Among The Believers Part 26

Barbara's lunch hour was quickly over; she went back to her handicrafts. I had another slice of fried fish; Sitor watched me eat. On one wall of the small room was a surrealist painting of two nudes seen from the back, one male and brown, one female and dark-red, with birds everywhere. A painter friend had called on a day when one of Barbara's birds had died; the picture was the gift he had been moved to make. Elsewhere were violent pen drawings of nudes that Sitor himself had done.

The glamour of Indonesia and Sitor, the poet, for Barbara; for Sitor, the glamour and security of Barbara and Europe. Barbara could take Europe for granted. Sitor, at the end of his own journey, couldn't. He now possessed his ancestral village, the valleys, the lake, the stone walls, the fairy-tale houses. But he could no longer go back there; he couldn't pretend to be what he had ceased to be. Without Europe (and that mean Holland) and its cultural invitations, its interest in his "complication," he had only Indonesia, for him a land of hurt and failure, where he could get no job now, and where he could be snuffed out, without anyone or anything to appeal to.

And it was not until many hours later that I saw what had been left out of our long talk: the twenty years from 1945 to 1965. I hadn't asked Sitor about them: his beginnings and his present had interested me more. In those twenty years, the first of Indonesian independence, Sitor had written his poems and become famous. He had later become a politician and a man of power. To some people then, especially those who towards the end of the Sukarno time could be described as "counterrevolutionaries," he had become a figure of threat. And, as I discovered later, there were people who felt that their careers had been damaged by Sitor. Some, even after all this time, had not forgiven him.

But the man who told me this said almost at once, "I will not talk against him, though. He has suffered more than any of us."

3.

Deschooling

Adi Sasono, whom I met at Sitor's the first evening, told me I would understand Indonesian Muslims better if I went out to the countryside and had a look at the traditional Islamic village schools. These schools were known as pesantrens. Adi had a business a.s.sociate who took an especial interest in pesantrens; and it was this man, as devout or concerned a Muslim as Adi, who planned my journey. He thought I should see a modern pesantren-there was a famous one near Yogyakarta and Borobudur; and I should also have a look at a very old one-there was one near Surabaya.

These village pesantrens preserved the harmony between community and school, village life and education. In this they were different from the Western-style schools, which, set down in the Asian countryside, were psychologically disruptive. Adi's friend told me that the famous educationist Ivan Illich had come to Indonesia to look at pesantrens. I hadn't read Ivan Illich's books, and of his theory of "de-schooling" I really knew only the word. But I knew that he had a high reputation, and I thought that it would be interesting to go where (to my surprise, I must confess) he had gone.

I went with Prasojo, a nineteen-year-old college student, and I could not have had a better companion. Prasojo had been to Arizona for a year on a scholarship given by the American Field Service. He spoke English well, with an American accent. He had greatly enjoyed his time in Arizona, had learned much, and remained so grateful to the American Field Service that he intended to give them part of the fee he was going to get from me.

I also felt that Prasojo wanted to give back to me, a stranger, some of the kindness he had received in the United States. For our trip he wore jeans with the AFS label st.i.tched on the hip pocket. He was just above medium height and of Chinese appearance. That appearance was the subject of a family joke. Prasojo's father, a bulky man, undeniably Indonesian, would say, "But, eh-how did I get this Chinese son?"

We took the Garuda air shuttle to Surabaya, on the northern coast of East Java. Mud tainted the coastline. The rivers were muddy wriggles in the green, overworked, overpopulated land. The land around Surabaya was a land of rice, the rice fields in long thin strips, easier that way to irrigate, but suggesting from the air an immense petty diligence.

The houses-as we saw later, driving inland from Surabaya-matched the rice strips. They were very narrow and went back a long way. The houses stood a little distance from the road, and the front yards were sc.r.a.ped clean, but shady. Banana trees grew out of the bare earth, and coconut trees, mango trees, sugar cane, and frangipani. The rice fields began directly at the back of the houses. During that drive we seemed to be going through one long village: Java here an unending smallness, hard to a.s.sociate with famous old kingdoms and empires, a land that seemed only to be a land of people of petty diligence, the wong chilik, the little people, cursed by their own fertility, four million in Java at the beginning of the last century, eighty million today.

It was Prasojo who gave me that word, wong chilik, telling me at the same time that the word (though beautifully appropriate in sound) was both insulting and old-fashioned. It still mattered to some people, though, who were not of the peasantry, to have their distinction acknowledged. Such people called themselves "n.o.bles," raden, and used the letter R. before their names. They also built houses with a special hat-shaped roof, a distinction I would have missed if Prasojo had not pointed it out to me, so squashed and repet.i.tive and cozy it had all seemed: the red tile roofs, the walls of woven bamboo for the poor, concrete for the not-so-poor, the yards full of shade and fruit and flowers.

