The Ten Thousand Things Page 9

  Every day they passed the graves at the edge of the wood; they knew all about the three girls who had been given poison to drink—they understood quite well: someone who drinks poison, or is stabbed with a knife, or is shot with a rifle or with arrows, dies, is murdered—they knew all that.

  They also knew about funerals.

  In those years old Sarah and Eliah died within a few hours of each other, in the night.

  They were washed, dressed neatly and laid in the coffins, the grandmother put in strongly scented herbs, camphor wood and sandalwood, sprinkled aromatic oil, and gave some of her best sheets to cover the dead—then the family could come, the others who lived at the Garden, people from the village; also the schoolteacher who led the prayers. They sang psalms—perhaps they would rather have sung the old lament of the “hundred things”—oh, soul—and called ee-ee-ee-ee-ee. But the schoolteacher said, the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away.

  Himpies and Domingoes had not seen that part of it. Later they were present and saw the men prepare the proas by torchlight, carry the coffins out and put them in the gala proa under the little roof on which the gongplayers would sit. Large winged proas were waiting on the beach for all who would come along; burials at the Garden were not permitted any more, they had to go to one of the graveyards near the town at the outer bay.

  They waited for the dawn, not the sunrise—the sky showed a touch of gray, the inner bay beneath it another, more tender shade of grayness, the trees seemed even darker than usual with their heavy wet foliage—and then a small procession of women came out from under the trees toward the beach. They were all dressed in the same severely pleated black skirts and long-sleeved jackets, in one hand the little Bible and the large folded white handkerchief, and in the other their Sunday slippers with curled points which must not get wet when they climbed into the proas.

  Sjeba the daughter-in-law went in front; there were more women like her, tall and bony; they all walked slowly and solemnly and with great dignity, as if they were carrying something else in their hands besides the Book, the handkerchief and the slippers—something about the secret of life and death.

  As soon as they were on board the proas sailed, the gala proa with the dead going first; the gong players beat a muted rhythm for the rowers, the steersman stood upright in the stern.

  The grandmother stayed behind at the Garden with the two children. First she stood on the beach watching the boats cross the inner bay; she cried for a moment, wiped her eyes and said, “goodbye, have a good journey!” and to the boys, “you must say the same.” The two children repeated her words.

  After that she walked to the slave bell; she did not pull the rope but took a wooden pestle from the kitchen, wound a piece of cloth around it, and beat with it on the bronze, slowly and regularly. It sounded like a church bell. The children were standing, one on each side of her. They stayed near her that day and didn’t run away as they were wont to do.

  But in those days the two boys had been together at the Small Garden; now the child Himpies was there alone.

  Domingoes went to another school in the town, and at first he occasionally came for the weekend; but then the old goldsmith and his young wife moved even farther away, to her island, no one knew where.

  After that Dutch children from Himpies’ class came to stay at the Garden during the weekends, but the Garden was not very friendly to the new children. They got sunburned, fell from trees, bruised their feet on the coral; one stepped on a sea urchin.

  Himpies was good friends with them but he didn’t seem to care much whether they came with him to the Small Garden or not, and so after a while they stopped coming.

  He learned to be alone at the Garden—sometimes he would stand, suddenly motionless, with his eyes wide open, and look and see that the Garden was beautiful. He now saw things separated from each other, one by one: one tree, one rock, one flower, one shell on the beach, one bird. At times he was afraid alone, but not very, and he did not know what it was that he feared.

  Now he also went to sit and talk with the “adults,” looked at them; and everyone liked to have the boy Himpies sit with them and look at them—the people in the village across the river, the servants in the Garden, his other mother Sjeba, his great-grandmother, his mother Felicia too. With her he did not have long conversations; they loved each other but the child could not cope with her vehemence and her quickly aroused irritation. Already then, when he was still in elementary school, he began saying what he would often say later—“well, yes, certainly, Mrs. Small Garden”—and then he would look at her intently and smile, and the lady of the Small Garden never answered.

  When he had finished grade school Felicia sent him to Java, to a secondary school in Surabaya; he again boarded with a teacher. Once a year during the summer holiday he could come home for some weeks—the voyage was a long and very expensive one.

  After his third year Felicia pronounced it all nonsense, she said it would be much better if he went straight to Holland for the last two years; that way he could make friends for his university days.

  Himpies looked at her and asked, “for how long?”

  “Do you mean how long will you stay in Holland? Long! Two years of secondary school, perhaps three—you always lose time when you change, six years to become a doctor if you work really hard, one year, or say two, at a university in France or Germany, to specialize—better everything at once, then you are somebody.” And without sparing his feelings or her own: “three and six and two, that is eleven—eleven years.”

  “No,” said the boy, “that is impossible, that is too long.”

  “Too long!” Felicia snapped, “too long to learn a decent profession! What do you want then? Are you too much of a slacker to study? Oh, I know, you’d rather hang around on the Small Garden. Go native, walk around in a pajama, sell eggs and milk, and spices which nobody wants any more! Shop around for a woman with some money, I guess”—she had almost said “sugary money”—“otherwise a plate of sago with a fried fish from the bay; is that what you want?”

