The Ten Thousand Things Page 6

  Felicia finished unpacking, put things away in the dressers; her grandmother helped her, she enjoyed it, looked at everything, chatted, asked questions. Her husband’s name was not mentioned between them on that day, nor ever afterward; she also said little about “your mother,” but she often mentioned “my son Willem, my son Willem.” When they had finished she asked, “you have none of your jewels left, granddaughter, how did that happen? your mother bought—there were so many jewels—did you have to sell everything after the sugar crisis? What a pity! but you had your bracelet for the voyage, was it enough for the voyage?”

  Felicia said that it had not been enough for the voyage; she had had to borrow money from a relative of her mother’s, the same one who was for the time being supporting her parents.

  “Oh!” said the grandmother, startled, “but then you have a debt, granddaughter—a debt must be paid.”

  Evening fell early and the first day had passed.

  Felicia had put the child with basket and all in the big double bed under the mosquito curtain—he couldn’t fall out that way; that first night she did not want him to sleep in a strange crib.

  The night lamp shone through the pink screen and in the side gallery a large oil lamp was burning.

  “Why don’t you leave the door to the gallery open?” the grandmother said. “It is nice and cool, and they can have their look at Himpies; they won’t wake him.”

  For in the dark people were still crossing the river and walking with torches toward the house and the large lit-up kitchen. And Felicia saw men and women, sometimes a man or a woman alone, old or young, go to her room; the men stayed at the door, the women went in—not for long, who would want to look for long at a sleeping child!—and Sjeba would be around somewhere to watch. She and her grandmother were sitting on the strip of beach together in the cool evening breeze, right in front of the house—the lamplight from the side gallery shone through the trees.

  It was high tide; the little waves came almost up to their feet.

  “There are all sorts of treats for them,” the grandmother said, “turtle meat with herbs—it has been cooking all day in a thick bamboo, which gives it a special flavor of its own, and Sarah is very good at frying fish with kanari nuts and peppers, she must show you too, granddaughter; and there are sago breads, black and white mussel sauces, both of them. There is fresh palm wine which won’t get them drunk very quickly and—” she winked—“a bit of good arak which I still had, and coffee of course.”

  “For all these people! But doesn’t that cost too much money?” Felicia asked worriedly.

  “It must be,” said her grandmother, “that’s the way it is done; it is because they have come for Himpies, and it is all from the Garden—except the arak, which I had saved; it usually serves as a medicine, you know.”

  Felicia had moved her chair so that she could see past the open door of the room where the child was sleeping and through the side gallery to the outbuildings. In the kitchen was singing; someone played on a kind of guitar, another blew on a bamboo flute with little runs and trills.

  Where they were sitting there was the sound of the water.

  “Are you listening to the bay? You are so silent, granddaughter—three waves behind each other—the father, the mother, the child, they say here, can you hear it?” and the old woman repeated it once more with the waves.

  Felicia came back from far off: here she was, sitting as she had wanted to, on the beach of the Garden on the island in the Moluccas, listening to the surf—the father, the mother, the child—better not say it! just say the child . . . the child . . . and obediently the waves went on in a whisper the child . . . the child . . . the child.

  “Do you still have cows, grandma?”

  “Yes, granddaughter.”

  “And chickens and ducks too, I saw.”

  “Yes, for the eggs.”

  “And do you still have a vegetable garden and all those fruit trees?”

  “Yes, certainly, granddaughter”—the old woman hesitated for a moment, what were these questions leading up to?—“The red grapefruit, do you remember that one?”

  Felicia looked her way in the half-dark. “Why don’t we try to sell all those things in the town at the outer bay—milk, eggs, vegetables, fruits? And you used to make pickles and candied fruits and mussel sauce, and also scents and amber balls and bracelets against rheumatism—can you teach me too, grandma?”

