The Year of Living Dangerously Read online

  Dedication

  To my brother, with gratitude

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  PART ONE: Patet Nem: Hamilton’s Dwarf

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  PART TWO: Patet Sanga: Water from the Moon

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  PART THREE: Patet Manjura: Amok

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  About the Author

  Other Books by Christopher Koch

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Billy Kwan’s dossier on President Sukarno draws on two different sources for the dialogue with the farmer Marhaen. The first version is in Sukarno’s speech ‘Marhaen and Proletarian’, made in Bandung in 1957 and published in the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project Translation Series. The second version occurs in Sukarno’s Autobiography as told to Cindy Adams (Bobbs-Merrill, NY, 1965). I am also indebted to this book for details of Sukarno’s years of struggle.

  The poem ‘To Li Chien’ by Po Chü-I, is Arthur Waley’s translation, from his Chinese Poems, published by Allen and Unwin Limited.

  C.K.

  ‘Tartar prisoners in chains!

  Of all the sorrows of all the prisoners mine is the hardest to

  bear!

  Never in the world has so great a wrong fallen to the lot of

  man —

  A Han heart and a Han tongue set in the body of a Turk.’

  — PO CHÜ-I, ‘The Prisoner’

  (translated by Arthur Waley)

  God dwells in the heart of all beings, Arjuna: thy God dwells in thy heart. And his power of wonder moves all things — puppets in a play of shadows — whirling them onwards on the stream of time.

  — The Bhagavad Gita

  (translated by Juan Mascaro)

  PART ONE

  Patet Nem: Hamilton’s Dwarf

  One

  There is no way, unless you have unusual self-control, of disguising the expression on your face when you first meet a dwarf. It brings out the curious child in us to encounter one of these little people. Since Billy Kwan added to his oddity by being half Chinese, it was just as well that we met in the darkness of the Wayang Bar. My attention was drawn to Kwan’s arrival by Wally O’Sullivan, a correspondent for a Sydney daily.

  ‘Hullo,’ Wally said. ‘Curtis is bringing in the black goblin.’

  We were sitting over our first gin-tonics at the big circular bar in the centre of the room, and Wally swivelled his twenty-two stone round to peer at two figures who had halted inside the entrance. The Hotel Indonesia in Jakarta was managed by an American airline, and the Wayang Bar followed the American practice and sealed itself against all natural light. Coming into this circular chamber, you stepped from the flat blaze of the equator into a permanent half-dark, to which air-conditioning added a Scandinavian cold; you would halt inside the doorway, the sweat drying on your back, and wait for your eyes to adjust so that you could see who was there. Pete Curtis, a red-haired Canadian working for the Washington Post, was a regular, but his companion was new to me. I didn’t at first doubt that the man was a true dwarf; and I also took him for an Indonesian Chinese. He was squinting about him at the few sources of light: fat red candles that flickered on the black Formica surface of the round bar, and a ring of electric lamps set high on the gold walls, across which were fixed Javanese shadow-puppets — the heroes and villains of the wayang kulit. He said something to Pete Curtis, who pointed to Wally and me. They began to move towards us.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Freelance cinecameraman called Kwan,’ Wally said. ‘He does a bit of television work for the ABS bloke, and for the Japanese. Been here about four months. I knew him in Sydney, years ago. He and Sydney didn’t get on.’ He had turned back to direct these remarks into his gin-tonic. Wally’s throaty bass, always quiet, but so well produced it could cut through the Wayang’s loudest babble, achieved many twin meanings, most of them wryly humorous, but not all of them intended for easy understanding. Underneath was the enormous sadness of the enormously fat: he was known to us all as Great Wally.

  ‘He looks Chinese,’ I said.

  ‘That’s his trouble. He’s not sure whether he is or not.’ Wally glanced at me as though suddenly regretting this offering. ‘Chinese father, Australian mother,’ he muttered, and swung ponderously on his stool to face Curtis.

