ShadowplayBy Norman LockEllipsis Press |
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In Java during the reign of King Senapati, a master of the shadow-puppet theater heard, by chance from a Portuguese sailor, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.
The rods were awkward in Guntur’s hands, and the puppets faltered behind the screen. No longer supple, his hands had forgotten how to divine the presence of the unseen. His voice also faltered. It would advance haltingly, as if words were stones above the surface of a river to be crossed with deliberation. During his exile, Guntur had lost the habit of speech. But an uncommon — even unnatural — sympathy for the wayang had not lessened during the years he had kept himself apart from people and puppets, both. If anything, it had increased while he taught himself to enter the minds of his puppets, especially that of Arjuna with whom he most identified.
To say that Arjuna or any other of Guntur’s puppets had minds is only to suggest the inordinate degree to which Guntur had concentrated his attention on them. Dwelling exclusively on some few objects, the mind may sometimes overcome the distance between itself and them. It will imagine that it is regarding other intelligences when these are, in actuality, only itself. Guntur had held his puppets in mind with so much fervor and fixity that he believed he could possess them where they lay shut up in their boxes. (Unless invisible powers had, in truth, materialized in Guntur’s shadow puppets — in which case, they might be said to have minds and with them to have subjugated Guntur’s own.)
Guntur would tell stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — for months and years he would tell them until they were enacted in the room without need of shadow puppets. Possibly no other dalang had ever made a theater of his thoughts alone. When Guntur did finally take the puppets in his hands and once more had mastered them, he was no longer an ordinary dalang. His power over the wayang kulit, over the stories’ gods and demons, princes and warriors—over the time and distances of myth—had no equal. Supernatural powers were now his and sufficient to the journeys he undertook to find Candra. Night after night, Guntur (in the form of Arjuna) and Arjuna (in the person of Guntur) traveled through all the heavens and hells known to the devout and to the damned. Guntur sat crosslegged behind the story-screen, sounding in his mind the music of the rebab and gamelan; and in his mind (which was also Arjuna’s), he searched the darkness. As Rama had pursued Sinta to Rahwana’s castle, so did they now—Guntur and Arjuna—pursue Candra across rivers, over white deserts, and through bleak forests. They went on foot, in boats, and on the backs of elephants. They flew with Gatotkaca, the Flying Knight, above the Sudirman Mountains. Each night they advanced farther, stopping at dawn in exhaustion under a tree, in a cave or a tent erected in the desert against the desert’s heat. And when the light was gone once more from the sky, Guntur sat on the floor behind the story-screen and began his journey anew — Arjuna’s journey and his own.
The ways leading to the Land of the Dead are not straight. They move, they go forward and double back on themselves. They writhe hypnotically like white snakes of snow before the wind; like certain snakes, they devour themselves. The ways are like carpets taken up at the beginning of summer and laid down in the wrong rooms at summer’s end. Demons harry the wayfarers with snares, with fog and confusion. One can arrive in the afterlife by dark or lighted paths, but one cannot always be certain which of the two he has taken or if the path on which he set out is the same as he now finds himself. The ways leading to the Land of the Dead are strange and forbidding, and there is more than one fatal land.
Guntur came to understand that the ways are, in actuality, sentences composing — in his case — the story of his rescue of Candra, which was more difficult than Rama’s of Sinta, who had not been ravished by death but by a monster. Prince Rahwana had become enamored of Sinta, the beautiful wife of Prince Rama. Disguising himself as an old man, Rahwana erased with his own magic the magic circle Rama’s brother had drawn round Sinta to protect her in her husband’s absence. Rahwana took her by force to Alangkadiraja — his kingdom — and locked her in Alengka, his castle. Aided by the Monkey King, Prince Rama followed the monster and slew him with a magic arrow.
Guntur invoked Sinta’s story, hoping to repeat its happy outcome. But he failed. For a hundred nights, he and Arjuna traced her path from the Dandaka Forest, where Sinta and Rama lived out their exile, across the desert and into the mountains of Alangkadiraja. A hundred times they besieged Rahwana’s castle, a hundred times broke down Alengka’s great door, and a hundred times slew the monstrous prince with magic arrows. But Candra was never there. Candra’s story was not Sinta’s, and Guntur would not find the young woman in the brown sarong in Alangkadiraja.
