The doors creaked; the rooms were musty; the place had been shut a year. But from the deep veranda in front you looked out through the palms over gleaming ricefields and caught a glimpse of the sea beyond. Arrangements were conducted through the businesslike young grandson of the old priest, who said that the rent would be forty guilders a month and that I could move in when I wished. He promised there would be the necessary furniture when I arrived.
The disapproval of the hotel manager when I told him my change in plans was real if not eloquent. But when he saw I would not listen he suddenly became surprisingly human, and offered to lend me linen, silver and comfortable chairs. I thought I even detected the slightest inflection of envy in his voice as he now gave advice about white ants and warned about the water. He said I would need a cook and a houseboy, and that my room boy could easily find them for me.
That evening an exceedingly languid youth in white jacket and trousers approached my veranda at the hotel, sat down on the floor and bowed politely, hands clasped below his chin. He did not look very efficient, but the room boy said he had recently worked in the hotel. He said also that he had found me a cook, and the next morning as I went out in my pyjamas for the early cup of coffee she was already waiting for me, standing patiently in the wet grass. She was a short, plump Madurese with a round face that had the expression of a sulky child. She was barefoot, and wore a white sarong covered with red peacocks; a short white jacket parted at the seams under her arms in order to meet across her breasts, exposing a triangle of midriff.
This is the koki, said the houseboy. She can cook Dutch,
Good day, koki, I said.
Tabé tuan; tuan chari koki?
She spoke in the strange, childish singsong of the Indonesian servant, colourless and remote. I gave her some money, told her to buy pots and pans, and said I would have lunch at the house two days later.
Two days later the house had become warm and alive. I found the priest’s son and two other boys waiting to welcome me. They had swept the house clean and arranged the furniture in careful order. The koki and the houseboy were already there; the shutters were wide open, and about the place there was an air of expectation.
Two of the rooms had been furnished exactly alike. Each contained a loose, musical iron bed, draped like a girl at her first communion in limp white netting. In the bed were two pillows, and down the centre ran the dutch wife, a long bolster, plump as a sausage. Against a wall in each room was a table with an enamel jug and basin, and above it a small mirror. In the corner stood a chair. The third room contained a bare dining-table and four chairs symmetrically placed. The fourth room contained nothing at all. On the open window sills the boys had placed drinking glasses with bright flowers that shone transparently in the morning sun.
The koki was already at home. She sat on the kitchen floor, fanning the fires of three small braziers and stirring the contents of the pans on top. Around her were bowls of grated coconut, fried onions and ingredients I could not identify. On the mat beside her lay little mounds of red peppers, garlic and nuts. There was a litter of bananas, duck eggs and crabs, some Australian butter in a large tin, and a stupefied chicken, tied by the leg to a nail in the wall. Her cigarettes and betel were within easy reach. An emaciated dog had already adopted the place and sniffed in the corners of the room.
In the air was a powerful, complex smell, acrid and pungent, of burnt feathers, fish and frying coconut oil. I was to find this a daily smell, punctual and inevitable as the morning smell of coffee at home. It came chiefly from sra, a paste of shrimps that had once been ground, dried, mixed with sea-water, then buried for months to ferment. It was used in almost everything, fried first to develop the aroma. It was unbelievably putrid. An amount the size of a pea was more than enough to flavour a dish. It gave a racy, briny tang to the food, and I soon found myself craving it as an animal craves salt.
Each night I gave the koki a guilder, at that time about forty cents, which she converted into Chinese coins when she went to the market at dawn. She bought a pair of chickens or a beautiful fish, vegetables, fruit, eggs, rice, beancurd, a handful of dried fish for herself and the boy, and had something left over to treat herself to cigarettes and betel.
Each morning she appeared around seven with a large washbasin balanced on her head. It had become a fantastic hat trimmed with pineapples, leeks, cabbages and bananas, from out of which peered a numb-looking chicken or duck.
Tabé tuan.
Tabé koki. How goes it?
Yes, tuan.
She was too remote, too indifferent to fill in the correct reply. She trudged silently to the back of the house. But it would not be long before her voice took on another tone. She was a woman with a little, shrewish temper, and she refused to get along with the houseboy. She was a Madurese and a Mohammedan, while he was a heathen Balinese, and a pork-eater into the bargain. Her scolding would burst forth in a sharp chatter that rose to a squeak and disappeared in the higher overtones of final exasperation.
For lunch she cooked Javanese style, which meant rice, accompanied by a dozen different dishes that were enough for six people. The table was crowded with bowls in which fish and fowl swam in sauces of green, yellow or scarlet. Some dishes tasted somewhat like curry, though infinitely fresher in flavour; some were so hot with spice they brought tears to the eyes and sweat to the forehead.
The preparation of these dishes was involved, and took hours of patient labour. The idea, it seemed, was variety to please a gourmet’s palate, for a chicken was never cooked in one way only, but divided into parts, to be fried, broiled, stewed, shredded, and seasoned with great care for contrast. A fish she cooked in the same way. This, however, was not enough, for there were endless little side-dishes of strange delicacies—stewed acacia blossoms, preserved duck eggs, tiny octopus fried crisp and looking like a dish of spiders.
Her sweets were even stranger. For lunch would end perhaps with corn and grated coconut mixed with a syrup of palm sugar, soggy little balls of rice paste treacherously filled with more syrup, or a sliced pineapple to be eaten with salt, red pepper and garlic.
But at night the koki “cooked Dutch.” Then she would send in a meat loaf, or duck in a black and curious sauce. Pancakes and blancmange alternated for dessert.
The houseboy was strangely limp and colourless. He had said, Call me Gusti (prince) though it seemed he had no right to the title. He a gusti? exclaimed the koki to me privately. She laughed derisively. In the early morning Gusti brought me luke-warm coffee while he was still half asleep. He dragged the mattress into the sun, moved chairs and dusted as though it took his last ounce of strength. He managed to wash a shirt or two each morning, and spent the afternoon in a delicious dream-world of cigarette smoke and slow, thoughtful ironing. First he did my shirts, then a pair of trousers. After this he rested. Then he pressed his own shirt and jacket, or spent an hour ironing fancy pleats into his sarong. This he wore when not in the mood for trousers, wrapped neatly around his waist and falling down the front in folds, which lay in flat accordion pleats that opened out when he walked, reminding you of Egyptian reliefs.
Soon the house was running of its own accord. I grew deaf to the koki’s voice; as I learnt to understand what she was saying it became clear that she scolded much of the time simply to keep in practice; these outbursts were her daily vocal exercises, necessary to keep her voice flexible in the long complaint of woman against man.
The village was laid out square as a chessboard. Like all villages on the island, it was a network of roads and lanes that ran north and south, east and west. It gave the impression of lying in the heart of a lovely forest; the houses were hidden behind walls in a jungle of breadfruit-trees and palms, whose long fronds drooped like plumes and reflected the morning sunlight at a thousand angles.
The house lay just off the main road at one end of the village. Across the way stood the Temple of Origins. You