  The Canadian was already quite drunk; he carried both his work and his drinking to excess, and had the constitution to take the punishment. His freckled, muscular arm encircled the shoulders of his companion, who wore a lurid Hawaiian shirt of red and yellow.

  ‘Cookie!’ Pete called. ‘Great Wally! Want you to meet my mate.’ It amused Curtis to use Australian terms. He staggered slightly, coming to a halt.

  Wally surveyed the pair with a kingly calm. ‘We’ve already met,’ he said softly, and smiled at the dwarf.

  ‘Hullo, Wally,’ Kwan said. He moved free of the burden of Curtis’s arm to reach up and shake our hands. ‘Wally and I were at university together,’ he explained to Curtis. ‘We once debated against each other. You defended the monarchy, Wally.’

  ‘And you were an anarchist. But what a long time ago that was, Billy. You’re probably a conservative by now. Hm?’

  Kwan laughed; it was a grating, eager laugh. His accent was Australian, with British overtones. Examining him with cautious curiosity, I now saw that he was not really a dwarf in the extreme sense: that is, he was not a midget. His black, crew-cut head appeared large in relation to his body, and his legs were comically brief; but his chest and shoulders were powerful, and his hands square and capable-looking. Had he not had this physique, I reflected, he couldn’t have managed the heavy sound camera on its brace, the cinecameraman’s cross. I categorised him simply as a remarkably short man — wishing abnormality away.

  ‘I figured it was high time Billy joined the Wayang Club,’ Curtis was saying. ‘He’s been in Jakarta for months, working his tail off, but he goes home every night to this crazy little bungalow near the Indian Embassy.’

  ‘Not a very safe place, surely?’ Wally said. ‘The Indians must be due for a demonstration soon — their Embassy hasn’t been smashed up yet.’

  The remark was not offered seriously, but Kwan appeared to take it that way. ‘They won’t sack my place,’ he said quickly. ‘No one takes me for a Nekolim — they think I’m Indonesian Chinese.’

  He did look Chinese, except for one striking incongruity: his almond-shaped eyes were green. They went from one to the other of us now as though in search of a reaction to his remark. He had perched himself with some precariousness on a high bamboo stool and crossed one stumpy leg over the other. The disturbingly intelligent face above the comical body split into a grin, and I decided that I liked him.

  ‘Hey Billy, I’ve got an Australian-Chinese joke for you,’ Curtis said. Kwan glanced at him warily, and said nothing. ‘It’s about a Chinese market gardener in Sydney who brings his vegetables into the city markets every Friday. There’s a really stupid Aussie pig running a stall — sorry chaps — who’s a xenophobe, right? And every time the Chinese delivers the vegetables to him, the pig asks him when he’ll deliver again. “Fliday,” says the Chinese, and the pig always shouts at him: “Friday — can’t y’ say Friday, y’ Chinese bastard?”’ Curtis gave a mangled imitation of an Australian accent.

  I was beginning to be embarrassed for Kwan, and glanced at him. He had now been given a Scotch and sat looking at it carefully, without expression.

  ‘This happens every week,’ Curtis said, ‘and the Chinese gets very sick of it, so he spends a lot of time practising how to say “Friday”. When he gets it perfect, and the pig asks him the question the next week, he’s ready. “Friday,” he says, “you flucking Austlalian plick!”’ He went into a falsetto guffaw and wiped his mouth. ‘Sorry, Billy,’ he said happily. ‘I thought you might enjoy that one.’

  And Kwan, it seemed, wished to convey that he had done. Bent double on his high stool, his drink held out to one side as though in salute, he gave a flat, eager laugh. ‘That’s all right, sport,’ he said. ‘My old man owns a gift store in Dixon Street, not a market garden.’

  Curtis clapped a hand on Kwan’s brightly clad shoulder. ‘Chinese plick,’ he said.

