The Fabulous Death Cultists of Torajaland

It happened just as I walked out of the grocery. A dirty little man wearing a singlet, torn shorts and no shoes snatched a gold chain off the neck of a fat young woman with a baby in her arms. She screamed the most hated word in the Indonesian language, “perampok!”- thief — and I watched the little man scurry towards me. I wasn’t in his reckoning; I was a foreigner with arms full of shopping bags. Without a thought in my head I stuck my leg out and tripped him. He landed hard and dropped the chain.

I set down my bags and picked up the lady’s necklace. The little thief was face down on the pavement. He didn’t move. I handed the chain to the woman and before I could turn around I heard the sounds of a body being stomped.

There were three of them, then a half-dozen, then a mob that jostled to get a kick in. Someone picked up a two-by-four board and started pounding the little thief’s head.

This was terrible. I had to do something. Across the street was a man wearing the olive drab shirt of a government employee. I ran over to him.

“Pak, please stop them!”

The civil service man smiled. “Well done, Mister,” he said in English.

That night, in my shabby little rented room, I drank three-quarters of a bottle of horrible Indonesian whiskey and managed to blot out the sight of the little thief flattened on the pavement with blood and brains seeping out of his smashed skull. I got so drunk I couldn’t remember why I was crying.

The Chinese-owned backpacker hostel was a pretty noisy place — the young Western travelers (they hated to be called tourists) partied late at night and shouted wake up calls to each other not long after sunrise. They never stayed more than a few days. Kota Kasar was a meeting place for them and after hooking up with other kids they headed south for Brastagi or Lake Toba. Although I wasn’t much older than these tie-died wandervogel, we didn’t have a lot to say to each other. At mealtime in the grubby little dining room I usually had my head in a book or studied lecture notes. Sometimes one of the kids would ask me about myself, but it always turned out that he was fishing for a dope connection.

The morning after I fried my brain with local whisky, I sat trembling in the dining room over a bowl of bubur, a sort of porridge. There were some Dutch kids sharing the table.

“Hey, Professor, where are your books?”

I looked at the boy who’d addressed me. He winked at his girlfriend. She smiled, anticipating a good joke.

“You don’t look so good today, Professor. You should relax, smoke a little weed, get laid.”

I stared at the kid. He wore a Grateful Dead t-shirt and a bandanna on his head. He and his three friends were lobster red. Northern Europeans take the equatorial sun badly.

“I saw a man get his brains beaten out yesterday.”

The boy looked at his companions, his grin a little unsteady.

“Are you sure you didn’t just read about it in a book?” That did the trick; they shuddered and slapped the table.

“No, I saw it, really I did. He was kind of like you. A cocky little guy. Somebody who thought he had it all figured out. You have to be careful here. You might think you’ve got the world by the balls, you’re in a cheap country, staying high on cheap dope and then someone hands you the bill.”

“You’re not making sense, Professor.”

“You know, the bill. Didn’t your grandfather tell you what a great time you Dutch had over here? They didn’t pay their bill. So sometime next week you might be sitting on the porch of your tourist hotel in Lake Toba, tripping on your magic mushroom omelet, when you suddenly find you can’t breath. Someone made a mistake and put a bad mushroom in the skillet. Bummer, man.”

The kid flushed even redder than his sunburn. The two girls tugged at their boyfriends and they all got up. The angry boy muttered something about Vietnam and they left.

Despite having a ready retort instead of imagining the next day what I could have said, I felt pretty stupid. Who was I to give these post-hippie kids a hard time? Now they wouldn’t enjoy their mushroom trip.

I skipped class that day and went to the palace. As palaces go, Maimoon was fairly new, built around a hundred years ago. It was constructed on utilitarian lines, with no extravagant domes or towers. Sort of a tropical, pocket version of Versailles. Boys were playing soccer on the grounds. From a window high overhead an old man watched them and puffed on a cigarette. He may have been the Sultan. After the struggle for independence, the government took away the land and power of the aristocrats who’d been too chummy with the colonial regime. The Sultan and his family were allowed to live in a small portion of the palace. Most of the building was open to the public, and the royal family had to keep the grounds clean. That was their part of the deal and I often wondered what went through the minds of the would-be princes and princesses as they sold snacks to the tourists and picked up trash from the lawn.

