Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

  And it was Sitor I telephoned. I didn’t think of him as someone whose life had been distorted by politics and imprisonment. The impression I had had of him, after our meeting that morning, was of a man who had achieved calm, a restful, reassuring man.

  A woman answered the telephone. She spoke English well. And Sitor was such a long time coming I feared I had interrupted him at his rest or at his work—his writing, his autobiography. When he did answer the phone, he was as gentle and concerned as I had expected.

  He said, “You must leave the Borobudur and stay at another hotel.”

  “You mean the Borobudur puts people off?”

  “No, it would be cheaper.”

  But then he understood. He understood solitude.

  He said, “Come to my house. Come at seven. I am seeing a young man at six. No, come at six-thirty.”

  He lived in the Jalan Maluku. Some men, lounging after the heat of the day in front of a drinks stall with a fluorescent tube, directed the taxi driver. A pushcart passed, the man knocking a piece of bamboo against his cart. These food pushcarts, though part of Jakarta life, and though there was a real one for the local colour in the hotel restaurant, were absent from the area around the hotel.

  It was a big new concrete house, with a gate apparently made of bamboo. Sitor came out in an Indonesian tunic. He said of the gate, “The bamboo hides the iron.” And he said the pushcart was selling noodles; he knew from the bamboo noise. Every street food had its own musical accompaniment.

  The house was a German house, with a kind of diplomatic status. It was temporarily without an occupant. It had little furniture, but there was a piece of contemporary Indonesian sculpture and many Indonesian pictures.

  We went to the back of the house. Sitor said, as if repeating and testing the English word, “This is the terrace.” We sat there. The young man he was expecting at six hadn’t come. Sitor said, “He is a busy man. He works in human rights.”

  The little house in one corner of the back garden, which was green and skilfully planted, was the “pavilion.” That was where Sitor lived.

  He said, “Barbara will be joining us.”

  Adi, the young man, came. He was in his thirties, slender, sharp-featured, his hair cut short. He said he had been working for twelve hours and couldn’t stay long. If he stayed long there was going to be a little Vietnam War at home.

  Sitor said, “Adi is one of the new leaders. He is a Muslim.”

  Adi said, “I am a Muslim.”

  “Why?” It was the kind of question that could be asked in Indonesia.

  “My parents were Muslim. It is also more logical than Catholicism. That Trinity business is something I cannot understand. Protestantism is better. Hinduism has caste. That I reject.”

  Darkness fell. A light came on in the verandah of the pavilion. And against this light, her face in shadow, there appeared a tall, slender woman in a long dress. She seemed to be attending to a hanging plant or to something in a cage.

  There was a tremulousness in Sitor. Tremulous, at his age, at the appearance of a woman! He composed himself and said with some deliberation, “Barbara is Dutch.”

  Some plates with sweets were brought by a woman servant to the table where we were sitting. And Barbara came the short distance to us, losing her mystery as she moved out of the shadow of the pavilion light into the light of the main house. She was in a blue batik dress. She was young, in her late twenties, and good-looking; she had certainty and style. Sitor became calmer.

  I said, asking about the sweets, “What are those things?”

  Barbara said, in barely accented English, “They are made from beans.”

  “Are they nice?”

  “He likes them. They must be good.” “He” was Sitor.

  She spoke in Indonesian to Adi.

  The sweets were round, with depressions, like little tennis balls that had gone soft. Within the flannel-like hull was a soft filling: oily, sweet, flavourless, like the sweets I had tried in Malaysia.

  Adi said in English, “I was being interrogated about being a Muslim.”

  “Oh, goodness,” Barbara said. “Not interrogated?”

  But interrogations were on Adi’s mind. A cartoonist had been arrested by the authorities.

  “The army has no sense of humour,” Adi said.

  I said, “Is it serious?”

  “It is their way. They will arrest him for a day or two. He will be interrogated in a friendly way. Though friendly isn’t quite the word.”

  Afterwards, Sitor walked out with me into the street. There were more pushcarts about in the evening, different kinds of noises.

  Away from Barbara, in her long batik dress, there was a tremulousness about him again.

  I said, “Go back to Adi.”