  Kwan, his face gone suddenly blank, was blinking rapidly, and leant slightly away from Curtis’s hand. I began to be uncomfortable for him, and set out to change the subject. ‘So you’re working here freelance?’ I said. ‘That must have taken some nerve, in the present situation.’

  He turned to me eagerly. ‘Not really, old man. It’s been dead easy, actually. There’s not much competition; the local cameramen aren’t exactly crash-hot, and I’m the only foreign cameraman permanently in town. Unti
l now, I was working mostly for Potter, the ABS rep. — that is, when he got off his bum and did a television piece. Potter’s been pulled out now — I suppose you chaps know that? I’m meeting his replacement in here tonight. He’s arriving just in time, as far as ABS are concerned. To listen to Potter’s radio reports, you’d never have known what Confrontation was.’ He grinned with cheerful malice.

  ‘Now now Billy,’ Wally said. ‘You’re just annoyed that Potter didn’t give you enough work.’ He looked reproving; what he was saying was that he didn’t care to hear a correspondent criticised in the Wayang by a stringer cameraman.

  But Kwan, undismayed, became brasher. ‘Potter was a disaster,’ he said. ‘That’s why he’s been pulled out. I happen to know that, from friends of mine in the Sydney office. And do you know what he’s done to finish up with? Pissed off to Hong Kong to have a holiday there with his wife, instead of staying here for the handover period, to give this new bloke his contacts and introductions. That’s going to put Hamilton about a mile behind. Eh?’

  This was true, and we all looked carefully into our drinks. ABS — the Australian Broadcasting Service — kept a permanent representative here with a well-staffed office. He could be a considerable competitor if he was good. Potter had not been good, and I awaited the appearance of his successor with some interest.

  Kwan jerked round suddenly and squinted across to the doorway where a tall man in a well-cut tan suit had made the obligatory blind halt to adjust to the Wayang’s night. ‘This’ll be Hamilton,’ he said, and dropped like an acrobat from his stool to the floor. Fists lightly clenched, elbows out from his sides, he hurried off, with a ghost of that rocking motion peculiar to the large-headed dwarfs one sometimes passes in the street.

  The newcomer’s face, caught in the glow of a nearby candle, looked startled when he found himself confronted by Kwan. The cameraman extended his hand, tilting his head back and offering his broad Chinese grin. As he came with Kwan towards the round bar, Hamilton’s tallness was fantastically exaggerated. The spiky head only just reached his elbow; it was as though the new man walked with a strange child.

  *

  We did our best to explain Indonesia to Hamilton, while trying, since we assumed he had done his homework, to avoid the obvious. I doubt if we succeeded; all of us were eager to convey the mad uniqueness of our situation, and he smiled at us with pleasantly quizzical amusement, like a sober man joining a drunken party.

  It had been a busy day, and a busy week. Indonesia was once again the major story on the world file, as it so often was in that era before the Vietnam war swallowed everything. Five days ago, on New Year’s Eve, menacing in his military uniform and black pitji cap, President Sukarno had threatened that if the Federation of Malaysia were admitted to the United Nations Indonesia would withdraw. His audience had faithfully roared its approval; and this week he had confirmed the threat: the UN could ‘go to hell’; Indonesia was resigning from the world.

  We were all pretty much convinced, in the Wayang that evening, that what this signalled was Indonesia’s total commitment to a ‘Jakarta-Peking axis’, and the long-threatened military invasion of Malaysia; and we were in that state of vicarious excitement over a possible international apocalypse which is a journalist’s drug. I had managed to get an interview that morning with the Foreign Minister, Subandrio, but I had been unable to extract from him any firm statement about an invasion: only the usual generalities. From the wiliest of Javanese politicians, this was only to be expected, but I wasn’t sure my agency would understand.

  I was a wire-service man at the time, and my job had made me over-familiar with the bars of international hotels in a number of countries; I didn’t generally develop any special feeling for them. But the Wayang was different; its red-and-gold cave was a refuge for the foreign press corps — all male and mostly unmarried — from what was outside. What was outside was Konfrontasi: Confrontation. Sukarno had popularised the term, hypnotising his crowds at the great rallies we covered almost every week at the Jakarta Sports Stadium he had built with Russian money.