From there I walked to the Grand Mosque and sat beside the shallow pool. Grave-faced men left the domed building and smoked clove cigarettes with their friends in the parking lot. I envied them. They knew their place in the universe. They may have had family problems and girlfriends on the side, but I suspected they never lay awake torturing themselves over the eternal verities.

Insy’allah.

I spent the rest of the day wandering around the markets. One little side street contained nothing but shops packed with small glass globes filled with murky water. There was a Siamese fighting fish in each globe. Indonesians are great gamblers. A lot of money changes hands over the tiny creatures’ battles. Stacked together like that, the fish were in a constant state of excitement. They expanded their gills to threaten the neighboring fish and they flushed with exquisite blue and red tangs.

A friend of mine tried LSD once and had an awful experience. He told me that the worst part of it was the feeling he had, the feeling of being strange to himself.

That’s how I felt as I walked around this hot and noisy city, filled with people of other races going about their business. Just what did I think I was doing here anyway?

Later that evening I found myself at Pak Udin’s front gate. It was pretty late and there were only a few men on the veranda.

One had a bottle of beer in front of him. I was a little surprised. Almost all of Pak Udin’s friends were serious Muslims. I took a closer look at the man and saw he was a Westerner, a man in his late sixties.

“Mr. David, you know everyone here except Meinheer Peter.”

“Enough of the meinheer crap, Udin,” said the old man as he shook my hand with powerful force.

The old Dutchman (this was my day for Dutchmen) had a booming voice and spoke Indonesian well, much better than I did. He even spoke the Batak dialect, at least enough to make a joke with Pak Rusli.

They talked of events long past. The old Dutchman remembered wilder times in Sumatra.

“So the three of us are in my jeep and this damned tiger is lying in the road ahead of us. He’s not going to move, he’s just lying there twitching his tail and looking at us like we were something not quite worth getting up and slaughtering. The road was too narrow to go around him and after a while we could see he wasn’t going to move. So we decided we weren’t going swimming at the river that day. We backed up around the curve and strike me dead if there wasn’t another tiger lying there blocking our way back!

“So there we were in an open top jeep with nobody for miles around and we’re stuck between these two deadly, beautiful animals — as scared as I was I couldn’t help but admire them. Those striking colors and those fierce eyes.”

“How Western to find aesthetic merit in the creatures about to kill and eat you,” said Pak Udin.

“Oh, bullshit, Udin, I was scared out of my wits and about to dump a load in my trousers.”

“How did you finally get away?” asked Pak Muharram.

“We just waited. About an hour. Then the one behind us got up and headed into the bush. They must have just gorged when we came upon them.”

“I don’t believe that’s the reason you are here tonight able to talk about the tigers. They must have been waiting for a plump Indonesian. You bule, you’re always jogging and lifting weights. You’re too tough and stringy for our tigers”, said Pak Udin.

And so the night went on with stories that made me forget myself and my own little troubles. When the group broke up, the old Dutchman invited me to a nearby hotel bar for a drink. We rode a pedicab.

It was an ex-pat joint with a couple Australian engineers playing darts in the corner. Two teenaged whores at the bar gave us weak smiles.

I was hoping to hear another story from past times, but what he said jarred me.

“I know all about what happened yesterday. Kota Kasar is a small town. Udin and the other guys were too polite to bring it up. There, look, you’re getting pale. Just forget it. It had nothing to do with you.”

It was too dark in the nearly deserted bar to see someone get pale, but I resented this man’s gall. I started to get up from my stool.

“Take it easy, kid. Have a shot with your beer. Don’t be such a delicate flower. You’ve got to have a little salt in your blood to live here. You know, all that Conrad and Somerset Maugham stuff, white men rotting in the hot climates. It’s no place for softies, lad.”

“So how long have you been here?”

“Longer than I care to recall. I knew Udin when he was just a little kid.”

“Do you have family here?”

“No, they’re in Holland. My wife died years ago. I’d been splitting my time between Indonesia and Holland, shipping rattan furniture from the little factory I’ve got here. When she passed, I returned here and never went back.”