  “Adi is an old friend.”

  “Are you married to Barbara?”

  “Tribally.” He laughed in the road. “Come on Saturday morning. I will show you the pictures. The tribe insisted. After we had been living together for two years.”

  “You are fifty-five, Sitor?”

  “Fifty-six.”

  “And still the life of passion? So it never leaves us?”

  “It was what the Canadian anthropologist asked me. ‘Still, at your age?’ She was twenty-four.” And he laughed again, showing his teeth in his bony, Chinese-Negrito face.

  IT was different on Saturday morning, in the daylight, in the almost empty main house. Sitor had a toothache and was taking various medicines. Barbara was in her working clothes: the paler colours of Europe. She looked slenderer. Daylight added a year or two to her face, though still showing her as a woman only in her early thirties. She was busy, businesslike, thinking of getting off to her job. She worked in a Dutch-supported centre for Indonesian handicrafts; and before she went she left instructions with Sitor about her caged birds, and especially about her red parrot.

  Sitor couldn’t settle down. He had his toothache; and people kept dropping in just to exchange the time of day with the famous poet. We had arranged to talk that morning about his autobiography. But he kept putting off the moment; at one stage he even went to the lavatory. When we did get started, he couldn’t talk. He had prepared too well, had thought too hard. He qualified every phrase almost as soon as he had spoken it, and he could scarcely finish a sentence. He began to use big words. And always there were the visitors, and the extended exchange of courtesies in Indonesian.

  Through every door of the sitting-room there was green to look at: the climate wonderfully used in this small plot, creating green, cool rooms, green, big-leafed shade outside every door. And all the time in the street—the morning ticking away, losing its freshness—the pushcarts made their varied noises.

  We decided in the end just to chat. Sitor brought out albums and showed me colour photographs of his village in North Sumatra. The photographs had been taken only a few weeks before, when he and Barbara had gone together to the village for the first time. Sitor had said he was a tribal man; he had also said that he came of a chieftain’s family. The words didn’t tell me much. The photographs helped me to understand one aspect of the reality: they showed that for Sitor, as a tribal man and the son of a chief, there was a part of Sumatra, a part of the earth, that was absolutely and inalienably his.

  For eighteen generations Sitor’s ancestors had ruled over a small area—six miles by twelve—in North Sumatra. It was a mountainous, rocky area, not worth anybody’s while to conquer. The Dutch got there late, towards the end of the nineteenth century. It was Sitor’s father who had fought them; he had fought them from 1884 to 1908. The dates were hard to believe, but Sitor said his father was born in 1850 and died in 1963. His father had died at 113? Yes; he was a tribal superman. Sitor had a sister of eighty; Sitor himself had been conceived when his father was seventy-three. After he had been defeated, his father was appointed administrator of the area by the Dutch. He remained a chief; things went on much as before.

  The tribal area, the area ruled by Sitor’s
father, consisted of three valleys running down from hills six thousand feet high to a beautiful lake. The photographs showed pale paddy fields with bunds or walls of stone down in the valleys. The paddy didn’t grow thick and emerald, as it did in richer soil. The colours of this tribal landscape were oddly muted, temperate. Here Sitor had spent his earliest years, one unit in the extended family of the chief; and Sitor had no memory of any conversation with his father or mother. When he was six he was sent to a Dutch school for people like himself, the sons of chiefs and minor chiefs. But only the boys, not the girls. Which was why Sitor’s sister—who was eighty—was an unlettered village woman and—to Sitor, before his anthropological illumination—part of a remote past.

  They were an isolated people. But however they had arrived in their valleys, they had brought with them—or had evolved—a decorative art and extraordinary building skills. Big stone walls protected the village; the entrance gaps were very narrow and could be easily defended or sealed up. The houses were built in a square. They had horn roofs—steeply pitched, in front elevation dipping in the middle, and projecting up and out at either end like the prow of a ship—a design, Sitor said, that protected the houses against the strong winds in the area.

