The Plancius

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THE PLANCIUS

by Konstantin Biebl

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Translated from the Czech by Jed Slast !

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copyright © 1931, 2012 by Konstantin Biebl translation copyright © 2000, 2012 by Jed Slast

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All rights reserved.

1 Where does Surabaya lie? Where is Prambanan located? What is Telega Mendjer and Kedjadjar? Tokay? Babu? Assam? Siris? Excuse me, what is wau-wau?

I don’t know where Surabaya lies or where Prambanan is located. I have no idea what Telega Mendjer and Kedjadjar are, or what is tokay, babu, assam, and siris. I don’t know what a wau-wau is. But I like to sit on the deck after dinner as the Dutch converse with one another.

Since the beginning of the voyage, past the desolate shores of Africa, only on rare occasions did their conversation touch on Java, and when it did, the topic was so lightly grazed it was as if by a wing. It was not until later that the stream of their talk, like the ship, turned toward the East, and the Dutch language, such a hard tongue spilling into the green Rhine, took on a beauty and melancholy through the aromatic influx of Malay and Javanese words.

At night, with my eyes closed and with my arms covering them, in the trebled darkness I listened to words I didn’t understand, letting them stir me for whole hours with their music, so mournful : BURUBUDUR

Isn’t each “U” a niche for a Buddha statue?

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2 Six in the morning : the sea in view, the Indian Ocean!

Air and water permeate one another at the horizon; the air becomes damp and salty, the water breathable and translucent — two mirrors, each admiring itself in the other. To look at the sea is to look at heaven and vice-versa. Plancius sails with its mast pointed downward, parting the white clouds, from which dolphins stream on their peregrinations through the sky. Look, an albatross! Flying under the sea, stomach upturned. The sun rises.

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3 The open sea is remarkable to me less for its verdigris hue — a patina borrowed from the heavens of old chapels and churches — than for the fact that it is the largest circle I have ever seen, drawn by the hand of God. Compared to this, what is a wedding ring removed from its finger, or the ring of the greatest circus on earth, Barnum & Bailey, which vanishes in the ocean depths as easily as the round pocket mirror that has just slipped from my hand?

My mind becomes fixed on the mirror, gently turning as it falls to the bottom, and that where my face would appear strange fish now open their mouths trying to exhale their asthmatic breath on it, as if terrified by their own image.

Even if you were to gaze into the ocean depths for an entire month you would glean very little of its secrets.

The Alps on the march, this is the ocean daily : the snowbound crests of waves, flying fish, the mute larks of these velvety abysses, raising themselves aloft. And if you’re lucky, one day you will catch sight of an aluminum shark glinting in the sun. You’ll also see : tortoises, as large as café tables; water snakes, plenty of water snakes; errant coconuts with their hair in their face like the heads of drowned men with whom fate is playing a curious game as gulls alight on them and break into cynical laughter; several empty bottles messageless; and then jellyfish, green, violet, pink — they are the maiden bonnets of mermaids, brought to the surface by an underwater eddy. When the eddy abates, the bonnets sink again to the bottom, to the feet of their owners, who have followed them the whole time with green eyes gazing upward.

By chance I learned that on the ocean floor there are metropolises with millions of inhabitants. An old captain on the small island of Sabang came out with it. He wept as he told me : “I collided with the roof of a giant skyscraper one thousand floors high. The ship was damaged but didn’t sink. They took me away because they thought I was crazy. But I’m not crazy!”

His hands were trembling as he unfurled a map and showed me the fateful spot, which he had marked with a red cross. East of Formosa.

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4 We’re approaching the equator. It’s already in sight, the equator, the sun’s reflection, a golden ring encircling the world.

— Now! Have already crossed the equator? We’ve crossed the equator and nothing has happened.

God, what a let down! How many stormy sea adventures did we have when we were sixteen? adventures we are now parting with once and for all : we’ve crossed the equator and nothing has happened. God, what a let down! Act quickly! Maybe something might still be retrieved from those marvelous days!

Let’s say that Plancius isn’t one of those modern oil-fed vessels, but an old Dutch windjammer, the type that undertook the first expeditions to India. On the equator, but only on the equator, would absolute calm prevail. This is of some consequence for our ship. Having moved at a very slow pace it suddenly comes to a stop — right on the equator, running through the ship’s center.

The captain curses and paces to and fro, from the southern to the northern hemisphere and back again. He then stops and, straddling his legs across the equator so that he’s standing in both hemispheres at once, tells the helmsman : “We just need to move the ship a few feet, but tell me how?”

At a loss, he summons the entire crew together, all but me. I take umbrage at the slight and turn pale, but smile all the same. I stand a little off to the side, in the same place as now I suppose. No one has anything useful to offer. The captain is holding his dislodged cap in the same hand that scratches his head. The sailors stand in a circle around him, the veins popping up on their brows as they brainstorm. The red-headed cook traces his thoughts with his hands, but soon loses the thread. After three or four gestures he lets his hands drop, then he begins all over again.