  The grandmother moved a bit forward in her chair and sat up straight as if she had swallowed a broom, “what do you mean, granddaughter? sell? for money? we! you can’t mean that, we didn’t pay money for those things. Our animals give milk and eggs, fruits are from the garden, mussels from the bay—black coral the fishermen bring me because I give them medicine when they are ill—the only thing is sugar, cane sugar for candied fruits, you can’t use palm sugar for that. I used to get it every year from your mother’s plantation, from Java—a large round hamper of white sugar—I don’t any longer. And for amber balls I have to buy everything, and gold of course, that’s not from the Garden.

  “But it isn’t necessary to make candied fruits! And as a matter of fact I still have a lot of jars of them, and amber balls in gold are not necessary either, I haven’t made those in years and years—but I remember the recipes for the amber and the candied fruits quite well . . .” She fell silent, out of breath almost.

  Felicia pretended not to have heard the end of it, “well, you see that you have to buy things too, and you have to pay people for their work, and work yourself . . .” She put out her hand and took the hand of the old woman with the black coral branch around the thin wrist, “the work of your hands,” she said.

  “Yes, granddaughter, but our hands we have received too—free as a gift for nothing to keep—” (as she used to say). She did not pull her hand back and after a time only said, “I understand, you mean to say that we have to earn money: your debt!” she whispered, and aloud again, “and for Himpies, who must go to school, yes, that is good—he has to learn a great deal and become clever. Would he want to become a doctor, do you think? Then he can have my snakestone, remember? So we’ll become two tradeswomen together”—she grinned—“a tradeswoman can be proud too, can’t she, granddaughter?”

  They had got up and gone into the house, the grandmother had shown her how to close the doors and the blinds, open the slats, “you don’t have to be afraid,” she had said, “it is safe here.” Was she thinking of the sentinels in the “special drawer”?

  She had helped Felicia lift the basket off the bed and had remained to watch her change the little boy, who slept through it all, put a rubber mat in the bed on the wall side and lay the child on top of that. She had kissed Felicia good night, “you undress, and I’ll come back later to tuck in the mosquito curtain,” she had promised.

  “Sleep well, granddaughter, in the Small Garden, together with Himpies.” Felicia was tired, but she lay awake a long time. It wasn’t dark, the night lamp shone pink through the screen with the three girls—after so many nights aboard the ship, in a little cabin on a narrow bunk, the bed seemed so large and wide; and the child lay next to her, small and lost in that vague space, between wide plains of sheet and mosquito net—it wasn’t quite still outside: the light surf of the inner bay, sometimes the sighing of the wind in the trees close to the house, the voices from the outbuilding as from very far—would they dance on the spice platform? sing? the bamboo flute sounded clearly, meltingly sweet, from very close—

  “The double Venus-heart—that is a very rare one, granddaughter.”

  Tomorrow she would ask her grandmother if there wasn’t a single bed to be found somewhere, at the house in the town perhaps.

  3.

  After only a few days the grandmother sent Felicia with the child and Sjeba to the town at the outer bay to pay visits, “that is the proper way—who arrives must greet,” she said.

  She had prepared a list of names beforehand, and told her who all the people were and why they
had to be called on: only from politeness or because they could advise her, perhaps later be of help. She should first just leave her name, and pay all calls in the sequence of the list—and stay here so long and there so long. She also gave Felicia little presents to take with her, jars with preserves, mussel sauces (black and white), lemonades—for them, and for them!

  Then she should pay a morning call on the wife of the “Captain of the Chinese” and some other Chinese ladies in the quarter; and the “Lieutenant of the Arabs”—he was an influential man and very jealous of the “Captain” although he didn’t show it. On no account could she go on these visits alone: she should take Himpies and Sjeba, and also the two big children Josua and Susanna, “first ask the school to give them the morning off,” and the caretaker and his wife and children who lived in the town house when there was no one there.

  “Be careful, they should all be dressed neatly.” And the more people she showed up with, the more elegant—pity that the palanquin was so expensive. She didn’t have to say much on those visits; just laugh in a friendly way every now and then, “and remember, don’t get up to leave too quickly, that isn’t proper.”

