LITMIR.BIZ

      When I got home from the little Government hospital, where I had spent the whole morning attending to various cases of fever, severe bamboo cuts and tropical ulcers, I found a bicycle leaning against the wall at my gate. I hurried across the courtyard, for I was curious to know who my visitor was. My Dutch friends like to make fun of me because my place is built in the native style—a house of whitewashed daub with a portico, surrounded by a number of smaller buildings or balés. Balés are raised platforms with roofs of alang-alang grass resting on posts. Many balés have one or even two mud walls and they can be sheltered from sun or rain by matting. Life is cheerful and pleasant in these balés and only the house itself has real walls. The whole plot is surrounded by a wall above which palms and fruit trees grow as high as a forest.

      On the steps of the open portico sat Ida Bagus Putuh and a step higher squatted the sculptor, Tamor. They were from the village of Taman Sari, near the coast and several hours distant from the foothills where I lived. Both clasped their hands and raised them to their shoulders in greeting. Ida Bagus did it with punctilious ceremony, but Tamor, who had modern ideas, did it with a laugh, showing his white, evenly filed teeth, as though he did not take the ceremony quite seriously. Tamor was a good-looking and talented fellow, who sometimes carved figures of quite astonishing beauty. He was fond of wearing brightly colored sarongs and beautiful head-dresses, which he wound round his small Egyptian skull with an air all his own. He had a red hibiscus flower stuck behind his ear and was smoking a maize-leaf cigarette which had a sweet smell of spice and cloves. His fine torso was hidden by a dirty, cheap Japanese shirt, for that was the height of fashion with the younger generation. “Greetings, Tuan,” he said cheerfully. Beside him was a coconut-fibre bag, in which, I knew well, he had a new carving to show me. “Greetings, Tuan,” Ida Bagus Putuh said also. “Greetings, friends,” I said, and looked at them both.

      Putuh, who knew that I was somewhat old-fashioned, was dressed in the old Balinese style, and was as smart as though he were paying a visit to a raja. He was naked to the waist, with long, beautiful muscles beneath his light brown skin. He wore a gold-threaded saput round his waist and hips girding his hand-woven silk kain. He had even stuck his kris in his girdle behind his back and its beautifully made wooden hilt projected above his shoulder. Putuh, too, wore a flower; it was in his head-dress above the middle of his forehead, but it was not an hibiscus flower but a yellow champak blossom. Its stronger, sweeter and more aromatic perfume pervaded the whole portico—the perfume of Bali—and it was already beginning to fade. Ida Bagus Putuh had a quid of sirih, betel, lime and tobacco, in his mouth, which was not so becoming, and at intervals he skilfully spat a jet of red liquid clear of the steps right into the courtyard.

      “How long have my friends been here?” I asked out of politeness. “We have only just come,” was the reply, and this, too, was merely a polite formula. The two of them might very well have been sitting on the steps for five hours, squatting and smoking contemplatively with the inexhaustible patience of their race.

      Ida Bagus is the title of those who belong to the highest caste of Brahmans. I had a suspicion that Putuh, though not half my age, was quite as old-fashioned in his way of thinking. In earlier days his family played a great part in his village and far beyond it. It produced many great priests or pedandas up to the time when the great disaster overtook Putuh’s father. Now they were poor and lived quietly in Taman Sari and Putuh labored in the rice-fields like any sudra. But he had a dignity beyond his years, and, as I have said, he was of a conservative turn of mind and kept to the fine manners of the older generation. The Balinese in general have very little idea how old they are. Their mothers, after six or seven years, get the dates mixed up (and no wonder with the complicated Balinese Calendar) and then they give up counting. But certain events, of which more will be said later, occurred when Putuh was two; and since these events became a landmark in Dutch colonial history it was a simple matter to reckon Putuh’s age. He was thirty-two years old at this time according to our reckoning and nearly twice as old if the days of the year are reckoned as two hundred and ten according to the Balinese Calendar.

      Although Putuh was a modest man, and Tamor’s intimate friend, he had taken care to sit a step higher, as was due to his caste.

      I sent for coffee and lit my pipe, which never failed to excite astonishment and amused admiration in the Balinese. Both men now stared at me with open mouths. These people are adepts at registering wonder: their upper lips, arched in any case, curve right upwards, their nostrils dilate and their elongated eyes, which look sad even when they are laughing, take on a fascinated expression. “Mbe!” they say, full of amazement. “Mbe!”

      Conversation began to flag, as it was meant to do. We circled round the object of their visit in many an elaborate phrase. As for Tamor, it was clear from the start that he had carved something which he wanted me to buy; but whether Putuh had accompanied him merely out of a liking for me was not so easy to discover. He sat and chewed, keeping his mouth open and smiling all the while—a rather complicated exercise—and now and again an anxious and intent look came into his eyes.

      Tamor announced that he had brought Putuh with him on the back of his bicycle, and Putuh added to this that he had really intended coming by the motor-bus but fortunately Tamor, too, was going to my house on business of his own. The Government had made good roads by which the few cars of the Dutch officials and the native rulers could travel in all directions, as well as an occasional, fully loaded, rackety prehistoric bus. The natives, however, love their Japanese bicycles, and even women may be seen on them in their bright-colored kains with little packages precariously balanced on their heads.

      “What has my friend got in his bag?” I asked Tamor at last, when I thought that full honor had been done to preludes and politenesses.

      “It is nothing,” he said modestly. “Only a bad carving.” “May I see it?” I asked.

      He slowly opened the fibre bag, unwrapped a carving from a piece of rag and put it down on the step near Putuh’s naked brown feet. It was a simple and vigorous piece of work—a doe and a stag in the moment of coming together. An arrow had pierced the male in the flank and both their necks were arched back in a way that expressed anguish and the pangs of death. I looked at the two beasts with emotion. Suddenly I was aware that I had once seen something like it many, many years before. Then I remembered. It was Tamor’s uncle who had tried to carve them—in defiance of the style of his day. The memory came back with a rush as I felt the smooth finely worked satinwood in my hands.

      “Has my friend ever seen a carving like this before?” I asked. Tamor smiled in surprise. “No, Tuan,” he replied.—”I must therefore beg forgiveness.”

      I had fallen in love with the piece on the spot and knew that I should have to have it. But first there were many ceremonies to be gone through. I praised the carving, while Tamor maintained that it was bad and worthless, unworthy to stand in my house and that he was a wretched beginner and bungler. Joy and pride in his work shone meanwhile in his honest eyes, in which there was the innocence of an animal. I asked him the price and he assured me that he would take whatever I chose to give and that he would be happy to be allowed to offer me the piece as a present. I knew that Tamor was a good salesman and that, like all Balinese, he loved nothing better than earning money to gamble away at cock fights. He was merely counting on the fact that I would offer more than he would venture to ask—and so it proved.

      The deal concluded, Tamor knotted the money in the folds of his silk girdle; but still Putuh had said not a word about the motive of his visit and it would have been impolite to ask him straight out. Perhaps he had been unable to pay his taxes and wanted to ask me for a loan, but in that case he would have come by himself and secretly, not with Tamor. The conversation dribbled on. The rainy season would soon be here. The heat had been bad for some days on end, particularly when you had the sawahs (the rice-fields) to plough. There had been a corpse-burning

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