it was true. I must be old to think such thoughts. I stumbled barefoot along the low banks between the sawahs as I meditated on these things. In the midst of the fields there was a small temple, built when disaster and blight fell on the sawahs. At the gateway sat a man wearing a large round hat he had woven himself. I thought I recognized him. He was an old man and he waved his hand to me. “Greeting, Tuan,” he called out, in the sing-song of the old-fashioned folk.
“Greeting, friend,” I said. “Greeting, my brother.”
It was Pak, the father of Tamor, the sculptor. He was as old as I, gray-haired and toothless. He had to break up his sirih with a knife, because he could chew no longer.
“How are you, Pak?”
“I am content,” Pak sang out. “My feet are content, my hands are content after my work. My eyes are happy when they look out on the sawah, and life is sweet.”
I stood talking with him for a short time, chatting about this and that. My servant waited nearby, just a little impatient, for he wanted to go into the village that night and see the Shadow Play. He was in love and the girl would be there, and he would be able to make eyes at her and perhaps whisper a word in her ear. I am coming soon, my friend—just one moment. I am just going in through the temple gate to look out over the fields. They shone more brightly now than the sky itself whose reflection gleamed on the surface of the water. The first frogs were already croaking and from Sanur could be heard the dull regular beat of the kulkul, the wooden drum which calls the men together. I saw the shrine of the deity in the last rays of the sun. Three plates of cheap pottery, with a rather hideous pattern of roses, were let into the stonework at the base of the shrine and caught the light. Yes, there they were still and still well-preserved— these three plates which had played so great a part in Pak’s life. I stood a moment longer, listening to the cicadas and the thud of the kulkul. The cool green smell of the growing crops came from afar. Raka will get well, I thought to myself. Pak raised his hand and waved me a friendly good-bye as I went.
“Peace on your way,” he sang out. “Peace on your sleep,” I replied.
My automobile was waiting with a trusty and patient air on the road north of Sanur. A crowd, twenty strong, stood round it, eyes, mouths and nostrils expressing delighted expectation and astonishment. They were the young people of the village, and they cheered as my old bus grunted huskily and started off.
The moon was high in the sky when I got home. There shone the constellation of Orion, which they call the Plough here, and the Southern Gross. The night air of my garden quivered with the chirping and humming of insects and the zigzag flight of fire-flies. The air was cool and there was a sheen on the palm-leaves which made them look like narrow kris blades. My little monkey sat on my shoulder and went to sleep. The tjitjak lizards on the wall made a smacking noise and a large red-spotted gecko uttered its cry in a husky baritone. I counted—eleven times, that meant good luck. After that there was silence, the vibrant silence of tropical nights. As soon as I closed my eyes I saw Raka’s little fevered face. Beyond it appeared the face of his ancestor—and Putuh and Pak and the cheap plates still unbroken on the little temple among the rice-fields. The old, old stories, touching and droll and proud and bloody. Many have died, but Pak lives on, the old peasant on the edge of his sawah.
I lit my pipe and got out some paper. Now I would tell all I could still recover of the days gone by.
He who is wise in his heart, sorrows neither for the living nor the dead. All that lives, lives for ever. Only the shell, the perishable, passes away. The spirit is without end, eternal, deathless.
(From the Bhagavad-Gita)
The Wreck of the Sri Kumala
PAK woke up when the cocks crowed at the back of his yard. He shivered under the blue kain with which he had covered himself and his eyes were still heavy with sleep. The room was dark, although Puglug, his wife, had left the doors open when she went out. Pak gave a deep sigh. He got up unwillingly and unwillingly went to his labors. But the day was favorable for ploughing, according to the calendar, and Pak got up from his mat just as the kulkul of the village sounded the seventh hour of the night. An hour more and the sun would step from his home and bring the day with him out of the sea.
The cocks still crowed lustily and Pak smiled as he picked out the voice of his favorite, the red one. He was still too young, but Pak could already see he had the makings of a fighter. Pak girded his kain about his hips and pulled it through between his legs so that it made a short loin-cloth. He groped about in the darkness for the beam and took down his knife and the sirih pouch and tied them to his girdle. His kain was moist and cool with the heavy dew. He had a hazy recollection of a confused dream. He felt his way to the other mat on the bamboo couch which stood opposite his own. The children were asleep—Rantun, who was seven years old, Madé, the next in age, and in the corner the bundle containing the baby, who had no name as yet.
Pak and his wife had made sure that they would have a boy this time. They had paid the balian eleven kepengs when the child began to stir in its mother’s womb and he had promised them a boy. Pak had begun to build castles in the air and had thought out a fine name for him. He wanted to call him Siang, the light and the day. Then when Puglug disappointed their expectations by giving birth to another girl, they did not know what name to give the child. Probably they would simply call her Klepon, a name that several girls of his family had been given.
Pak sighed once more as he left the room and after hesitating a moment in the open porch went down the steps into the courtyard. The kulkul had stopped.
The women had lit a fire in the kitchen balé and Pak’s father came following his lean shadow across the yard with a bundle of dried palm-leaves on his head and went across to the wall. Pak’s uncle lived on the west side of the plot and his first wife, who could never be at peace with anybody, could be heard quarrelling already. But Puglug was unclean for forty-two days after the birth of her little girl and could not prepare any food for Pak. He had good reason to sigh. He was as sick of Puglug as if she had been a dish of which he had eaten too much. Three daughters she had borne him and not one son. She was useless and not even good to look at. He sat on his haunches on the steps and looked down ill-humoredly at his wife, who was sweeping the yard with a besom. The sky by now was a little lighter behind the tops of the coco palms and Pak could distinguish her heavy shape, as she bent and got up again.
Then he caught sight of Lambon, his young sister, coming from the kitchen and carrying a pisang leaf heaped up with cooked rice. Pak took it eagerly, sat down again on the steps and felt better. He put three fingers into the rice and crammed his mouth full. His spirits rose with every mouthful he swallowed. Puglug paused in her work for a moment and watched her husband, for whom she was not allowed to cook any food, while he ate, and then went on sweeping. She is a good wife, Pak thought to himself, now that his belly was contented with rice. She is strong and can carry thirty coconuts on her head. She is hard-working and goes to the market and sells sirih and foodstuffs and earns money. It is not her fault that she cannot bear a son. Our forefathers decided it so. He wiped his fingers on the emptied pisang leaf, threw it down on the ground and began carefully wrapping his sirih in betel-nut and adding a little lime to it. As soon as he had the strong quid in his mouth, so strong that the spittle ran down from the corners of his mouth, the world seemed a good place. He got up to fetch the cow from the shed and the plough from the balé where all the implements were kept.
Lambon, who had sat at his feet watching him eat, went back to the kitchen. Her small face looked pretty in the light of the blazing fire and Pak looked back at her for a moment and was proud of her.
Lambon