  She should try to make friends with the owners of the two hotels—one was a lady, the other a gentleman—hotels always needed all sorts of things—and also on her evening visit with the military doctor, if she dared—he was the head of the little military hospital, in a hospital they needed things too.

  She would stay in the town house and Sjeba would take care of everything.

  When she returned the grandmother immediately wanted to know everything: how they had received her in the town at the outer bay, and what he had said, and she, and whether they had been friendly to Himpies, and to her.

  Felicia related: everyone in the town had been friendly to Himpies, and to her; and he had said this and she had said that—and if she wanted she could also give piano lessons in the town, there was no one there who did.

  “Do you now want to give piano lessons, granddaughter, and for money too!”

  And when Felicia asked why they didn’t redecorate the house in the town and rent it, the old lady was even more indignant than before, “what do you mean, rent our house? for money? we? you don’t mean it,” but after a while she gave in again, “all right then, for Himpies, and that—”; the other “that” she didn’t mention aloud, and she sighed.

  The town at the outer bay was deeply moved: the poor “young lady of the Small Garden” (that’s what they called her), not even twenty-five years old and left with a child to take care of all alone, a husband who had walked out on her, or she on him? and then to come here, to an old grandmother on an old neglected spice garden, and with the prices which spices fetched nowadays, they would have to content themselves with a dish of sago porridge and a fish from the bay. And then, to start a little trade, and not even be ashamed to talk about it! It would never work of course: you had to be born to a thing like that.

  But after a few years the town on the outer bay had changed its tune. In that time Felicia and her grandmother had made the Small Garden into a kind of model farm: milk, fresh chicken eggs and salted duck eggs, vegetables, fruits, mushrooms could all be bought there; and pickles, preserves and mussel sauces, but those had to be ordered in advance.

  Early in the morning the milk proa moored under the awning behind the Castle: the bottles with milk and the baskets of vegetables were picked up, the empties returned; one of the servants managed everything. Felicia often came along, she taught piano in town, and she went to the Chinese quarter—never alone, grandmother still did not allow that—to negotiate with a Chinese or Arab merchant about “the other things” these merchants bought and resold, the things one was not supposed to talk about, no one in town was to know of—everyone knew!—medicinal herbs, dried scents, mixed incense, but especially black coral bracelets against rheumatism, with or without gold decoration, and amber balls in golden-fretted fruits.

  Those “other things” eventually went everywhere, to the other islands and even farther, to Java and Sumatra and all the way to Malacca: most of the money was earned with them.

  In the beginning it was earned by the merchant only; but then one morning the grandmother sent the gala proa and invited him for a visit with her at the Garden—there she had him sit on the couch in the side gallery and have a glass of homemade vanilla lemonade with kanari cake, and the old grandmother sat next to him and looked at him a few times—and from then on things worked out quite satisfactorily.

  They had been lucky—not too unlucky—with the Small Garden. What was planted grew; the animals were healthy, the people content. The goldsmith from the town came to live there—there was so much work for him, and every few months the old woman came, the bibi, from whom the grandmother bought everything which was not “from here”; also the ambergris, also the gold. Ambergris and gold were weighed against each other and were equally expensive. No one else was allowed to attend those negotiations, not even Felicia at first.

  The family house in the town had been rented well: one pavilion room was kept for Felicia to sleep in when she stayed in town. The spices fetched reasonable prices.

  The sugar crisis passed; Felicia’s parents could subsist again, although her mother never stopped complaining. She had immediately hired “legal counsel” (as she called it) to trace Felicia’s husband in America. In North America? In South America? Don’t you know even that much? She assumed he had married again—then we can have him prosecuted for bigamy, they are very severe with that in America, and he’ll end in prison where he belongs! And then Felicia would be able to get a divorce and “start a new life,” she wrote; otherwise she would have to wait at least five years—she was angry when Felicia didn’t answer her on this. And then she offered to pay the debt, fussed for years about the exact amount—and didn’t she need a new piano in that wilderness? She sent parcels with beautiful clothes for the little boy, who never wore them.

