“I believe it became sick when a raindrop squeezed through a hole in its sky and touched a thing and festered it like a fallen tree in the jungle. The thing is small, like a tiny snake, thin as an earthworm, short as a cockroach.” He groaned and stretched. “My back’s killing me,” he said in English. “Fix my pillow, will you, laddie?”
As Peter Marlowe bent down, Mac lifted himself and whispered in his ear, “A coupling condenser, three hundred microfarads.”
“That better?” Peter Marlowe asked as Mac settled back.
“Fine, laddie, a lot better. Now, be off with you. All that nonsense talk has tired me out.”
“You know it amuses you, you old bugger.”
“Less of the old, puki ’mahlu!”
“Senderis!” said Peter Marlowe, and he walked into the sun. A coupling condenser, three hundred microfarads. What the hell’s a microfarad?
He was windward of the garage and smelled the sweet gasoline-laden air, heavy with oil and grease. He squatted down beside the path on a patch of grass to enjoy the aroma. My God, he thought, the smell of petrol brings back memories. Planes and Gosport and Farnborough and eight other airfields and Spitfires and Hurricanes.
But I won’t think about them now, I’ll think about the wireless.
He changed his position and sat in the lotus seat, right foot on left thigh, left foot on right thigh, hands in his lap, knuckles touching and thumbs touching and fingers pointing to his navel. Many times he had sat thus. It helped him think, for once the initial pain had passed, there was a quietude pervading the body and the mind soared free.
He sat quietly and men passed by, hardly noticing him. There was nothing strange in seeing a man sitting thus in the heat of the noon sun, cinderburned, in a sarong. Nothing strange at all.
Now I know what has to be obtained. Somehow. There’s bound to be a wireless in the village. Villages are like magpies — they collect all sorts of things; and he laughed, remembering his village in Java.
He had found it, stumbling in the jungle, exhausted and lost, more dead than alive, far from the threads of road that crisscrossed Java. He had run many miles and the date was March 11. The island forces had capitulated on March 8, and the year was 1942. For three days he had wandered the jungle, eaten by bugs and flies and ripped by thorns and bloodsucked by leeches and soaked by rains. He had seen no one, heard no one since he had left the airfield north, the fighter ’drome at Bandung. He had left his squadron, what remained of it, and left his Hurricane. But before he had run away, he had made his dead airplane — twisted, broken by bomb and tracer — a funeral pyre. A man could do no less than cremate his friend.
When he came upon the village it was sunset. The Javanese who surrounded him were hostile. They did not touch him, but the anger in their faces was clear to see. They stared at him silently, and no one made a move to succor him.
“Can I have some food and water?” he had asked.
No answer.
Then he had seen the well and gone over to it, followed by angry eyes, and had drunk deep from it. Then he had sat down and had begun to wait.
The village was small, well hidden. It seemed quite rich. The houses, built around a square, were on stilts and made of bamboo and atap. And under the houses were many pigs and chickens. Near a larger house was a corral and in it were five water buffalo. That meant the village was well-to-do.
At length he was led to the house of the headman. The silent natives followed up the steps but did not enter the house. They sat on the veranda and listened and waited.
The headman was old, nut-brown and withered. And hostile. The house, like all their houses, was one large room partitioned by atap screens into small sections.
In the center of the section devoted to eating, talking, and thinking was a porcelain toilet bowl, complete with a seat and lid. There were no water connections and the toilet sat in a place of honor on a woven carpet. In front of the toilet bowl on another mat the headman sat on his haunches. His eyes were piercing.
“What do you want? Tuan!” and the “Tuan” was an accusation.
“I just wanted some food and water, sir, and — perhaps I could stay for a little while until I’ve caught up with myself.”
“You call me sir, when three days ago you and the rest of the whites were calling us Wogs and were spitting upon us?”
“I never called you Wogs. I was sent here to try to protect your country from the Japanese.”
“They have liberated us from the pestilential Dutch! As they will liberate the whole of the Far East from the white imperialists!”
“Perhaps. But I think you’ll regret the day they came!”
“Get out of my village. Go with the rest of the imperialists. Go before I call the Japanese themselves.”
“It is written, ‘If a stranger comes to thee and asks for hospitality, give it to him that thou find favor in the sight of Allah.’”
The headman had looked at him aghast. Nut-brown skin, short baju coat, multicolored sarong and the decorating head cloth in the gathering darkness.
“What do you know of the Koran and the words of the Prophet?”
“On whose name be praise,” Peter Marlowe said. “The Koran had been translated into English for many years by many men.” He was fighting for his life. He knew that if he could stay in the village he might be able to get a boat to sail to Australia. Not that he knew how to sail a boat, but the risk was worthwhile. Captivity was death.
“Are you one of the Faithful?” the astonished headman asked.
Peter Marlowe hesitated. He could easily pretend to be a Mohammedan. Part of his training had been to study the Book of Islam. Officers of His Majesty’s forces had to serve in many lands. Hereditary officers are trained in many things over and apart from formal schooling.
If he said yes, he knew he would be safe, for Java was mostly the domain of Mohammed.
“No. I am not one of the Faithful.” He was tired and at the end of his run. “At least I don’t know. I was taught to believe in God. My father used to tell us, my sisters and I, that God has many names. Even Christians say that there is a Holy Trinity — that there are parts of God.
“I don’t think it matters what you call God. God won’t mind if he is recognized as Jesus or Allah, or Buddha or Jehovah, or even You! — because if he is God, then he knows that we are only finite and don’t know too much about anything.
“I believe Mohammed was a man of God, a Prophet of God. I think Jesus was of God, as Mohammed calls him in the Koran, the ‘most blameless of the Prophets.’ That Mohammed is the last of the Prophets as he claimed, I don’t know. I don’t think that we, humans, can be certain about anything to do with God.
“But I do not believe that God is an old man with a long white beard who sits on a golden throne far up in the sky. I do not believe, as Mohammed promised, that the Faithful will go to a paradise where they will lie on silken couches and drink wine and have many beautiful maids to serve them, or that Paradise will be a garden with an abundance of green foliage and pure streams and fruit trees. I do not believe that angels have wings growing from their backs.”
Night swooped over the village. A baby cried and was gentled back to sleep.
“One day I will know for certain by what name to call God. The day I die.” The silence gathered. “I think it would be very depressing to discover there was no God.”
The headman motioned for Peter Marlowe to sit.
“You may stay. But there are conditions. You will swear to obey our laws and be one of us. You will work in the paddy and work in the village, the work of a man. No more and no less than any man. You will learn our language and speak only our language and wear our dress and dye the color of your skin. Your height and the color of your eyes will shout that you are a white man, but perhaps color, dress and language may protect you for a time; perhaps it can be said that you are half Javanese, half white. You will touch no woman here without permission. And you will obey me without question.”