Meinheer Peter motioned again to the bartender. In the little time we’d been there, he’d knocked back two draft beers and three shots of gin. The old man had mentioned Conrad and Maugham. In their books heavy drinkers didn’t last long in the tropics, but this man was overflowing with ruddy health.

“Just out of the blue a couple years ago I got a phone call from my son. Poor boy. I don’t know where he got his looks from. Only in his thirties and bald as a baboon’s ass. Love handles spilling over his belt. A few years in the army would have done him a power of good.”

The old man downed his shot of gin and motioned for another.

“Then again, maybe not. Today’s Dutch soldier wears a ponytail. They’ve even got soldier’s unions, by God. Imagine that.

“So he’s babbling over the phone, crying about his wife and his daughter. To tell the truth, he’s pussy-whipped by both of them. Well, it seems the girl, Kati, who was only fifteen at the time, has taken up with some sort of pimp or drug dealer from Surinam. She’s screwing him and he’s giving her cocaine. Han’s wife is a bit upset, but she thinks it’s just a phase the girl is going through. Hans is going out of his mind. He went to the cops, but they said they had to actually catch the guy in the act of doing something illegal. He asks me what he should do.

“The firearm laws in Holland are pretty strict, so it would be tough to get hold of a gun, more’s the pity. So I tell Hans to get a baseball bat and break the punk’s knees. He thought I was joking. ‘Now is not the time for jokes, Father,’ he says.”

The old man shook his head. “Sometimes my kid makes Gandhi look like Mike Tyson. In my day you had to be tough, the bars I drank in you had to always watch out for the sucker punch from some guy whose girl you’d screwed.

“So I put my little thinking cap on. If Han’s wasn’t going to wallop the Surinam punk, then the girl had to be taken away from that place, away from drugs and bad characters. ‘Leave it to me,’ I tell him. ‘School’s out now so send her here and I’ll take her on a sightseeing tour. Maybe seeing how other people live will mature her some.’

“I wasn’t ready for what stepped off the plane. The last time I saw Kati she was a sweet little thing in pigtails, all shy and eager to please. Have you ever seen the working girls in the windows in Amsterdam, the girls all tricked-out in tart outfits? No? They can lure a customer in, do the jiggy-jiggy and get him out of there in fifteen minutes.

“God in heaven, that’s what my granddaughter reminded me of. Her face was caked with purple makeup and she wore a tight halter-top and pants made of black leather. She had a butterfly tattoo on her bare stomach, and rings through her ears, nose, eyebrows and who knows where else. She was wearing more bits of metal than I keep in my tackle box.

“She made quite a sight in that airport full of conservatively dressed Muslims. The women stared at her with horror, the men with fascination. They like them young here, you know.

“So I get her in the car and I lay out our itinerary. We’ll be based out of Kota Kasar for a few days. Side trips to the Brastagi highlands and Lake Toba, and then a flight to Java. We would visit Borobudor, hop over to the Bali beaches and then on to the Celebes to tour Torajaland, and the fabulous death-cultists who live there.

“I described all the strange and delightful things she would see. I got no reaction from the girl. She just stared straight ahead, occasionally turning her head to note beggars at a street corner or one of those cats with an impossibly-shaped tail you see here. I found myself running out of things to say to her.

“I learned to like the way people live here, so my house has no air-conditioning or hot water, and I’m not bothered by the occasional mosquito.

I knew Kati wouldn’t go for any of that, so I reserved a room for her at a quite decent tourist hotel. I dropped her off and told her I’d be back in a couple hours to take her to dinner at someplace special. I left her in the lobby with a small army of room boys taking charge of her. The place was full of old Dutch and Germans on tour. The only time she opened her mouth was to ask me what the terrible noise outside the hotel was.

“There was a mosque across the street and it was time for afternoon prayers. The muezzin was making the call through loudspeakers. I wish I’d spent a little more time explaining it.

“I didn’t know whether her sulkiness was a pose that kids have now or something to do with not being able to get drugs, but I could see this child was a hard case. I felt like talking to someone who had experience raising girls, so I went over to Udin’s house.