  Felicia’s father, as always, wrote a monthly note to his mother and added—many warm greetings to Felicia and the little Willem.

  The boy Himpies grew up, a pretty child, a sweet child too, healthy, content, everyone liked him. Yet he was not spoiled: he could never be found, they always had to search for him—for him and his slightly older friend, Domingoes, the son of the goldsmith and his young wife who had lived for such a long time at the Small Garden.

  It seemed as if the Garden took the two children away and hid them: in all the water, the cistern, the rivers, the shallow inner bay; in all the green, the trees, the wood, the rosebushes on the hills and the forests behind the hills at the foot of the mountains—once they lost their way there and were found in the dead of night only, by a torchlight party.

  They secretly crossed the river to the village and hid in the hut of the man with the blue hair to listen to the stories about his son. The fishers took them along in their proas, or they played underneath a proa on the beach—who was going to keep track of the two children?

  The grandmother was ailing at times but always recovered and immediately went back to work—the endless jobs of patience: the trimming of the black coral, softening it in oil, warming it, bending it very carefully, and again, and again, until a bracelet was in its proper shape and could set; and after a while the goldsmith decorated it with gold motifs or with gold snake heads and tails.

  The weighing, the painstaking powdering of ambergris and black amber, with benzoin and musk and rose water and ground rasamala roots added for body, to make the amber balls. The goldsmith did the fretwork on the golden fruits which held the balls.

  The mussel sauces took more time than anything: the rinsing of the mussels—not a single grain of sand should be left in them, her honor was at stake there.

  She was always curious to see how a thing would turn out, and that made the monotonous work yet a bit adventurous.

  And thus life at the Small Garden unrolled its peaceful course.

  But Felicia was not peaceful: things w
ere always tugging at her. On one side the town at the outer bay, not even so very far from the Garden but turned away from it, as if belonging to another world—over there . . .

  The town of possibilities: ships which came and went once a month—with a ship someone might arrive, someone else might leave . . .

  A post office with mail coming in and going out—a letter can be sent in the mail, from one side or from the other, but there has to be an address on the envelope—

  The town also of the evening parties: in the beginning Felicia was asked to all the parties, for there was always a shortage of young European women and girls, everyone was prepared to close an eye as far as her “trade” was concerned. Dressed up in an evening gown from the past, with the real tortoise-and-gold fan from her grandmother’s youth on a ribbon around her wrist, she danced through the long warm tropical night, danced, danced, with him and with him, she loved dancing—you dance well, Li—nobody called her Li. Afterward some polite young man took her home, to the pavilion room of the town house, along one of the paths lined with high trees, in the moonlight, in the night.

  In the town at the outer bay it was stated that there wasn’t much fun in seeing the young lady of the Small Garden home at night in the moonlight.

  And on the other side, the Garden which pulled her back across the outer bay to the blue movement of the inner bay, to its own deep green silence—where the two children, Himpies and Domingoes, were standing at the quay, hand in hand, waiting for her; a little farther down the old grandmother was waiting, and the faithful Sjeba, always—to all the jobs she liked to do, to all the money she earned with her work, and the feeling of security it gave her.

  In the end the Garden won. Her clothes helped in its victory. When the French dresses, shoes and stockings were worn out, she first tried: a pattern from the magazine Gracieuse, drawing paper, a piece of material from the Chinese quarter, her grandmother and Sjeba fitted her—it didn’t look like much, she thought, and she began turning down the invitations to the evening parties in town. After that she dressed for a while in white cottons which didn’t become her at all, and walked on high-heeled slippers which made her teeter; then in sarong and jacket. Not bright silk sarongs like her grandmother: a strong yellow and brown batik sarong from Java, a white jacket without any frills, and her bare feet in low-heeled leather sandals. She canceled the piano lessons, made the merchants come to see her when that was necessary, and only rarely went to the town at the outer bay.