Sabina Murray - The Caprices

“But you say they are still hunting?”

“I wrote to Guillotte’s family saying that I doubted he would return. And as for Versteegh, his native wife is still living in the house. Why would I write to his cousins in Holland? They would come and sell this and where would I go? And why should they have this place? You cannot put the value of our little house, our compound, and small business into guilders. Besides, is it not a romantic thought that the Dutchman and Frenchman are wandering through the heart of Sumatra chasing an elusive ape who stays always two steps ahead?”

“A pretty myth,” said Tan. “You are romantic, from another time. You forget that it is 1922, that the ways of the ancestors, yours and mine, have long been buried with them. I don’t mourn that. Change is good.”

“Change?” said Bouman sadly. Katrina appeared in the doorway with a plate. She had picked more blossoms and arranged these in with the rice cakes and wafers. “If I could make this evening last indefinitely, I would do it.”

The prahu returned six days later. Bouman had convinced Tan that he had no weapons for sale. Bouman had a half-dozen rifles and countless boxes of cartridges, but Tan was unwilling to name his enemy and rampaging bull elephants were no longer the problem they’d been twenty years earlier. Bouman decided to give the boy a good deal on some bolts of cotton. He’d thrown in a few pairs of embroidered slippers for the boy’s relatives, offered gin and tobacco, which had not been of interest, and an immense cooking pot (for boiling missionaries, Bouman had joked), which Tan had thought would be useful. Bouman was just coming out of the warehouse when he saw Tan running down the steps of the house. A figure appeared in the doorway immediately afterward, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Tan stopped and turned, then he ran back up the stairs and embraced her. In his shock, Bouman wanted to believe that the woman was Aya, who, gnarled as she was, could offer occasional sexual gratification. But no. It was Katrina and a cold chill slowly took over Bouman’s heart.

When Tan entered the warehouse Bouman was sitting at his desk. There was a box of ammunition by his feet. A dozen rifles leaned against the wall. Bouman sat at his desk, his face covered by his hands. Tan could see the man trembling and at first thought that he had been moved to tears, but when Bouman lifted his head, his eyes were clearly fired with anger. Bouman stood up.

“You were a guest in my house and you have deceived me.”

“My intentions are honorable.”

“Who is the judge of that?”

Tan was silent. “You know my family. .”

“That they are rich, powerful — yes, I know that. And I tell you that you will never have my daughter. Take the guns. Leave. Never come back.”

“She wants to go with me.”

“What does she know of what she wants? She is seventeen years old.” Bouman picked up a rifle and swung it gracefully to point into Tan’s face. “I am offering you the gun. You take the muzzle or the trigger.”

Tan was silent.

“I will kill you. I have killed dozens of men in my time and not once has my sleep been disturbed.”

Bouman watched the prahu round the promontory and thought with a cautious satisfaction that he would never see the boy again. No doubt, Katrina was in tears and would not speak to him for months. His household was in disorder. Aya would be glaring at him from behind the posts of the house, going about her daily tasks with more than the usual menace; she would be spitting in his food. Bouman shook his head. A stiff breeze stirred the water and the palms dipped and swayed. More than the usual monkey chatter was going on overhead. The birds dipped and swooped with unusual urgency. On the ground Bouman saw the ants coursing fervently in streams. There was the burn of electricity in the air. At the edge of the horizon a beam of lightning flared, leaving the margin a menacing dark purple. Bouman sighed deeply, baring his teeth at the world. He knew he was in for trouble.

About many things, Bouman had been wrong. He was wrong to think that his father-love could satisfy his daughter and wrong to think that he would never see Tan again. By the time the young man returned he was no longer a young man and Bouman had seen so many things — more than twenty years had passed — that he questioned every reality. The very nose in the center of his face was up for debate, as far as he was concerned. But as he squatted and smoked in the burned-out square of earth that had once been his house, he somehow knew that the prahu dipping over the edge of the water, rising up like the sun, bore his old acquaintance, Tan. And Bouman thought, in an uncharacteristically mystical way, that his new clairvoyance meant that his life was drawing to a close.

Tan had lost the colonial whites and was now wearing the baggy batik trousers of his people, those and a European shirt of coarse cotton, with a belt of ammunition slung from shoulder to hip. There was silver in with the black, but he looked much the same. Bouman got up and threw his cigarette. He cocked his head to one side. Tan hesitated, stopping twenty feet from where Bouman stood. To his surprise, Bouman laughed.

“I told you not to come back or I would kill you, but it is you who are armed and I have nothing but these two imperfect hands.” Bouman splayed his eight fingers up for inspection.

“How can it be,” said Tan, “that you have not changed?”

“A mystery,” Bouman shrugged. “I am wiser now and so I will ask you to dinner, to have some tea with me, because I now know what an enemy looks like.” Bouman laughed again.

“I thought you were dead,” said Tan. “I myself looked in all the nine camps of Sumatra. I had my people check every Javanese camp, every Dutchman.”

“Did you not think I might be lost under a different name? And the islands are full of Dutchmen.”

“Eight-fingered Dutchmen?” said Tan.

“So thinking I was dead, you came back for my daughter, but it is she who is dead.”

Tan was silent.

“That saddens you.”

“The Japanese killed many.”

“Many, but not her. I have you to blame for that.”

“Me?”

“Katrina died in childbirth.” Bouman closed his eyes. He heard again Katrina’s frightened screams. He remembered Aya’s desperate butchery. “Come. Have tea.” The Dutchman gestured for Tan to follow. “You can send me back to Holland after dinner.”

Bouman had moved into the manager’s small house. He walked quickly and Tan followed, two steps behind, his hands resting nervously on his ammunition belt and gun. The sloping thatch roof was repaired with ragged sheets of tin, probably the work of Bouman. He no longer seemed to have anyone in his employ, not even Aya, who would have made her presence known had she been there. Leaning up against a tree to the right of the hut was an ornate, carved door, blunted and polished by exposure. Tan recognized the door as belonging to the original house and wondered what had inspired Bouman to move it from the flames that had no doubt engulfed and destroyed all of his former dwelling. The hut backed onto a wall of vegetation — a development of the last twenty years — and was shadowed and dreary. A few tough vines had lassoed the roof and beams, and soon the hut would be dragged back into the jungle.

Bouman cooked now. He could offer Tan a weak chicken and vegetable broth. Tan set his gun down and took a stool at the table. The sun was low and forced its way inside in blades of harsh light. Soon they would need to light candles. Bouman lit a flame beneath the pot and stirred the chicken. He was whispering to himself, almost singing to the soup. Tan looked cautiously around. There was a hammock in the corner and a sleeping mat rolled up, leaning against the wall. A case of gin (or what had once been a case of gin) acted as a side table and set on that was a greasy candle and, of all things, a Bible. There was a large wooden box on the floor, blackened by the fire, and it took Tan some moments to realize that it had once been a clock.