  In Sitor’s village the only modern addition to this architecture was the corrugated iron for the roof. The houses stood on stout wooden pillars strengthened with mortised crossbars or crossbeams. The walls, between pillars and steeply pitched roof, were really quite low. It was dark in the houses. There were wooden beds; they repeated, in a modified way, the horn or ship’s-prow shape. And that modified shape appeared again, in the open village square, in the stone sarcophagus that contained the skulls of the chiefs. The upper half of a lizard was carved on the lid of the sarcophagus; the lizard’s feet were on the section below. The lizard was the emblem of good luck.

  From this life Sitor was snatched when he was sent, at the age of six, to the Dutch boarding school. It was a Christian school, but he wasn’t required to be a Christian. He was, however, required to speak in Dutch, in class and out of it. The longest school holiday lasted a month. He went back then to his village. He would be greeted warmly by his father (then over eighty) and his mother, but there would be no conversation. He would simply sleep in one of the houses in the village and eat from the common pot. There was always food, prepared by some distant relative.

  He was in his last year at the secondary school in Jakarta when the Japanese came. They landed first in South Sumatra, in the middle of February 1942. Two weeks later, Sumatra overrun, they landed in West Java. The Dutch army retreated. The streets of Jakarta were empty; people stayed indoors. But one day Sitor and some of his friends went out on their bicycles. And it was near the big Dutch colonial monument, near the present site of the Borobudur Intercontinental, that Sitor saw the first Japanese soldier.

  The soldier was on a bicycle, one of the famous fold-up bicycles of the Japanese army. The soldier was tired and sweating; his uniform was thin and cheap, and he smelled of sweat. He stopped the boys. He made it clear—though he spoke only Japanese—that he wanted the bicycle Sitor was riding.

  The Japanese fold-up bicycle was shoddily made and hard to pedal. Sitor’s bicycle was British, a sturdy Humber or Raleigh or Phillips. But this bicycle, which was a little too big for Sitor, was far too big for the Japanese. He tried to ride it but decided he couldn’t. Sitor was five feet three inches; the Japanese was some inches shorter.

  The Dutch monument, near where this meeting took place (replaced today by a gigantic bronze statue of an exultant man breaking chains), was of an early Dutch colonizer pointing down, as Sitor said, to the conquered land of Indonesia. And Sitor reflected even then—having kept his bicycle—how strange it was that a man as small as that Japanese soldier should have defeated the very big Dutchman.

  That was the limit of Sitor’s direct contact with the Japanese. In the area of Jakarta where he was living, life went on as before. So it did even in the Dutch areas; it was only later that the Dutch women and children were sent to camps. Sitor’s school was closed down, though. When, after some weeks, the trains began running again, Sitor and his friends used to go to the hills outside Jakarta to get fruit and vegetables which they would then hawk about the streets. Later he got a more substantial job. The Japanese had decreed that all signs in the Dutch language were to be taken down or obliterated. So Sitor went around painting out Dutch signs.

  Six months later the Japanese ordered that all non-Javanese students were to return to their own islands. The Japanese wanted to break up Indonesia into manageable occupation zones, Sitor said; they also wanted to remove unemployed students, potential trouble-makers, from Jakarta. So Sitor, taking advantage of the Japanese offer of transport home, went back to Sumatra, to the village where, since the age of six, he had never stayed longer than a month. He stayed in the village for three years. His brother had a good library; it was the library of a man who had received a sound Dutch education. So, although Sitor didn’t finish school, he had read widely by the end of the war.

  Afterwards there was all the turbulence of Indonesian postwar history: the proclamation by Sukarno and others of the Republic of Indonesia; the fight against the Dutch; the Sukarno years; and then, in 1965, the revolt against Sukarno. The army that had been created by the Japanese now emerged as rulers. Sitor was arrested for his Sukarno connections and imprisoned for ten years, until 1975. He was not allowed to read or write. He was allowed one visitor a month, and that visit lasted fifteen minutes. What did he do? He talked to his fellow prisoners; he got to know people he hadn’t known; politically and socially he learned a lot.

