“May I?” he called out.
“Of course!” she shouted. “Come in. But I’m on my way to the pantry.”
And she showed him her basket of keys.
“I’m due to see the Commissioner in half an hour, but I’m too early… That’s why I’ve dropped by.”
She smiled.
“But I’m busy, you know!” she said. “Come along with me to the pantry.”
He followed her, wearing a black lustre jacket, since he was about to see the Commissioner.
“How’s Ida?” asked Eva. “Did she sleep well after last night’s seance?”
“So-so,” said Frans van Helderen. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for her to repeat it. She kept waking up with a start, throwing her arms round my neck and asking forgiveness, I’ve no idea what for.”
“It didn’t make me nervous in the least,” said Eva. “Though I can’t make head or tail of it…”
She opened the pantry, called her cook, and arranged the menu with her. The cook suffered from a nervous affliction that caused her, when surprised, to obey any order and imitate whoever spoke to her, and Eva liked to tease the old woman.
“La… la-illa-lala!” she cried.
The cook jumped, repeated the cry, and the next moment came to her senses, begging for forgiveness.
“Throw it down, cook, throw it down!” cried Eva, and the cook, reacting to the suggestion, threw a tray of rambutan and mangosteen fruits on the floor, and instantly came to herself, begging forgiveness, picking up the scattered fruit, shaking her head and clicking her tongue.
“Come with me!” said Eva to Frans. “Or she’ll be breaking my eggs next. Come on, outside with you, cook!”
“Come on, outside!” repeated the cook with the nervous condition. “I beg forgiveness, nyonya. Enough, mistress!”
“Come and sit down for a moment,” said Eva.
He followed her.
“You’re so cheerful,” he said.
“Aren’t you?”
“No, I’ve been feeling melancholy recently.”
“So have I. There’s something in the air in Labuwangi. We must pin our hopes on our table-turning.”
They sat down on the back veranda. He sighed.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I can’t help it,” he said. “I’m fond of you. I love you.”
She was silent for a moment.
“Again,” she said reproachfully.
He didn’t reply.
“I’ve told you, I haven’t got a passionate nature. I’m cold. I love my husband and my child. Let’s be friends, Van Helderen.”
“I try to fight it, but it’s no good.”
“I’m fond of Ida, I wouldn’t want to hurt her for anything in the world.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever loved her.”
“Van Helderen…”
“Perhaps just her pretty face. But however white she may be, she’s a Eurasian, with her whims and childish petty tragedies. I never realized it before, but now I do. I’ve met European women before you. But you’ve been a revelation to me, of everything that is enchanting, gracious and artistic in a woman… Your exoticism complements my own.”
“I value your friendship highly. Let’s keep it like that.”
“Sometimes it’s as if I’m crazy, sometimes I dream… that we’re travelling through Europe as a couple, that we’re in Paris together. Sometimes I see us together in a private room by the fire, you talking about art and me about contemporary social issues. But then I see us in a more intimate situation.”
“Van Helderen…”
“It doesn’t matter if you warn me off. I love you, Eva, Eva…”
“I don’t think there’s any country on earth where so many people are in love as in the Indies. It must be the heat…”
“Don’t crush me with your sarcasm. No woman has ever appealed to me so completely, body and soul, as you, Eva…”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Don’t be angry, Van Helderen, but I can’t stand those clichés. Let’s be sensible. I have a charming husband, and you have a sweet wife. We’re all good friends and have fun together.
“You’re so cool.”
“I don’t want to spoil our happy friendship.”
“Friendship!”
“Friendship. There’s nothing I value as much apart from my domestic happiness. I couldn’t live without friends. After happiness with my husband and my child, the first thing I need is friends.”
“To admire you, and for you to dominate,” he said angrily.
She looked at him.
“Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps I need to be admired and to dominate. We all have our weaknesses.”
“I have mine,” he said bitterly.
“Come on,” she said in a warmer tone. “Let’s stay friends.”
“I’m deeply unhappy,” he said in a flat voice. “It’s as if I’ve missed out on everything in my life. I’ve never left Java, and I feel a sense of incompleteness because I’ve never seen snow or ice. Snow… for me it stands for a strange, unknown purity. I never even come close to what I long for. When will I see Europe? When will I stop enthusing over Il Trovatore and be able to go to Bayreuth? When will I reach you, Eva? I reach out everywhere with my antennae, like a wingless insect… What does the rest of my life hold for me? With Ida, with three children, who I know will grow up to be just like their mother. I’ll work as a controller for years, and then — perhaps — become an assistant commissioner… and rise no further. And then finally I’ll leave the service, retire or be retired, and move to Sukabumi and vegetate on a small pension. Everything in me seems to long for a life of idleness.”
“But you love your work, and you’re a good official. Eldersma always says: anyone in the Indies who doesn’t work and doesn’t like his work is lost…”
“You haven’t got a nature for love, and I haven’t got one for work, for nothing but work. I can work for a purpose, which I can see before me in all its beauty, but I can’t work… for the sake of work and to fill the emptiness in my life.”
“Your purpose is the Indies.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Fine words,” he said. “That may be true of someone like the Commissioner, whose career is going smoothly, who has never sat and pored over the Colonial List and speculated about so-and-so’s illness and so-and-so’s death… in the hope of promotion. For someone like Van Oudijck, who really believes, in all his idealistic honesty, that the Indies are his purpose, not for Holland but for the Indies themselves, for the Javanese, whom he as an administrator protects from the tyranny of landlords and planters. I’m more cynically inclined…”
“But don’t be so lukewarm about the Indies. It isn’t just fine words: that’s what I feel. The Indies are where the true greatness of us Dutch lies. Listen to foreigners talk about the Indies, and they are all enraptured by its glories and about our way of colonizing… Don’t associate yourself with that wretched spirit you find in Holland, which knows nothing about the Indies and always has a sarcastic word for them in its petty, stiff, bourgeois narrow-mindedness…”
“I didn’t realize you were such a fan of the Indies. Just yesterday you felt anxious here, and I defended my country…”
“Oh, I feel a shudder in the mysteriousness of the evenings, when some imminent danger — I don’t know what — seems to threaten: a frightening future, a danger to us… I feel that I personally remain far removed from the Indies, though I don’t wish to be… that here I miss the art I was brought up with, that here I’m without that line of beauty in people’s lives, which my parents always drew my attention to… But I’m not unjust. The Indies as our colony I find great; us, in our colony, I find great…”