Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (17 page)

Outside the town the road hardly changed. Village ran into village, and for stretches the road was closely built up on both sides. The fields, the pure country, would have been at the back. But more and more, even on the main road, there were country patches; and, as I saw it, the well-worked, over-peopled country scenery of Java revived in my memory. Every scrap of land was used. The little bunded fields of rice or tobacco or peppers or maize never stopped, and the boundaries of the fields were marked by banana trees and cassava plants with their knotty stalks and purple young scalloped leaves.

In the pastoral in my memory Linus’s family house stood in the shade of trees at the very edge of fields. It wasn’t like that: the house, which was low, with concrete walls coming right down to the ground, stood quite exposed beside the main road, which was like a road through a country town rather than a village. For some miles—adding to the town effect—this road had been decorated for RI50 with red-and-white Indonesian flags, and with simpler colored flags (like upright banana fronds) on bamboo poles, leaning towards the road to make what looked like a series of broken Gothic arches: gaiety for which, according to Linus, the Jakarta government didn’t pay, but the local community.

The village of my pastoral hadn’t been lost. My memory had conflated this village, with Linus’s house, with another village, off the main road, where Umar and I had been taken on our walk to see a big, traditional Javanese house owned by one of Linus’s many relations.

The front yard of Linus’s house was flat and hard and bare. It was like that so that paddy could be spread on it to dry, Linus said; or a bamboo tent put up for some festival. On two sides of the bare yard were useful trees or plants: coffee, coconuts, the South American chico or sapodilla, a guava tree (the guava another South American import, known to some as the Brazilian weed), everything growing well in the volcanic soil. On a third
side of the bare yard, and for the beauty alone, was an irregular little patch of manila grass, tight and springy like a deep pile on a rich carpet, bordered with hydrangea and tall zinnias, beside a superseded amenity: a broken, tainted-looking pond.

We entered the front room. It was as wide as the house. The floor was of very smooth concrete, the ceiling of matting, now darkened. The left-hand side of the room was screened off; there were low dusty armchairs on the right. Against the screen there was a small oilcloth-covered table with two kitchen chairs. On the inside of the front wall, shielded from the glare, there was a photograph of Prince Charles with a printed copy of a letter he had written about Indonesia (in connection with an Indonesian performing arts festival held in London); and Linus’s certificates or diplomas from universities abroad for attendance at special courses: the very small change of diplomatic benevolence on which, in countries like Indonesia, people like Linus depend, for excitement, travel, refreshment.

A very small old woman in a dun-colored blouse and sarong came out from the inner room, to be introduced, as courtesy demanded. This was Linus’s mother, shrunken and dimmed by age. The woman I had had in my head from sixteen years before was in her finery and had just come back from her shopping, her hair carefully combed and flat and tight, her high-cheekboned face warm and brown and tilted upwards, her eyes bright with courtesy towards Umar and complaint about Linus. The dun-colored blouse and sarong of this small woman, not erect, matched and killed her complexion. They might have been her working clothes. It was now past mid-afternoon, and in a little while, when it would be cooler (a different way of arranging time here), she would be going out to the rice field. In 1979 I had not associated her with that kind of labor.

She spoke little, and not loudly, and didn’t stay long with us. Then, as on a cue, someone else began to come out of the inner room. I heard words oddly distorted by rage and tears, building up to a deep scraping sound; and even before I could see who was so out of control, almost about to scream, I knew she was Linus’s handicapped sister. I had forgotten her, edited this shadow in Linus’s life out of my pastoral memory. But now it was as though I had never really forgotten, had only filed it far away, and at this very moment it came back to me: the silent young woman of uncoordinated movements who had come out dragging her slippered feet from a dark side room and then sat on a chair in the corner frankly considering us, the guests, new people, sitting before the platefuls of steaming corncobs, village hospitality, the farmer’s plenty: her eyes angry, tearful, yet looking for attention, her twisted mouth hanging open and wet with dribble. She
seemed young, in her teens, but she was twenty-five. When we left the house Umar Kayam told me that this sister of Linus’s had had a wrong injection when she was a child; it had damaged her nervous system.

The woman who came raging into the front room of Linus’s house was now forty-one. She wasn’t interested in Linus, but in me. She seemed to rage and rage at me, attempting to speak, but no words coming out, crying between attempts, the spittle running down her lips and unhinged mouth, making what looked like old-fashioned elocutionist’s gestures. Linus held his head slightly to one side and let her rage. He listened; he knew what she was trying to say. His eyes were full of pain and tenderness.

When she had finished, and had left the room, he told me what had happened. There had been a Christian house-blessing service in the house of an older brother; it had been combined with a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian independence. The priest offered communion at the end, but he didn’t know how to offer the wine and the wafer to Linus’s sister, and so he passed her by. She had returned in a frenzy. She complained to everyone who came to the house. When things like this happened to her, Linus said, they had terrific problems with her for three days afterwards.

Even without the mother and the sister, I would have felt that a light had gone out of the house. And it came out—indirectly, and not as statement of tragedy—that Linus’s father had died two years before, and the family were now very poor. Linus’s father had been the village leader. In Java, where everything was highly organized, this was an official post. (People said the Japanese were responsible for this military-style organization of Java, but the Japanese occupation had lasted only three and a half years. Perhaps the serf labor of the old Javanese kingdoms and the later Dutch agricultural colony had always required high organization.) Linus’s father had become village leader because of his family connections. A village leader was given one and a half hectares of land while he held his post; but the rule was that when a leader died the land was given back to the government after a thousand days.