  Whatever Sitor was or had been in Jakarta, to his village he was always a man of the tribe. And when he came out of jail he had to be reinitiated into the tribe. For this ceremony the skull of his grandfather was taken out of the stone sarcophagus with the lizard of good luck carved on the lid. Sitor held a plate with this skull and a lemon, the lemon an agent of cleansing. There was a cousin of Sitor’s at the ceremony. The cousin was a medical man, and he saw that the lower jaw of the skull had slipped while it was being transferred to the plate for Sitor. He reached out and put the jaw back in place. The shaman or priest was furious. The cousin, by touching the ancestral skull, threatened to undo all the good and to bring bad luck on them all.

  Sitor had a black-and-white photograph of that moment: Sitor, innocent of the drama at his back, holding the plate with the skull and the lemon at shoulder level; the shaman, fury distorting his face, moving swiftly, hair flying, to counter the effect of the cousin’s irreverent gesture.

  Sitor, as a politically proscribed man, couldn’t get a job. But he still had a reputation as a poet. One day, about two years after he had come out of jail, he was giving a poetry reading at the house of a Dutchman in Jakarta. There were about twenty people there, mainly foreigners. Someone came late. Sitor, who had his back to the door, turned as the latecomer entered, and he saw a tall European girl whose beauty astonished him. And more than her beauty, Sitor said: her “aura.” It transformed the room. He decided there and then that he would get to know that girl. And he had a bit of luck: the girl went and sat next to an Englishwoman who had asked Sitor to recite an English translation of one of his poems.

  So Sitor, the reading over, was able to go directly to the girl. He told her he wanted to get to know her; he asked for an “appointment.” He discovered that she hadn’t come to the reading because she knew Sitor’s poetry. She had come only to have a look at the man who had been connected with Sukarno and had spent ten years in jail. Sitor didn’t mind that she didn’t know his poetry. Barbara was Dutch. She had been sent out to Indonesia by a Dutch group to help develop Indonesian crafts; she was the equivalent of a Peace Corps worker.

  They met on the twenty-fifth of May. Barbara’s thoughts were of her return to Holland; she was going back on leave on the sixteenth of June. And that was extraordinary: because Sitor had been invited to Holland by a cultural organization
and was going to Holland on the twenty-eighth of June. After two years he still remembered the dates. So, although Barbara could give him only two “appointments” in Jakarta before she left, in Holland she was able to give him many more.

  It wasn’t easy for him to know what impression he was making on her. Barbara was Dutch and very cool. But he was overwhelmed by the new world she showed him, the new ideas she introduced him to. He had spent ten years in jail, shut away from books, living with old ideas; he had missed a whole decade of intellectual movement in the West.

  Barbara was of the 1960s, the generation of 1968. She was full of Schumacher and people like that. And to Sitor, who had grown up in colonial times, Barbara and her friends appeared as a new breed of “missionary.” The young people Barbara took him among didn’t want to convert the natives, but wished in a more direct way to help them.

  How had they been created? How had Europe thrown up this dazzling generation? During his time in Holland with Barbara he was in a state of high emotional and intellectual excitement: this tribal man of fifty-four, with the Negrito-Chinese features (and the bristling eyebrows that at times suggested a Chinese pirate), five feet three, diabetic, politically neutered, with the bright and tall Dutch girl twenty years his junior.

  They lived together when they came back to Indonesia. The tribe got to know, and the tribe insisted that they get married according to tribal rites. For this, it was necessary for Barbara to be initiated into a related but separate tribe, since Sitor’s tribe was “exogamous”—and Sitor spoke the technical anthropological word easily.

  Just a few weeks before, he and Barbara had gone to the village for the ceremonies. It was wet and cool up in the rocky hills above the valleys; the photographs showed mist and cloud hanging low; the colours were soft. There was a ritual meal in one of the houses with the extravagantly shaped horn roofs. Barbara and Sitor ate with their hands; they ate pork. “Look,” Sitor said, pointing to a photograph. “That’s me. In my village. It’s real. It’s not for tourists.” He was dressed like a visitor, in rubber boots, and he was looking down at an old woman working on a village loom. “And that’s my sister. She cannot read or write.” And there was a photograph of him and Barbara standing at the door of his father’s house, the house of the great chief, which now belonged to Sitor’s brother: it was where Sitor had to take Barbara for the tribal marriage ceremony.