“Udin laughed his ass off. ‘Oh, this is priceless’, he said. ‘The big, tough Captain of the Northern Sumatra Expeditionary Force is stymied by a sullen little girl.’ He said something like that, anyway.

“Then he gave me some advice. He said it was the mother’s job to be tough with daughters; the father’s job, or in this case, the grandfather’s, was to coax and conciliate. Something to do with the tenderness of a girl’s ego. He recommended patience and said the worst thing you could do was treat her like one of the troops, the way you could with sons. It sounded like a dodgy business.

“On the drive back to the hotel, I went over the plans for the night. I’d take Kati to the best nasi padang restaurant in town, where the waiters bring you twenty-five or thirty dishes and you choose what you like. Have you ever been to Holland? No? Well, we took that idea and expanded on it and call it rijstaffel. All the spice and heat of the original with our own heavy meats and sauces, washed down with lots of beer and liquor. The Dutch colonials out here got gout in their early thirties.

“After that we’d call on Van Dieran, the consul here. Van Dieran has a brood of fine kids that I thought might be a good influence on Kati.

“When I got to the hotel there was a ruckus outside. There was a mob of men, a lot of them wearing the black peci caps. They had surrounded a tour bus full of old Europeans and were beating on the windows and rocking it from side to side. Others were screaming and shaking their fists at the hotel.

“God, these people were working themselves up to an amok! What in the world had brought this on?

“I parked the car a safe distance away and slipped around the back way, through the door of the hotel kitchen. The lobby was full of terrified white folk.

“Now the police had arrived and they laid out with their clubs. They formed a cordon to let the people on the bus through. The bus tourists ran into the lobby faster than you would think people that old could move. Poor devils, some of them had pissed themselves.

“Kati! Had she been caught outside? I got her room number from the desk and ran upstairs.

“She didn’t answer my knock so I threw the door open. She was lying on the bed naked listening to music from one of those little box jobs with headphones. Incidentally, those damned bits of metal didn’t stop at her navel.

“At least she had enough modesty to scream and cover herself. ‘Put some clothes on, girl, all hell is breaking loose outside!’ I yelled at her.

“I looked out the window as she dressed. A couple of the black peci men were talking with the police commander and pointing at the hotel. The policeman got a hard look on his face.

“Don’t ask me how I knew, but I got a distinct feeling that the source of all this trouble was in the room with me.

“’Child, do you have any idea why those people are going crazy out there?’ I asked her.

“She had just squeezed into those ridiculous leather pants. She turned to me and I saw an expression on her face that I hadn’t seen for thirty years, the look I saw on my son’s face when I confronted him after he shot my wife’s cat with his pellet gun.

“’Alright, you little sly boots, out with it.’

“Well, it seems that she had just lain down to take a nap when she heard that unearthly racket from across the street again, so she took the little Swiss Army knife that I gave her on her tenth birthday and she went over to the mosque and she….

“I swear to you that I didn’t mean to slap her so hard, but she flew across the room and hit the wall. I looked out the window again. The policemen were talking with the black-capped men and pointing at the hotel. Now a truckload of army men pulled up. Who would protect us from the soldiers when they heard the story?

“’Kati, stop whimpering. You have one minute to pack your bag,’ I told her. ‘One minute’.

“We ran out the back way through the kitchen and drove to the airport. The guy behind the counter said the flights were all full, but I told him my granddaughter was deathly ill and it would be on his head if she died. He still wouldn’t budge, so I called Udin and begged him to use his connections to get things moving. Twenty minutes later the airport counter man got a phone call that turned him pale. He punched his computer keyboard and produced a ticket that would take Kati to Jakarta and then to Amsterdam.

“All this time the girl wouldn’t look at me or say a word. One side of her face was red and swelling. I felt badly, but the important thing was to get her out of there, away from the people who would treat her as a foul jin.

“I watched her get on her plane and then I watched the plane take off. About a day and a half later I got a phone call from her parents. I was a monster, a brutal, heartless old beast and if I ever set foot in Holland again I would be arrested. The poor girl was so traumatized that she had moved in with her Surinamese boyfriend and the best her parents could do was to get her to agree to go to counseling a couple hours a week. What, my boy demanded, what had she done to deserve such treatment?