  “We don’t live on sago with a fried fish from the bay.”

  Then Felicia explained to him the way they had earned their money, especially in the beginning, by peddling “the other things” in the Chinese and Arab quarters; she told him everything. “And only because great-grandma made them—when she is no longer here they won’t even buy a rheumatism bracelet from me, you watch! Too long, what do you mean too long? You are still very young, Himpies.”

  He looked around him as if he were searching for something, did not know what to say—“then I won’t see great-grandma again.”

  “No, of course not,” said Felicia, “she is past eighty, that is very old for the tropics,” and more softly than she usually spoke, “we all die, Himpies, and we receive nothing for nothing.”

  The boy regarded her again, “and you? and mother Sjeba? and all the others? and the Small Garden?” he asked, stammering for a moment.

  “Oh,” she said. “You should trust us to last a little longer—the Garden will, anyway.”

  Then he smiled, just vaguely. “Well, yes, certainly, Mrs. Small Garden,” he said, but the brown eyes with the little spots looked past her.

  2.

  When Himpies had been gone for two years the grandmother died; she was not very ill beforehand—sometimes it seemed as if she had lost all her certainties toward the end of her life.

  She seldom used the word “proud” any more.

  Once she said to Felicia, “when I’m gone you must move everything from the ‘special drawer’ into a drawer of Himpies’ cabinet, but without the little sentinels—you would forget to change them anyway, granddaughter, because you don’t believe in them.”

  Felicia laughed, “but do you, really?” and she had answered, “I don’t quite know; you must remember, I’ve been alone at the Garden for so many years, alone with the servants—Sarah was my friend—she believed in them, and I . . . I liked to believe in them too.”


  She missed the boy and often asked for him, “why isn’t Himpies here? where is Himpies?” and then she remembered that he was studying to be a doctor, “he can have my snakestone, don’t forget! When he has used it he must put it in milk to extract the venom—” she stopped suddenly—“don’t you believe in the snakestone either, granddaughter?”

  She could get restless; “is there still not enough money? why does Himpies have to become an army surgeon, in a uniform?” and she calmed down only when Felicia explained that there was enough money for him to study medicine properly, at the university, that he was certainly not going to become an army surgeon such as they had in the garrison in the town.

  “That is good, granddaughter, don’t let Himpies put on a uniform.”

  Once more she talked about the three little girls, “you mustn’t forget the three girls, granddaughter—forgetting is not good,” and she muttered something about the slave girl—the years of the slaves—“not so long ago, granddaughter.”

  And then she said, “my mother came from here, a child of the island, perhaps she came from here, from the Small Garden, and perhaps her mother—I don’t know,” and she shook her head.

  On one of her last days she called all the servants to her, one at a time, some people from the village too, and gave each a souvenir; afterward she said to Felicia with a little gesture, as if she were handing her something, “the Small Garden is for you, granddaughter. It isn’t that I forget my son Willem—I love my son very much,” and she enumerated the names of all those whom she had loved most during her life, “and my husband and my father and mother and the sisters all four, and you, sweet granddaughter, and Himpies”—it was as if she wanted to say more but she was tired and fell asleep; a little later she died, very quietly, in the night.

  In the morning in the gray dawn they carried her away; everyone came along. When they sailed off in the proas Felicia remembered too late that nobody had stayed behind to say goodbye, have a good journey, and to ring the slave bell. The grandmother dead, and where were the children?

  Now began one of the hardest times in her life.

  She was worried about Himpies: he was boarding again with a teacher who had a large family, with other student boarders, and little time; Himpies himself wrote irregularly, sometimes not for months. He was living in the same town in Holland where her parents had stayed after the sugar market crashed. Her mother began to ail, and wrote her long confused letters full of complaints; her father wrote regularly, very briefly, there wasn’t much in his letters: young Willem was a nice fellow, she shouldn’t worry, he would make his way, and many greetings.

  The Garden was there, but submerged in its greenness; Sjeba was grumpy, and didn’t speak much. At times there was nothing but the deep humming silence around her—not even the sound of water and wind and trees, and no voices.

  The work remained, and the money. She worked hard, earned much. When her mother died there was more money than anyone had thought—she inherited it together with her father.

  The lady of the Small Garden is rich, the town at the outer bay said.

  In those days she began making expeditions all over the island. As soon as she was on the road she felt better, in a proa, or rather, walking, climbing in the mountains, over rocks and cliffs; nothing was too steep or too far. She bathed and swam in every clear stream she crossed.

  She did not go alone; Sjeba started by asking “why” but came along in the end, also some older men from among the servants—one with a rifle. Sometimes they visited places where they should not have been.

  On those trips she also began to hunt for antiques: old china and porcelain, furniture, crystal—everything. She took medicines with her, as her grandmother had taught her, and money. She was never afraid. Everyone knew her: the little white woman, the lady from the inner bay, a bit stocky, on sandals, in a simple skirt and jacket, with curly brown hair; behind her, three from the island: Sjeba, tall and lanky, two elderly men in black, one with the rifle, the other with an old brown bag full of medicines, food, clean clothes, and the gray purse with the silver lock.