The captain suddenly turns around, having been struck in the bowed back of his neck by the force of my gaze. I slowly and somewhat recklessly approach him. As I do, I feel welling up on my body all the old wounds that I have suffered in my countless battles with the palefaces. I yank open my shirt and everyone recognizes me at once, even the captain, who goes completely white, as if my fame at sea were as great as it had once been on land.

But as that typical trait of every great adventurer, vainglory, has not entirely vanished from me even today, and seeing that action on my part would result in saving some Dutch schooner of, as I glance about me, negligible worth, the control of which I could seize, so it appears, almost without a fight : one wink of the eye would win over eight men, another wink four more . . . No, no, my lad, this isn’t for us!

I have abandoned the ship — which I could have gained control of and saved — leaving it to fend for itself with its bemused captain and entire crew. In one second I have aged to my twenty-nine years. And this was for nothing more than the smile of a petite Japanese woman leaning against the railing, who abruptly turned to me fully her fragrant visage.

5 I am not afraid of the sun; I love it more than anything else, this appalling sun that turns the Albanian cliffs to ashes and dust. Meanwhile a drowsing vulture squints its sly eyes in the scorching heat, nodding its hoary old head. I have no fear of Algiers, when the sun milk-glazes its mosques, nor of the Red Sea, when the ship’s stoker, whom the heat has driven mad, suddenly runs out of the engine room with a fiendish laugh to fling himself into the water as sharkbait.

I am not even afraid of the sun in the tropics, blindly trusting it with bared head. Like the natives, I gladly put my naked body in its hands, and then feel a mounting sadistic pleasure from the thousands of slender needles that tattoo my vibrating skin.

My eyes are closed, and I see an enormous fire. Its crimson glow has penetrated my lids and lines the interior of my head completely with flame, whose reflection is cast deep into my chest and illuminates my lungs and heart, beating lightly. I see myself living, breathing.

Yet I am immobile, as immobile as a pharaoh being embalmed.

Perhaps the great anxiety with which I guard the least movement comes from the secret fear that, having lost the conception of time, I have possibly been lying here thousands of years, and if I would want to move my finger I’d find to my horror that I cannot.

For a moment my uneasiness intensifies. I have a flash of anamnesis that tells me I once had roots sunk into the earth, which I now recognize around me, dolorous and swampy.

All at once I clearly see that I have never been anything other than what I am now, namely, a sprig of horsetail which dropped down here millions of years ago and is turning to coal.

A vigorous prod at my shoulders rouses me out of the late Paleozoic Era : “Sumatra!” announces Mr. Sachse.

While I was dozing in the sun land had surfaced in the west, a long blue band hemming a somewhat lighter sea. Mr. Sachse hands me his spyglass. What a land! And what a familiar land! In the vast marshes stretching from the north across the whole west to the south I see palms and tree ferns.

My teeth chattering, I say to myself : “Sumatra! Sumatra!”

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6 Mr. Sachse is no longer nervous; his wife has stopped turning her emerald ring. Mr. Jansen is not snapping toothpicks and throwing them under the table. Mr. Makelaars has quit drumming the table.

“Djongos!”

Mrs. Sachse would like some ice cream.

Gradually I’m beginning to understand why Mr. Sachse made such a fuss recently on the deck of the German Yorck whenever the steward did not bring the tea he’d ordered : “This would be unthinkable on a Dutch ship! Everything there runs smooth as silk! Do you know what ‘djongos’ is? Of course you don’t, how could you! No one who hasn’t spent time on Java could know.” Mr. Sachse chuckled. His hand described the arch of an air bridge from Genoa to Batavia, flinging the butt of his cigar into the sea, the fish fighting over it.

“Djong . . . !”

Mr. Jansen wants a glass of sherry.

And here it is.

Slowly I’m beginning to understand this one word, half a word, the second half can be swallowed and still one’s wishes are immediately satisfied.

“Djong . . . !”

Mr. Makelaars would like some fish.

And here it is.

This is akin to : Table, set yourself ! “Djong,” i.e., roast chicken, lobster, zabaglione, pineapples, and all the comforts of India. Slowly I’m beginning to understand.

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7 The ship lightly rolls, every chair a rocker; the horizon rises and falls.

I open a Malaysian textbook. On the first page, first word : djongos. He sits in the Javanese fashion, watching my every movement : djongos. His face is motionless, as are all faces of the East, and though he might spend his entire life in someone’s service he will never lose his natural nobility. He looks askance when regarding you, like we look upon stars of lesser luminosity. Putting himself into a light sleep by dint of his own will, he remains effortlessly vigilant, and will divine each of your wishes and see to them automatically without hesitation or the least displeasure. “The Javanese are the best servants in the world,” the Dutch will tell you.