“’Well, she cut some speaker wires in the mosque across the street from the hotel’, I told him. “’You beat the shit out of your little granddaughter because she cut some speaker wires? Why didn’t you just give those people some money for the damage?’

“I told him it wasn’t that simple and the locals were really upset, but he hung up on me.”

The old Dutchman gave the bartender his two-finger signal, meaning he wanted another shot and a draft. He downed the shot and sighed.

“It’s alright. I’m not at home in Holland anymore, so I’ll die over here. I don’t even have dreams about the old country these days

“It’s funny, I had a dream just the other night with Udin in it, when he was just a little kid, the same age as when I first met him, when he tried to cut my throat”

The bar was quite now. The engineers had left with the whores and the bartender was drowsing on his stool. I felt at peace with the world and was pleasantly lulled by the drone of the old man’s voice.

I bolted upright.

“What did you say? When he tried to what?”

Meinheer Peter laughed. “So you really have been listening! Well, it’s getting late and that’s a tale for another time.”

I wasn’t going to leave until I heard the story and the old man finally relented. “I was sent here in ‘forty-eight with a couple hundred men under me. The people here had some funny ideas about Indonesia being ruled by Indonesians and Her Majesty’s Royal Army was going to put a stop to that nonsense.

“We were quartered in the Dharma Deli Hotel, here in Kota Kasar. After every meal, the cooks would take the leftovers out back of the galley. There was always a small bunch of kids there with little buckets who divided the scraps up and took them home. Udin seemed to be the ringleader. He saw that everybody got his share. I chatted with the lad a few times. He was a tough little bugger. He advised me to go home while I still could.

“Imagine that! A big soldier with a tommy gun on his shoulder being told to go home by an eight- year-old boy.

“When I woke up one night and found the boy hovering over me with one of those sickle-shaped knives, I hesitated for a second. In my drowsy state I thought the kid was playing some kind of joke. I felt the blade on my neck and knew it was no joke. I threw him across the room and started yelling.

“My adjutant cuffed the boy around a little and got him to confess that he was from the guerilla front. My men were all for gutting him and throwing his carcass into the street for the rats.

“Try to picture this little child with tears and snot running down his face, he knows he’s going to die and he’s terrified, yet he’s very pissed-off that he didn’t manage to slit my throat and he keeps giving me angry looks. I was impressed. I got him away from the guys who wanted to cut him up and I booted his tail out the lobby door.

“Fifteen years later I’m back here setting up my little furniture business and I’m having real problems. The Chinese don’t want the competition. They make life hard for me. My shipments to the port aren’t getting through. Customs finds stupid reasons to waylay them. The machinery in the factory constantly breaks down and my trucks keep getting sugar poured in the gas tanks. I was up to my neck in debt from the money my friends had fronted me and my poor wife had to keep making excuses to her father about the money that he had invested.

“So one bright morning this handsome young pribumi walks into the shop and looks around. He’s dressed like the typical guy off the street here, but he carries himself like a damned prince. I ask him what he wants and he stares at me for a good ten seconds.

“’Captain Peter, I think you’re not doing so well’ he says. That’s all I need to hear, I’m really pissed off and I’m about to grab the guy and toss him out when he grins at me and I see that kid with a bucket full of kitchen slops who tells me to get out while I can. Udin!

“For a quite reasonable monthly fee, Udin gets things moving. He has a talk with the Customs boys and he sends some lads to guard the trucks and the factory. I was saved.”

It was very late now. I said goodbye to the old Dutchman and promised to stop by his factory. Meinheer Peter grimaced and gestured towards the rack full of liquor bottles. “Sorry. A few drinks and I turn into one of those stupid, barroom Homers.” I tried to tell him how moved I was by his story. He cut me off with a brusque gesture.

“Save it. Next time the world seems like a bad, scary place just act like you’ve got a pair of balls. Maybe you can fool everybody.”

I watched him get up and walk out without showing any effects of all the alcohol he drank. The bartender coughed politely to let me know it was closing time.