  The house on the Garden was being filled with beautiful things: long racks of china along the walls, famille verte and famille rose; water pitchers with dragons’ or lions’ heads, black carved furniture, sometimes with inlay, brass, tin.

  Into the guest room went a four-poster of black wood with a gilded pineapple on each corner post.

  Felicia did not want to change the house in any way, but she did have the living room extended with an archway and stairs leading to a large verandah facing the lemon orchard, with a pond on each side filled by the stream from the wood —on the surface lotus flowers floated. The cistern had to stay the way it was.

  There was plenty of time for building: not even four of the eleven years had passed.

  But when Himpies was in his first year at the university he wrote her that he did not want to continue his studies, that he wanted to go to the military academy and become an officer—that did not take so long—he hoped that she would approve.

  Felicia sat down on the edge of the side gallery with the letter in her hand and leaned against a pillar. What could she do? Go there, take him by the hand, make him continue those long years of study he did not want? Leave the Garden?—that would be the end of it! She saw the empty space in front of her where the old house had been—it was still almost bare—saw all the other things, saw all the sadness, and it was as if it took a solid shape and threw a shadow over the Garden.

  She jumped up and went inside to write him an answer: he should follow his own heart; and then went on to tell him little things about the Garden which she knew he would like to hear.

  3.

  Felicia and Sjeba were standing under the plane trees at the beach; all the others kept in the background—they were a bit afraid of the lady from the Small Garden but they were curious—again nobody remembered in time to ring the slave bell.

  Felicia would not say, “there you are!” and “I have been waiting for you!” as her grandmother had once; she could not say anything: the tall, the handsome stranger from the hotel in Nice, in a white uniform, stepped out of the proa and came toward her—and her heart stopped beating.

  But when he was close, it was someone else, with other eyes, the warm brown eyes with spots of the boy Himpies, and he said, “hello, mother, there you are, I’m finally back!” and embraced her; and “hello, mother Sjeba, you’re still here, how lucky that you’re still here!” embraced her, ran to the others, shook all their hands, patted them on the shoulders and looked at them and laughed and repeated, “here I am again!” and “are you still here!” and “how lucky you’re still here!” to all and everyone and everything, and laughed—and wanted to know all at once: how was Felicia? and the Garden? and the coco palms? and the cows and the milk and the eggs? “can you still manage, mother?” and “great-grandma gone, I told you so! are you still making bracelets? why not let me help—are the parakeets dead too? where do I sleep? how are they in the village, the old man with the blue hair? has his son taken another fort by storm? where on earth is Domingoes? I’m going to track him down one of these days! are you sleeping in great-grandma’s room now? is everything unchanged there? where did you get all these beautiful things?”

  He looked at the curiosities cabinet, opened the top drawer of the Cinderella story, immediately picked out the Amoret Harp, “what’s-its-name again—the bibi gave it to me! you must tell me that story again about Cinderella and her prince, they didn’t live in a house but in a tower, the . . . no, don’t say it, I know—the Tour de Bra, wasn’t it?”

  Felicia opened another drawer, in which the “treasure” was laid on a piece of Palembang silk, and he asked, “why did you do that? and without the sentinels of Good Fortune? does great-grandma approve?” and laughed, and “does no one know where Domingoes has gone?” and at times he hummed snatches from the only Malayan song he had ever been able to remember.

  “And everything i
s still here!” and he threw back his head and laughed, and looked. He had to see the new verandah and the two lotus ponds—when he saw the beautiful four-poster with the golden pineapples in the guest room he whistled and said, “well, yes, certainly, Mrs. Small Garden!” and looked at her closely and laughed aloud.

  Later he calmed down. They were having tea together at the inner bay, and it seemed to Felicia that he had not changed much, perhaps he was a little gayer than before—that could also be the excitement; friendly to everyone, he had always been that, and at the same time a bit absent, he still had that about him. When she asked him something he would wait a moment as if he had not heard, and then he might answer a hesitant yes, and—yes and no . . .

  “Why haven’t you brought grandfather with you?”

  “Yes, we did discuss it, but I think he couldn’t quite muster the courage; perhaps if he could have taken grandma’s little dogs along on the ship—grandfather is very nice, mother.”

  “Yes,” Felicia said, “he is.”

  Had he not seen how spiritless and beaten the old man was after a lifetime with a nagging rich wife—or had her father always been like that?

  “Was grandmother nice to you?”

  He hesitated. “Not so very nice,” he then said, “I mean, not as nice as grandfather, but . . . she was so well-meaning, she always wanted to buy things for me.”

  Felicia looked at him sideways—nice, and very nice, and not so very nice. Her son in a uniform; it became him well; why in a uniform? They had never been a family of officers. And suddenly she recalled grandmother’s words, “don’t let Himpies put on a uniform”; would she tell him? no, it was too late now anyway.