When thirsty you say : “Saya minta ayer blanda.” An appetite for food is expressed by the word “makan!” Mr. Sachse assured me one day that it is possible to learn passable Malay in two weeks. He’s right : Malay is without grammar. It is used only in the imperative.

To speak Malay means to know how to command. You’d be truly amazed at what a simple language it is; just a few magic phrases is all you need to know.

I think back to Professor Jiroušek who with such tenacity would graft the subjunctive into our heads. What would he say if he were to hear that his pupil from the first bench by the door had learned Malay in two weeks? I’ll pay him a visit when I return. He’ll be at home and will be a little taken aback since he’ll recognize me. I must thank him for all his efforts, which I have come to appreciate fifteen years later on the deck of Plancius. I’ll tell him this in Malay and then he’ll really be flabbergasted. But I don’t know how to say, “thank you.” In the meantime Djongos has taken advantage of my stooping over the textbook to slip a cushion behind my back. Even though I peruse the entire book, it’s no help. I’m agitated that I cannot complete the sentence I will say upon my return from Java.

Irritating me the most, however, is Djongos’s extreme solicitousness. Look at how his eyes follow my lit cigarette! I pretend that I don’t notice, and at the moment when he least expects it I flick an ash, which instead of falling to the ground as I expected tumbles into an ashtray he has managed, by I don’t know what sort of miracle, to hold out at the last second. Humiliated by failure, I discard the cigarette half-smoked. Djongos extinguishes it with a saliva-moistened finger.

With a quick movement, so he won’t be able to assist me, I turn the back of my chair to him. This victory so satisfies me that I remain calm even though he has repositioned himself opposite me as before.

Here comes Babu with a toddler in tow. The Javanese nanny : a voluntary slave of European children.

A child’s greatest pleasure is not to receive a toy, but to break it. And as Babu loves all the world’s children — black, yellow, white — she bears everything with equanimity. She lets them scratch, bite, kick, pull her hair, smiling the whole time with her eyes full of sad joy. When a child begins to cry, perhaps because he has hurt his little hand — a hand he uses with all his strength to hammer his nanny’s face — Babu cries with him and blows on

it. If she could be sure it would soothe him, she would offer him a knife to cut off her own nose or ears, if only the child would smile a little. So as all Javanese males are djongos, all females are babu.

The child pulls his nanny toward the railing, and Babu must hold him as he spits into the ocean. He is delighted when the wad falls right on Babu’s face mirrored in the water.

Babu and the child laugh at this together.

At that moment Djongos taps her on the shoulder to warn her that she is blocking my view of the ocean. She glances at me, then at the child, who doesn’t want to leave. She is beautiful and bewildered. This is the most pure-hearted woman in the world. I don’t dare raise my eyes to her, not even as she is leaving with the child, who in his own astonishment has forgotten to commence bawling. She walks off leisurely, swinging her hips swathed in a batik sarong, its great lotus blossom spreading open with each step.

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8 Mrs. Sachse orders : “Spit it out!”

Babu spits out a masticated betelnut and stands there guiltily with bloodstained mouth as if she’d just run out of a dentist’s office.

“I simply cannot bear to have my babu chewing siris,” she says turning toward us. “But it’s no use, after a while she will just do it again.”

Mr. Jansen would like to add something to this, but doesn’t as he appreciates the impropriety of superfluously amplifying the vices of a colored nanny. Using this opportune moment to hide my true intentions, and like a switchman who has just shunted the train onto another track, I ask : “Do you know Malay well?”

“I have been in Java for fifteen years,” Mr. Jansen assures me.

“How do you say ‘thank you’ in Malay?” I ask, as if unaware that I am aiming at his heart.

“What’s that? What’s that?” In the end he has to admit he doesn’t know. Neither does Mr. Sachse nor Mr. Makelaars. No one from the party knows.

“Just a moment,” Mr. Sachse says, “let us solicit Engineer Berger’s opinion.” A little hard of hearing from the quinine, it seems he would rather not comply : maybe because his fever is drawing him into the casino or because he has spotted me, whom he has so openly despised since the first moment I set foot on the ship, which is why he is now sitting with his back to me. In this tense atmosphere Mr. Sachse, smiling thrice — twice in his pincenez — puts the question to him : “How do you say ‘thank you’ in Malay?”

Mrs. Sachse is as aroused as if she were in the theater viewing a melodrama; Mr. Jansen, not having any toothpicks handy, is snapping matchsticks and tossing them under the table; Mr. Makelaars is violently drumming the table as if a decisive battle were about to take place. But Berger maintains his composure.