At last, Guntur understood that it was his own rising and falling voice, which paved with words the ways to the afterlife. And he remembered the old dalang’s admonition against invention for its presumption against the ancient forms of storytelling. But Guntur knew that he had reached the end of all known forms and, like a navigator on the brink of the world, must enter the unknown with neither map nor history to guide him. Like wayang that the clothmakers purchase as readymade patterns for the decoration of batik, the immemorial patterns of stories, too, can lose their usefulness and serve merely to reproduce an empty form.
While it was not uncommon for a dalang to improvise (Guntur’s and his mentor’s condemnation of the practice notwithstanding), the result was limited to a comic or satiric confirmation of reality. Never before this had a dalang improvised in order to extend his story — and himself—beyond what was previously known.
Guntur now embarked on other, more formidable journeys from behind the story-screen — to Vaikunth, the heaven of Vishnu; to Kailash, the heaven of Shiva; and to Brahmalok, the heaven of Brahman. With his voice paving the way and with an almost unearthly skill in the manipulation of the wayang, he traveled as far as Indralok, where the blessed sit beneath red parijata trees. With his radiant shadow puppet, Arjuna, Guntur went also to Yamalok — Lord Yama’s infernal palace where Chitragupta pronounces irrevocable judgment on all human souls.
But nowhere among all that dead did Guntur find Candra.
* * *
One night Guntur did not go in search of Candra in his theater’s limitless shadowland, which might also have been the equally limitless space of his mind. He did not take up Arjuna, did not sit crosslegged on the floor behind the story-screen, did not sound in his mind the music of the rebab and the gamelan. He lay down on his mat and slept.
And for the first time, he dreamed of the sea.
In his dream, a girl walked into the sea and climbed into a boat just beyond the rolling waves. Having let out the sail, she sat by the tiller and steered toward the place where the sun would soon rise. Guntur knew, in his dreaming, that it was the Java Sea and the girl was Candra as he had often imagined her. He was dreaming the story she had told him ten years earlier, while she sat on her side of the white cotton screen, so that she might take to the clothmaker a puppet.
The boat flew over the water, accompanied by flying fish which sang a nonsense song to wake the sun. The girl’s long hair loosed itself darkly in a morning wind fragrant with cinnamon. And the boat sped toward the horizon even as the sun began to pull itself up from sleep and so, once more, light the world. The black sea lightened, turned gray, then blue. The horizon trembled, and the sea round the boat now resembled a vast indigo cloth, which a wind’s rough handling has creased.
The horizon trembled as if in nervous expectation, for the girl was steering a course for it that no power on earth could deflect. Implacably, she was making for the horizon; and contrary to all mortal experience, it did not recede. The horizon line to which she steered remained as if fixed to the spot on the earth’s watery bulge where first her eyes had detected it — black against the night’s lesser black, with here and there a lingering star. The horizon did not fall back in order to keep between it and the approaching boat a constant distance. Instead, the boat closed on it. And as it did so, the flying fish trilled all the louder, the sky rolled shining and silken overhead, and the sun vanished. Or rather the sun was no longer a flaming disk above the water but an unfolding rose — coral and cinnamon and singing in concert with the fish.
Guntur dreamed that the sea at last stopped its ceaseless motion; the waves lay down and the wind, which had been blowing from every corner at once, uncreased the indigo cloth before returning to its caves at the ends of the earth. Not caves — nautilus and amphora shells.
The boat crossed the blue horizon and entered the sea’s far side — the first boat built by human hands to do so. And on it, Candra entered that impossible sea.
Guntur did not dream what happened next; if he did, he forgot it. Or if it was not a figment forgotten upon waking, it was one that the dreaming mind could find neither words, sounds, images, nor fragrances with which to speak of it to the mind’s waking half. The girl had entered a place where sensations were perceived only by gods and by the dead—a passageway leading from the visible to the invisible world.
He dreamed further; and what he dreamed, he remembered. Candra at the tiller, the boat drawn up on an island’s pink and yellow sand, a coral reef through which the boat had passed and — beyond it — a green jasper sea from which came the odor of cinnamon. Guntur watched her step lightly from the boat and lightly walk across the sand toward countless pavilions in whose radiant shadows the dead were sleeping. Their faces seemed to him like yellow diamonds heaped in the sun, though here there was no sun — only light and music, which were the same. Their faces seemed like lanterns carried at night by the fishing boats, whose lights appear and disappear in the rolling sea’s deep troughs. But here, light and dark were indistinguishable — or say, instead, that these and other familiar categories of existence had no meaning.
