I had met the old coum in 1979, a small, strong, wiry old man, with a laughing voice and bright eyes, and hair flattened by his hat; and with memories of the wars. He had died the next year, Linus told me.
“He loved to look at the puppet play, which is the mixture of Hinduism and Javanese culture. His son has taken over, but he is seldom asked to lead the community in prayer. Because of the changing orientation of the Muslims themselves, they have fewer rituals—commemorating the dead in the Javanese way, sharing food in the kenduri, ritual food. They used that custom only when the old coum died.
“When my father died we asked the son of the coum to pray with us. The Christian leader led the prayers, and the coum and others, non-Catholics, were asked to pray for my father in their own way. This is the way of tolerance and equilibrium in relations in the village.”
So Linus’s thoughts constantly went back to that death in his house, and, almost as a parallel theme, the loss of equilibrium in his world.
Without any change in his expression or in his tone, he said, “Six or seven feet below us here are many Hindu temples or Buddha temples or Hindu-Buddha temples, buried by eruptions of Merapi a thousand years ago and also two thousand and fifty years ago.” Merapi, the active volcano of the region, creator of the lava that enriched the soil, and showed as black boulders in the beds of streams. “This creates a job for people who want to study about Java culture and religion, because behind these phenomena we can catch the spirit of Javanese people today.”
The vegetation of Java was a composite of the trees and flowers of the Old World and the New. It was like the vegetation of Trinidad and Venezuela and some of the islands. I was even to see one day—on the busy road from Yogyakarta to Prambanan, with the half-restored towers of the great tenth-century Hindu temple complex—a giant immortelle tree bare of leaves and in full, lava-fed flower: red-and-yellow bird-shaped flowers ceaselessly falling on the road, as I had seen them fall in Trinidad in cocoa woods: the immortelle a Central American import, used there as a shade tree for cacao. It was hard to shake off old associations; but I was to feel with Linus, as I had felt in West Sumatra, that there were different things in this soil, other emanations.
Linus’s mother was at a funeral when Linus brought me back the next morning. And after some time Linus’s sister appeared in the back room. She sat almost formally in a straight-backed chair before the television. I could see her from where I sat with Linus at the table next to the dividing screen. She paid me no attention. She looked rested; she was calm. She had complained about the priest the day before, and had nothing more to say to me.
Linus said, “My sister cooks. If my mother cooks, and she doesn’t like it, she will cook for herself. But she doesn’t know how to judge things. She will use too much rice, for instance. She can cook vegetables, too. Fried eggs. She will buy these things for herself.” He spoke with pleasure and pride and delicacy. “She feels very much that people shouldn’t treat her differently. We suffered a lot during my big sister’s wedding party. ‘Why am I not married?’ she said. We said nothing. We can do nothing for her. We shook our heads to say, ‘No, we cannot do anything.’ ” And, reliving the moment, he shook his head slowly, and the pain showed in his eyes. “But she will cry. She will use new clothes and complain about it to new people.”
“How does your mother manage?”
“My mother says often to others: ‘I don’t know why God gave a gift of an invalid daughter.’ ” Invalid: it was the word Linus used for his sister: he allowed nothing stronger. “My mother has a big trouble with her. Sometimes she will attack my mother. We went this season after the rice fields had been harvested and bought a lot of rice, to sell later. My sister will tell my mother, ‘Don’t sell it.’ Maybe she thought the rice shouldn’t be sold. We had to tell her that the rice had to be sold to buy other things.”
His face was grave; his tenderness touched it with beauty.
I asked, “Have you written about her?”
“I have tried to write a poem about this sister. But the time hasn’t come yet. I have only written poems about another sister, number eight, who died in 1983.”
He went through the doorway below the cross and Semar to get the book. The display shelves by the dividing screen had simple Hindu images among its Christian pieces and its simpler ornaments and keepsakes. The sister was still calm, watching the television.
The booklet he brought out had a white lotus on a green leaf on the cover. The dedication was to the sister who had died. All the poems in the booklet were written in six weeks in 1987, four years after the sister’s death. There was one poem which Linus particularly liked; and in an anthology of Indonesian poetry which he gave me there was this rendering (by John McGlynn) of the last stanza of that poem:
From the earth to earth return
From shadows to shadows return
Like heat lightning in swiftness rising
Your soul rises and leaves your body
Asal bumi balik bumi
Asal bayang balik bayang
Bagaikan tatit kumedap—lap—
Atman oncat dari badan
The feeling could not be denied. In the second line there was an indirect, moving reference to the wayang, Linus’s obsession; and I thought that the last two lines recalled the death of Dido in the Aeneid (“The warmth all failed, and the life was taken up to the winds”):… omnis et una / Dilapsus calor atque in ventos vita recessit.
In the house this poem was like a private possession of Linus’s. His mother hadn’t read a line he had written. She had encouraged him, or not objected, when he wanted to have an army career. He had gone far; he had got a place at the Indonesian Military Academy at Sukabumi. But then after two weeks—and after a childhood and adolescence dreaming of being a general—he had decided that the military life was not for him, and he had left the academy. It was after that that the poetry vocation had come to him, which his mother had never stopped thinking of as absurd.