Windows were an innovation, Prasojo said. In the traditional Javanese house there were none; and, with walls of woven bamboo that shut out glare and heat but permitted ventilation, windows were not necessary. In the traditional house, light came through gaps in the roof. But concrete walls required windows; and I could see that gla.s.s louvres were fashionable among the not-so-poor.

Each little yard had its gateposts but no gate. The posts were of a curious design, with slabbed or stepped pyramids or diamond shapes at the top, the pyramids or diamonds sometimes bisected: concrete, but concrete clearly imitating brick. These posts, which at first suggested a single ownership of land and people, perhaps by some vast plantation, were in fact the remnant of the architectural style of the last Hindu kingdom of Java, the kingdom of Maj.a.pahit, which disintegrated at the end of the fifteenth century.

This was how the pre-Islamic past survived: as tradition, as mystery. Indrapura, "Indra's City," was painted on the bus in front of us; and Indra Vijaya, "The Victory of Indra," was on many shops. But this Indra was no longer the Aryan G.o.d of the Hindu pantheon. To Prasojo, as well as to the driver of our car, this Indra was only a figure from the Javanese puppet drama. Prasojo began telling me a local Muslim legend of the five Pandava brothers, who represented the five principles of Islam. And I don't believe Prasojo had an idea of the true wonder of the legend: the story he was telling me came from the ancient Hindu epic of the Mahabharata, which had lived in Java for fourteen hundred years, had taken Javanese roots, and had then been adapted to Islam. Prasojo, a Javanese and a Muslim, lived with beautiful mysteries. Scholarship, applied to his past, would have undermined what had become his faith, his staff.

And so we came in the late afternoon to the town of Jombang. It was where the famous old pesantren was. But Jombang, once we turned off the highway, seemed to be full of schools. There were scattered groups of chattering Muslim schoolgirls on the road at the end of the school day: little nunlike figures, with covered heads, blouses, sarongs. Where was our pesantren, and in what way was it different from these other academies? We raced back and forth, the driver behaving as though he was still on the highway; we penetrated murky rural alleys. And then we found out that we had pa.s.sed it many times: it was so ordinary-looking, even with a signboard, and not at all the sylvan retreat, the mixture of village and school, that I (and Prasojo as well) had been expecting.

There was a fence. And behind the fence, rough two-storey concrete buildings were set about a sandy yard, which had a few trees. In the centre of the yard there was an open pillared mosque with a tiled floor just above the ground. Boys in shirts and sarongs were sitting or lounging at the edge of the floor and on the step, following an Arabic text while a sharp-voiced teacher, unseen, steadily recited.

We went past the newspaper board-in the open, with a wooden coping, and with the newspapers behind gla.s.s-to the office at the side of the mosque. There was n.o.body in the office. Variously coloured shirts and sarongs hung on the verandah rails of the two-storey buildings. There were boys everywhere, barebacked, in sarongs, with warm brown skins and the lean, flat, beautiful Indonesian physique, pectoral and abdominal muscles delicately defined.

They stared back. And then, gradually, they began to gather around Prasojo and me. When we walked, they followed. They became a crowd as we walked about the narrow dirt lanes and the muddy gutters between the houses at the back of the compound: hanging clothes or sarong-lengths everywhere, glimpses of choked little rooms (eight boys to a room, somebody told Prasojo). There was mud and rubbish outside the rough kitchen shed and the school shop; and over an open fire in the muddy yard one little saronged boy was sc.r.a.ping at a gluey mess of rice in a burnt saucepan. He looked up in terror, at us, at the crowd with us. Perhaps, I thought, all medieval centres of learning had been like this.

But-was it "Illich" that one boy shouted, and then another boy?

A very small man in a black cap, a man perhaps about four feet ten, came up to us and led us back, with our following, to the front of the compound, to a building near the mosque. He opened a door, let Prasojo and me into a big room, and shut the door on the crowd. He looked quite stern below his black cap.

Prasojo said, "He says we are creating a disturbance."

I said, "It isn't me that's creating the disturbance."

Chairs were lined up in two rows on either side of low tables in this big room. We sat down.

And just as in East Africa, at certain seasons, the flying ants pile up in drifts against the windows to which they are attracted by the light, so the students of the famous pesantren of Jombang-attracted by what? by the visitor who proved their own fame?-piled up against the windows, Mongoloid face upon Mongoloid face, grin upon grin. They mimicked every word I spoke, even in the shelter of the room. And distinctly now, between the chatter and the mimicking, there were shouts of "Illich! Illich!" Had the visit-or the reported interest-of that famous man made them so vain?

Another man came into the room.

Prasojo said, "They say we must be registered. There is an Arabic cla.s.s going on in the mosque and we are creating a disturbance. They get lots of visitors here."

Of course.

"We have to register in the office," Prasojo said.

"But there is no one in the office. We went there first."