This was why Linus’s mother was now poor and the house was so gloomy; and why these days, Linus said, his mother railed against her grandfather. This grandfather, after having one family with three children (including Linus’s mother), had taken a second wife and had had two more children. The first family had as a result been impoverished. And then at the end the grandfather had divided his property unequally.

Just the day before, Linus said, when his mother had been railing against her grandfather, he had had to be firm with her. “No tears, please. Don’t think like that. Think instead of your children who have gone to the university. Better we look at the future.”

In fact, it was because of the Christian preaching against polygamy, and the suffering it had brought in their own lives, that Linus’s father and mother—as recently as 1938—had converted to Christianity. They had not been Muslims before, but Javanists, with a mixed local religion made up of survivals of Hinduism, Buddhism, and animism. They had both attended Christian schools; they had learned about Christianity there. The Christianity they had adopted had not meant a break with the past.

“Here even when we became Christians we continued with our old customs. Taking flowers to the cemetery, praying to the spirits of our ancestors. When someone dies even today in our Christian community we have mixed rituals. The ceremonies three days after the death, seven days, forty days, a hundred days, one year, two years, a thousand days.” Because of his father these death ceremonies would have been on Linus’s mind.

Linus said, “Christianity is important because it teaches you to love somebody as you love yourself. It means teaching us to become tender persons, not wild or aggressive persons. In Javanism also we have the concept of restraint. It is easy therefore for Javanese people to embrace Christ’s teaching.”

High up on the inner concrete wall, above the central doorway, out of which Linus’s mother and sister had come from the room at the back, there was a big brown cross. It was above a grotesque leather puppet. It was the standardized puppet figure of the clown, Semar, from the shadow play, a character, Linus said, from one or the other of the two Javanized Hindu epics, the Ramayana or the Mahabharata: “a god turned into a man, always supporting the good people.”

In 1979 there had been a leather puppet there, but I didn’t remember Semar. I remembered another figure. I couldn’t say what it was, and I didn’t ask Linus about it. It was only while working on this chapter that I checked, and found that in 1979 the mascot figure on that wall, the associate divinity of the house, above the horizontal ventilation slits and below the cross, was the Black Krishna. Not the playful Krishna of India, stealing the housewife’s freshly churned butter and hiding the clothes of the milk-maids while they swam in the river; but the Black Krishna of Java, a figure of wisdom. That Krishna would have been a sufficient protector of a man starting out as a poet. Now, in a time of deeper grief and need, Semar—the man-god who helped the good—was a more appropriate divinity.

Linus had pinned the figure there—through the upper body, leaving the jointed arms and legs free to move.

He said, “I try to understand my culture. The kind of myth that stays in my culture.”

And for Linus much of the myth of his culture was kept alive in the
wayang kulit,
the shadow theater. His love of the wayang was like reverence. It might have been something he had got from his father, who, in addition to his official duties as village leader, taught Javanese dance, and put on a dance show every independence day. Before he started going to school Linus looked at the wayang every day: every day there was a puppet play going on in the village. Even when he began to go to school he went to the wayang almost every day. When he came back from school he would have food and a shower, and at about eight or nine he would go to a night performance. The older
dalangs
—the puppeteers, the storytellers—did the show through the night up to five in the morning. The younger dalangs did the daytime performances, which started at about ten or eleven.

“People would sometimes fall asleep and then wake up again. It’s not like a Western performance. The dalangs were invited for wedding parties, or circumcision ceremonies, or at certain Javanese ceremonies to celebrate the washing of the streets, the cleaning of the village; and ceremonies connected with the rice goddess.”

So, as in the section of “Pariyem’s Confession” I had read, the wayang—allied to different uses of day and night, different patterns of living, and very old local rituals—could release emotions that were not easy for the outsider to enter. This old world of feeling was dear to Linus, and it was something he felt was now being lost. People (and even Linus’s mother) watched more television. And the village was poorer, and dalangs were more expensive. In the old days a family could sell nine hundred pounds of rice and invite a dalang. Nowadays the minimum fee, even for a local village dalang, was a million rupiah, about four hundred and twenty-five dollars. The more cultivated court dalangs of Yogyakarta and Solo could ask for twice or four times that amount.

So Linus lived with the idea of decay, a precious world in dissolution. His recent trouble with the young Muslims of Yogyakarta was like part of the new uncertainty.

“I write a short cultural essay for the local paper. I was in charge this year of the Javanese and Indonesian literature section of the Yogya art festival. In one of my columns I tried to present the Javanese music that still lives in
our society but is not popular today. In the gamelan there is an instrument called the sitar, and a group called
sitaran.
As far as I know, people use this sitaran group at weddings and circumcision ceremonies. I tried to understand the custom of circumcision. I know from the Old Testament that the prophet Musa introduced this custom, and Musa is Jewish. Jewish in Indonesian is
Jahudi,
and circumcision is
jahudi-sasi.
I wanted to make a historical-cultural point. To make for a better festival. I wasn’t touching the Muslim custom only, because Christians here also practice circumcision. Today it’s not only a religious thing, but a health precaution.