And Linus had been discovering that the poetic and literary life was hard. After his great beginner’s success with “Pariyem’s Confession” things had slowed up for him. A four-volume anthology of Indonesian poetry—a great labor, and a famous work that had sold three thousand copies—had earned him only five hundred dollars; and he could get no more than two hundred dollars for a book of articles. And articles and anthologies made enemies; poets didn’t like being criticized or left out. Linus said, “People are jealous of me. Jealousy was behind those young Muslim agitators.”
As hard as anything else was the writer’s need to go on, to go beyond the first impulse, the impulse that had committed him to the career, to dredge up material that when he began he didn’t know about. Now, however, things had begun to move for Linus again. He was just about getting started on a new book, something that might turn out to be bigger than “Pariyem’s Confession.” The new book was going to “reflect” Javanese history.
Linus was a Catholic, the son of converts. To some extent, then, in the religious divide of Java, the competition between the two revealed religions, his side was chosen for him. For him all the mingled emanations of the past, below the lava, the Hinduism and Buddhism and animism that together made for the “restraint” of Javanism, ran naturally into Christianity with its message of love and charity.
He said, “It is easy for Javanese people to embrace Christ’s teaching. And maybe Javanism has some spirit of Buddhism. Siddhartha taught people love.” Siddhartha, the Buddha.
With no change of tone, he said, “I think the spirit of Siddhartha often comes to teach us, to teach wisdom in living. He comes to a small group of my friends. When we collect together, in the night usually, the spirit of Siddhartha will come sometimes to teach us, and we will ask him about our problems. Sometimes he writes on the palm of my friend Landung, a poet and translator. I can’t read it, but my other friend, a woman—she works as a palace guide in Yogya—she can read it. Landung will feel somebody writing on his palm: tuk, tuk, tuk, li
ke that. And at the last the person writing will write his name: Sincerely, Siddhartha. And my woman friend can read what Siddhartha has written.”
I asked, “Can you remember any message?”
“I remember. It was: ‘I don’t teach about devas, the many gods of Hinduism. I don’t teach about reincarnation. You could arrive at nirvana even if you live in this world.’ ”
“What year was that?”
“This was in 1993, about.” The year, perhaps, when his father died.
“When did Landung discover this gift?”
“Maybe around 1990. Once Landung told me he didn’t believe he had this gift of receiving messages from God or Siddhartha or the true spirit in this way. That night Siddhartha came and said, ‘When you receive a gift from God, don’t throw it away.’ ”
“When do you have your meetings?”
“A spontaneous feeling in all of us. But sometimes we can’t collect together all of us. Sometimes Landung feels there is a message in his palm—”
“Even when he is working?”
“Yes. He will stop it, saying, ‘Wait, wait, wait. I am busy today. Maybe tonight.’ And then we take it to the lady to read.”
“Are the messages short?”
“Sometimes short, sometimes long. If Siddhartha comes, it means he wants us to think and discuss his teaching.”
“Do you get messages in a moment of crisis?”
“He told us about Jesus Christ. He is coming in a mystery. We cannot predict.”
“Does he give more practical advice?”
“When I was sick, Siddhartha told Landung through the palm that I had to try to look for a certain kind of leaf, something in the village. Then you must steep it in hot water and drink the mixture. It worked.”
“Does your mother know?”
It was as with Linus’s poetry. “I never told her. Her narrow experience in the spirit world will be surprised. She will not believe my explanation.”
The most important revelation they had had from Siddhartha was that he was a prophet—which meant (though Linus didn’t say so) that Siddhartha, the Buddha, was in the line of prophets that (according to the Muslims) ended with Mohammed: which meant that this Indian-Javanese figure had connections with the two competing revealed religions of Indonesia.
What Siddhartha said through Landung’s palm was, “When I meditated for fifty-four years in a small lake, suddenly I received a voice: ‘Look at the bright star in the sky.’ In that sky I saw a man in blue clothes, very bright, and he brought a bucket, and inside the bucket was a baby, and the man in the bright blue clothes introduced himself as Adam, and the baby introduced itself as Jesus. Then I saw writing in the sky: This is the man I promised you.” Siddhartha told Landung, “I don’t know who gave me the direction to look at the sky.” When Linus heard this he said directly to Siddhartha through the woman friend who was translating, “It was John the Baptist.” And Siddhartha answered, “A long time I have wondered about that person. It’s only today that I’ve got to know his name.” So Linus began to feel that he was in touch with Siddhartha.
I asked Linus, “When did this mystical group start?”
“It just happened. In the late 1980s.”