“I have no idea,” he replies, “I have never had need of those words, and I also hope, gentlemen, that neither have you. And why would you? Do you ever speak Malay amongst yourselves? Never! We speak Malay only with the natives. However, if you would like to slake your curiosity, you should ask someone more qualified than I,” pointing over his shoulder to me without so much as deigning to turn his head.

Mrs. Sachse jumps to her feet; the color has drained from her face and she is shaking all over. She is not so much concerned about what he has said as about his outrageous behavior. She is proud of the Dutch colonists’ level of social refinement and is pleased to be included in their ranks. Mr. Jansen senses that there has been a misunderstanding : “Have you two gentlemen not been introduced?” and he introduces me.

I thought Berger would pounce on me; he embraces me instead : “So, you are Czech?

Well that’s just fine! But where did you get so dark? Forgive me, I thought you were a halfbreed,” and he offers me a cigar.

Once again happy and radiant, putting to shame Mrs. Jansen’s diamonds, Mrs. Sachse bursts into a rather unDutch-like laugh. Naturally she doesn’t fail to curb her uncorked voice just enough to make it generally understood that her laughter is a deliberate attempt to quickly gloss over the unfortunate indiscretion. The rest of the party also starts to laugh, thereby indicating that they have indeed understood. Sitting close by, the major looks on in wonder. When his glassy gaze, accustomed to binoculars, meets Mrs. Sachse’s eyes, he produces a faint smile so that she will not think he condemns the party’s conduct.

At this point Eng. Berger recognizes his obligation to give me his undivided attention.

He inquires into the purpose of my journey and has a difficult time grasping what I mean by “research trip.” I ask him what he thinks is the most beautiful thing on Java.

“The hotels! You’ll see, it’s the hotels. Each room has its own water closet and large bathroom with shower. Surrounding the hotels are parks with sand walkways amid beds of roses.

“Will you be spending time in Batavia? Don’t forget to have a look at the fair, you won’t see something like that every day. For instance, the head of the Dutch queen with a diamond diadem, only this diadem is ten meters high. I tell you, it’s a magnificent piece of gardening, made out of nothing but white orchids.

“Did you know you could get Pilsner on Java? But what will likely surprise you the most is that when you go to the rain forest I believe there are lovely asphalt roads for you to drive on. You have no reason to be afraid, the tigers have already been killed off, or at least very nearly so. Anyway, in Solo there is a zoo where you can see all the wildlife found on Java. Snakes eight meters long! Crocodiles! Panthers! One would be hard put to say that such a panther was even indigenous. I have seen monkeys, but only once I think, though there are plenty of them up in the mountains. Sometimes one manages to spot them from the train, but in this heat you never know — one tends to sleep.”

“What is your opinion of the Javanese?” I ask next.

“Oh, the Javanese,” Berger replies, absorbed in thought. “They are so kind and so gentle,” he adds. “And why shouldn’t they be? They have it pretty good. By constructing dams the government has ensured them a sufficient allocation of water needed for irrigating the rice paddies. They don’t have problems with finding work, there are plenty of jobs on the plantations or in the sugar refineries, whichever they prefer. We have built a hospital for them and are building lazarettos as well.”

Engineer Berger would lay bare to me the whole of his colonial heart if it were not for a sudden radio bulletin from Batavia, a bulletin as extraordinary as it is incomprehensible. It quakes the ship, shakes the mast, upends the chairs, ruins the games of chess, hastily clearing out the salon so it can then sweep clean every single third-class cabin. The Chinese, rich merchants from Java, capitalize on the confusion and admix their yellow with the throng of their white rivals.

“There is an uprising on Java.”

They surge to the railing. With eyes bulging in terror as if there had been a mass overdose of caffeine, they face the dark event, devouring the last remnants of daylight so that dusk begins to fall more quickly than at other times.

Mrs. Sachse is the first to scream : “My pearls!”

She sees her drawers ransacked, while Mr. Sachse stands before his pried-open warehouse out of which hundreds and hundreds of his bicycles are in motion in every direction. Mr. Jansen has one hand gripping his wife’s arm and the other his servant’s throat, from whose hand falls a liberated knife. Mr. Makelaars defends his house, shooting from a window onto the street. And Engineer Berger sees the rebellion grow ripe on the plantations.

They all stare at the sea. They all see Batavia in flames! I stand behind a Japanese woman with a high open comb in her hair, behind whose grille the sun is setting.

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Note : Konstantin Biebl (1898-1951) was a member of Devětsil and co-founder of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia. Known primarily as a poet, The Plancius is one of his few works of prose, and is very much in the vein of Poetism. It was published privately as a limited edition booklet by Sfinx Bohumil Janda in Prague on New Year’s 1931 as a gift for friends. Jindřich Štyrský provided the frontispiece (reproduced here) and the design. An earlier version of this translation appeared in The Prague Revue, no. 7 (2000).