The pavilions were red, blue, gold, and green silk. The music danced like motes of sunlight on the water.
Guntur woke and recalled on the instant of waking the story of Orpheus and Eurydice told to him long before by a Portuguese sailor. And with the harrowing certainty of one who has endured a revelation, Guntur knew that the island sought by the Portuguese was the same as in Candra’s story. Guntur knew where he would find Candra and that he could bring her back, provided he did not turn round to see if she were following him.
* * *
Guntur could not wake Candra from the sleep that clung to her as a mist does the water until the sun, rising high into morning, can burn it off. Hers was not now the sleep in which she was drowned inside the blue silk pavilion. It was a sleep such as anyone living might undergo who had been brought by sickness to the brink of death. She was not dead; and so he let her sleep, watching her the while intently, like someone blind who all of a sudden sees.
Arjuna sat in the thickest shadow, in a corner of the room — mute, his head on his arms, not because of weakness or weariness (for he was incapable of either), but because he was without occupation. He had played his part and would not be summoned to another. (Only his puppet would, after audiences had rebelled at Guntur’s heretical idea of theater.) Like the sun’s mirage seen everywhere for a time after one has looked at the sun, so Arjuna — also luminous — would remain inside the playhouse until he faded gradually from Guntur’s mind.
Guntur was entranced by Candra’s beauty.
Without the story-screen to conceal her, he studied her face avidly. With his hand, he traced the outline of her slumbering form. He was seized by a desire to remove her sarong but was stayed by a countervailing emotion — part fear, part reverence, both incited in him by the contemplation of a mystery and both comprising love. He could have spoken her awake just as he had spoken her from out the Land of the Dead. But he was glad that she slept, for he doubted he could have looked at her so wantonly otherwise. Sleep protected both of them from the consequences of wakefulness.
Guntur was made aware of time’s passing only by the alternation of light and darkness on the face and shoulder of the woman. The silence of the theater was such that not even the sedulous wasp could disturb it.
Arjuna sat huddled in shadow, himself no more than a heap of shadow.
The morning of the third day, Candra woke. It might have been that she had first to let her body rid itself of death, as a poison is slow to let go its hold on the heart; or maybe she had given up dreaming only with reluctance. Guntur could not guess what those who dwelled in Yama’s kingdom might dream, what quality of sweetness or ecstasy. Arjuna might have known; but he was already forgotten, with only his shadow left behind in Guntur’s shadow theater where so many times before, it had been cast from a place that was neither life nor death but partook of each. For whatever reason, Candra woke to find Guntur sitting next to her.
“Who are you?” she asked, disturbed by the covetousness of his gaze.
“The dalang who gave you puppets for the clothmaker. Duryodhana and Abhimanyu have been waiting more than ten years for you to wake.” He nodded toward the table in the corner of the room where two leather puppets lay, pelted with dust. “You’ve been asleep.”
Candra let her eyes wander the room. She seemed unable to rise from the jute mat. Sitting crosslegged beside her, Guntur made no move to help her.
“I was dreaming ––”
In the street, the iron-bound wheels of a cart rattled over loose stones, and a shrill voice shouted in Persian a warning to the driver.
Candra wetted her dry lips with her tongue.
Guntur rose and poured water into a clay cup. With one hand, he held the woman’s head while with the other he helped her to drink.
“What were you dreaming?” he asked.
“I –– I don’t remember.”
“Try to remember!” he exhorted her, so great was his desire to know the nature of death’s dreaming.
But she could not; and Guntur saw in his mind a pale light go out at the farthest reach of experience — heard a door softly close on a secret of the afterlife.
She sat up and, tidying her sarong, looked again at Guntur — this time with recognition.
“You sat behind a white cotton cloth and asked me questions,” she said. “I told you stories. You gave me puppets which I pretended to buy with the clothmaker’s money. I kept the money to buy a piece of blue batik to make a dress for my friend’s wedding. I got sick and died.” She felt her arms and face, looked at the palms of her hands. “I burned on the pyre.”
The shadow of his inordinate grief crossed Guntur’s face.