We were sitting at the oilcloth-covered table, next to the dividing screen and the wall shelf with the ornaments and images. I had a partial view of the dark inner room. Linus’s sister had some time before left her chair before the television. Now Linus’s mother appeared, small, her footsteps almost without sound. She had come back from the village funeral and was in her home clothes, which might also have been her working clothes; later, when the sun was lower, she would be going to her rice field to plant out seedlings. Now she sat in the chair before the television set—the blue light flickering on her face, the sound turned down low—and watched a Latin-American telenovela, or soap, very slow, in bright, unnatural colors. It was something she followed, Linus said; and it was strange to think of this low commercial form (so particular to the yearnings of Latin America) leaping the hemisphere, leaping cultures, to speak directly to this sorrowing old woman in her shut-in Javanese world.
While her husband, the village leader, lived, the broad-fronted house on the main road had been one of the six important houses in the village. Now, without him who had been its light and center, with the tarnished sofa set low on the concrete floor, the darkening ceiling matting, and with Linus’s mementos—in a corner, on a wall—of a festival of the performing arts in London from five years before, it was as though dust had metaphorically settled on people and things.
But the house had treasure: in Linus’s bedroom was his collection of antique krises, local daggers, of serpentine shape, with leaf upon leaf of various metals. These krises, always personal to their owners, had spiritual significance, Linus said. The handle and the hilt, or the blade and the sheath, had an obvious sexual symbolism: the spirit came from the lingam and yoni emblems of Javanese Hinduism. He had about sixty of these krises. He had been collecting them since 1982 (the year before his sister had died, the sister whose death he had written poems about, in a six-week burst in 1987). The krises were mainly from the thirteenth and fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some, he said, were of the sixth and seventh centuries. I thought he meant the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he insisted.
The krises were in his bedroom, and we went to see them when his mother (unwittingly like a dragon guarding mystic treasure) had done with her telenovela, and had gone to her work in the rice field. It was dark in the bedroom, and the darkness was like part of the privacy of the rooms at the back of the house. The krises were in an old brown wardrobe. The ones with scabbards stood against the corners of the tall compartment. The naked ones lay flat and hidden on a top shelf. They were fearful things, their blades jagged and sharp, different leaves or layers of metal showing, some of them seemingly rusted. They encouraged thoughts of Linus’s invalid sister (perhaps now resting in her own dark room) and her three-day rages; and then they set the teeth on edge.
It occurred to me that Linus had over the years spent a fair sum on these krises. But he didn’t answer when I asked. He said that he was guided in these and other spiritual matters by a wise man of sixty-five, also a Javanist-Christian, in the next village. Krises gave off vibrations of energy; it was possible for this reason to be led to them by “pendulum study.” Knowledge about them also came to him in dreams.
When he saw that I couldn’t follow, he said, “All the animals in this world have a magic power, and some of them a very strong one. When this animal dies this magic doesn’t die, but comes out and stays in the sky.”
“Where in the sky?”
“I don’t know at what level of the sky. And when the kris-maker makes a kris he will fast and pray, and the blessing of the god of the animals’ magic power will come down in the process of the making.”
Linus also, again with the help of his adviser, had a collection of magic stones. These stones could be found anywhere; he had even found one in the United States. In the pattern of the colors in a stone could be seen—as I understood—the souls or magic of animals.
He said, with a giggle, “Sometimes you can see a beautiful woman.”
The village was closely built up. Neighbors pressed on one side of Linus’s yard, beyond the broken pond and the flower patch. Between the yard and the small plot of salak fruit trees that belonged to Linus’s family there were two sets of neighbors. A sharecropping family, a widow and two of her five children, lived in a poor hut seemingly patched together with old bits and pieces. After that there was a more established farming family, with a well-used but more traditional house, with a separate kitchen and washing-up place at the back, and with their own yard. Chickens—black and tall and slender: the chickens of Java—scratched in the dust. In a pen at the end of the shady yard two white bullocks rested after the labors of the day, skin loose over bone, oddly frail-looking and small for their ploughing duties in the deep volcanic mud of the rice fields. Bullocks we
re smelly, Linus said, but not as smelly as buffalos. And, not far away, in a corner of a yard shaded by young bamboo, we saw two black buffalos, their skin dulled with dirt and muck, tethered to stout, tall poles and resting on a spread of dried grass.
The main village road was a narrow, twisting dirt lane, now showing broom marks, now with damp patches: everyone had to clean the lane in front of his yard, and did so in his own way. There were house plots and fruit or garden plots. These plots were not big, and sometimes they had walls of beautifully cut and fitted lava blocks. Lava, like bamboo, was a local material; people handled it well. The village was full of shade. There was no feeling of openness. People didn’t want openness in a village.
With the volcanic soil and the damp heat everything grew fast, here and in the open rice fields. You couldn’t forget the lava of Mount Merapi: Linus’s obsession with the worlds buried underfoot was understandable. Part of the bounty of Merapi and the volcanic soil was the distinctive salak fruit of the region. Homemade boards on the main road advertised SALAK PONDOH. The small orchard plot that Linus’s family had was of young salak trees—like palm trees, but with thorny trunks, and with intricate spider webs on the thorns. Someone else had a plot of mature salak trees protected by an old lava-block wall made higher with wire and matting. Where there was so little space, where neighbors (and outsiders) always pressed, the products of the earth were precious.