  He had made for himself and his people a sort of theatre there; a theatre of romantic-revolutionary euphoria in which they were spellbound. And he had created a strange propaganda world of paper and capital letters: a world divided between the NEFOS — New Emerging Forces — and the OLDEFOS — Old Established Forces — where we whites were called NEKOLIM: ‘neo-colonial imperialists’. Bung Karno showed a genius for such coinings, as a substitute for economic management. Talismans, intended to change reality, they have all gone under glass now, with the other debased coinage of history: but in that year, Konfrontasi was a term to juggle with in most world capitals. Malaysia was confronted. Its protector Britain was confronted. The United States was confronted. The whole western world and India as well were confronted, while the Bung warmed his ego at the blaze, striking dictatorial attitudes from Europe’s nineteen thirties, his black pitji tilted in defiance: a baffling mixture of menace and playboy appeal. The people sometimes called him Bapak — father — but he was really the Bung, the daring elder brother, who carried out every outrageous scheme they had ever longed for, and shouted every imagined insult at the world’s Establishment — and at shady colonial masters who might try to come back.

  What Konfrontasi meant for us Nekolim in the Wayang Bar was life under a regime whose hatred for all Westerners had reached the dimension of insanity. We carried our white faces through the streets like ridiculous badges, ignoring insults and jeers and malevolent brown-eyed stares that had the intensity of religious fervour. Our stories were full of the stoning and smashing of embassies and Western businesses by mobs whose activities were approved by the government: and after we’d filed these stories we retreated gratefully to the Wayang, a foreigner’s bar in a foreigner’s hotel, out of reach of all but the most wealthy and powerful Indonesians. Off-stage, in these cool hours, we could be ourselves, no longer men in white masks.

  The resident correspondents were drawn together — particularly the remaining English-speakers — in an artificially heightened good fellowship. Nearly all British and American journalists were now barred from the country: the media in Britain and America were served mostly by Australians, and by a remarkable goulash of other nationalities who spoke English, but did not carry the passports of the wicked OLDEFOS powers. And so we welcomed Hamilton with something a little warmer than our usual spurious camaraderie, and competed to explain what the rules were for survival in the country of Konfrontasi.

  ‘You don’t wear shorts — ever. The Dutch wore shorts.’ This from Wally.

  ‘See this bag?’ Curtis pointed to a small airways bag beside his stool. ‘It’s full of rupiahs — my week’s supply. No wallet could hold it. You can get 10,000 roops to the US dollar in any bazaar, and a packet of Lucky Strikes is as good as money.’

  ‘All white faces are bad,’ Billy Kwan told Hamilton. ‘But you’ve got a big advantage being Australian. Australians aren’t as bad as other Nekolim yet. We still get special credits for the time in the independence struggle when our wharfies wouldn’t load Dutch ships.’

  ‘It’s a pity I’m not Australian, then,’ Hamilton said.

  We all stared at him; since he worked for ABS, we had assumed he was, but certainly his accent seemed to be English.

  His voice, resonant, pleasant, perhaps a little too bland, was almost a BBC news-reader’s; but I wondered about some of his ‘a’ sounds.

  ‘I was born in England,’ he said. ‘But I grew up in Singapore and Australia. And I travel on an Australian passport. So what the Indos don’t know won’t hurt them, will it?’

  ‘So you’re a hybrid,’ Kwan said. From his vantage point on the high stool that raised him to normal level he was studying Hamilton with great intentness.

  This personal remark caused Hamilton to look quickly at him. ‘I suppose I am,’ he said; and after a slight pause: ‘They’re not too keen on the Chinese in Indonesia either, are they? How do you get on?’

  ‘Well, they find it hard to know what I am, exactly,’ Kwan said cheerfully. ‘Particularly since I don’t speak Chinese.’