“How did I come to be here?”
“I brought you back,” he said, forgetting Arjuna.
“Where was I?” she asked, understanding nothing.
“Asleep in a blue silk pavilion, on the Island of the Dead. Don’t you remember?”
“I was dead,” she said in a way that could be interpreted either as a question or as a declaration.
“Yes — don’t you remember?”
“Why did you wake me?” she asked, perplexed.
“I adore you,” he answered foolishly.
She wrenched her body free of the fixity of his gaze — the bangles noisy with her anger.
* * *
Candra could not rid herself of the feeling she was dead. But not even with the imprecision of memory, which constructs from the ruins of time a replica of a vanished past, could she invoke her experience of the afterlife. Had any of the possible sensations felt in that remote existence been present — however faintly — to her waking or dreaming mind, she could not have conveyed them to Guntur: there was neither a mortal form nor language that might begin to encompass them. Not that Candra searched her recollections or looked into any of her mind’s shut-up rooms for things forgotten or ignored. Their mere intimation caused her to shudder because of the living’s natural fear of death or because of the desire once more to give herself up to it.
Was Candra in love with death?
Half in love, as are we all.
What she remembered — what she saw when her gaze was fixed on nothing was this: herself asleep inside the blue pavilion, surrounded by a multitude of other sleepers. And at the boundary between this—
But she had told Guntur that she remembered nothing.
After a time, she remembered this much: herself among a multitude of sleepers — sleeping and seeing while she slept the island, the far sea, and the far side of the sun separating that fatal island from the world of living beings. She saw them — there is no way to say how it was she saw except by resorting to commonplaces such as: through a mist, or fog, or a pane of water. That last is the least inept of all possible comparisons for how it was that Candra saw from death’s magisterial vantage. She saw what lay around her like a diver viewing the distant sky from underneath the water. She was permitted to remember no more of her life on the island ––
Her life?
A kind of life, or half life.
By whom, “permitted”?
By the gods, by the inexorable law of the world, by Candra herself. How can I be expected to answer such a question? For her death was an interlude between a past life and a life to come. According to all the sacred texts, is it not always so?
If Candra had not been silenced by death and by the ill will she bore Guntur, she might have told him this:
“While I was sleeping, I saw you coming from far off with the morning light. Arjuna was with you, standing a little apart or sometimes so close that you and he seemed one and the same. You were hunting the boundary between the two worlds for a way inside. I would not have known you were there except for the noise — the turbulence you made as you crossed over finally into that sea and came up onto that beach in my father’s boat. It was a commotion never before heard in that windless, breathless place. Those around me muttered in their sleep, as did I to hear it where only silence was heard — the silence of stone — and a song that something even older than stone might sing. I was not unhappy there, nor was I content. Those words have no meaning there. Does one say he was happy or unhappy to have been asleep? Even if you have dreamed a nightmare, it is not a matter of happiness or unhappiness. And so it is in that other life, which is and is not life.
“I watched with my closed eyes how you searched for me — you and Arjuna. So long a time it took you to find my pavilion! (Though there, there is no time.) I did not want you to find it, but you did and still I thought: he will never find me among all these dead! (I did not wish to be found — didn’t want to wake!) Arjuna whispered, reminding you of my blue hands. I tried to hide them but couldn’t. Movement is impossible there save for that unrest caused by the agitation of a dream. I saw through my closed eyes where my hands lay folded below my breast on the brown cloth of my sarong. How beautiful! I thought. Never before this did I notice how blue hands are beautiful! I did not regret them, though they would soon betray me. I trembled when at last your eyes fell on them and Arjuna gathered me up, as if I were nothing at all. My bangles shook with my fear and anger.”
When Candra did finally open her eyes, she saw Guntur standing over her. She did not know him, but she remembered having been in the room—recalled that she had once looked up, because of a wasp’s insistence, and seen the rafters.
She seems …
What does she seem?
That she is no more than Guntur’s dream, his figment, his creature. Obedient or sullen, she has no life apart from his.
He imagines her in every atom of her being save this: her mind’s extinction. I mean: what it was she knew or might have known inside the blue pavilion. Because he has yet to know death, he cannot know her innermost portion of — I cannot call it life. But it is what remains apart from Guntur’s life.
Why must she remain silent?
So that Guntur cannot possess her story.