inside was filled with buddha images of gold and brass, silver and ivory, granite and wood, alabaster set with gems; of images from north and south India, from Siam and Ceylon. But in an opulently ornamented silver shrine, sitting still and fine and infinitely distinguished and venerable, was a beautiful old Buddha, cut from a single immense crystal, and the light of the candle I held up behind it shone in colors through its glass body. Of all the many images of the Perfect One, this crystal one was the only one I will not forget—it truly expressed the nature of the utterly flawless Enlightened One.