So we sat for a while. And then it turned out that the man in the black cap had no authority at all, wasn't even a teacher, was only a student, had been one for nine years. He had brought us to this room only to have us to himself. I thought he should be made to do something useful.

I said to Prasojo, "Give him the letter of introduction. Tell him to take it to his leader."

A pesantren, being traditional and "unstructured," as I had heard in Jakarta, didn't have a "princ.i.p.al." It had a kiyai, a "leader."

Meekly, the man in the black cap took the letter and went away.

I said to Prasojo, "Couldn't you go and talk to the Arabic teacher?"

That cla.s.s was continuing. The teacher, hidden somewhere in the shadows of the mosque, was reciting on and on.

Prasojo was horrified. He couldn't interrupt a teacher.

"What do we do?"

"We wait."

We waited. When the Arabic cla.s.s was over we went outside, risking the crowd. Barebacked boys were lounging about the verandahs of the houses; some were smoking Indonesian clove cigarettes, sweetly scented. But the mimicking crowd, pressing all around now, made movement and speech difficult. The little man in the black cap came back, as brisk and neat and equable as ever, with the letter of introduction still in his hand. He hadn't found his leader.

Prasojo led me back to the room with the chairs. He said, and his unhappiness gave him a strange formality, "May I leave you here for a while? I will go and find someone."

He went out. I saw that none of the boys followed him. But they continued to gape at me. The evening was coming on, though, prayer time, food time, and interest in me began to abate. Less and less frequently, and sometimes now from far off (an idler moving away, his curiosity sated), came the shout of "Illich!" And Indonesian courtesy wasn't dead. I was sitting alone, but someone from an inner room brought out many gla.s.ses of tea (as though a proper tea party was about to begin), set one gla.s.s in front of me without staring, and went away.

Prasojo came back with two men. One was a student, who stared and remained mute. The other was an English teacher, as small as the man in the black cap. He was all smiles, anxious to practise his English. Prasojo damped him down. They talked together in Indonesian and Prasojo said the English teacher would take us to another pesantren, half an hour's drive away, where we might see someone who might tell us something.

There seemed little to lose. So we drove through the dusk, past the eternal Javanese village, and the smiling English teacher, sitting next to the driver, was no trouble at all. Abruptly, after some minutes, he turned around and said, "How many times have you visited this place?" And having framed and asked his English question, and having got a reply, he sat good and quiet for the rest of the drive.

The pesantren we came to looked newer and more businesslike: a well-constructed set of buildings of concrete and corrugated iron around a well-kept yard. It was the hour of the evening prayer: someone was chanting the call. The deputy leader was in the unlit office, an old man with thick-lensed gla.s.ses and a long blue sarong. He said we were lucky: Mr. Wahid was going the very next day to Jakarta. And he led us in the dark through some gardens to a private house, to meet Mr. Abdur Rahman Wahid, who knew all about pesantrens. And it was only then that I remembered that Mr. Wahid's name had been given me as a man I should try to see. There had been articles about him in the Jakarta papers. His pesantren work had begun to make him a figure.

Accident-Prasojo meeting the English teacher-had brought me to Mr. Wahid. And what Mr. Wahid-a short, chunky, middle-aged man in a sarong-said in his Western-style drawing-room-a dim ceiling light, a television set going in a far corner, women coming and going, family, servants, cups of tea laid out on the low table-what Mr. Wahid said altered the day for me, gave order to the confused experiences of the late afternoon, and opened my mind to a historical wonder.

First, the name. In Indonesian the word for the Chinese quarter of a town was perchinen: per-china-en, "where the Chinese were." So, pesantren was per-santri-en, "the place where the wise men were," santri being a version of shastri, the Sanskrit word for a man learned in the Hindu shastra s, the scriptures.

In Hindu-Buddhist days in Java, a pesantren was a monastery, supported by the community in return for the spiritual guidance and the spiritual protection it provided. It was easy for the sufi Muslims, when the philosophical systems of the old civilization cracked, to take over such places; and it was easy for such places to continue to be counselling centres for village people. It was open to a man to go at any time to the leader or kiyai of a pesantren and ask for personal advice or religious instruction. It was not necessary to be enrolled in any formal course; in this way pesantren instruction could be said to be "unstructured."

In the Dutch time, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the villages began to change. Some people became rich, and they wanted to educate their children. It was these people, the newly well-to-do of the villages, who began to turn the pesantren from sufi centres into schools for children. And Islam itself was changing in Java. The sufi side, the mystical side that was closer to the older religions, was becoming less important. The opening of the Suez Ca.n.a.l and the coming of the steamship made Java-until then at the eastern limit of Islam-less remote. In the days of sail it took months to get to Mecca; now the journey could be done in three to four weeks. More people went to Mecca. More people became acquainted with the purer faith: the Prophet, the messenger of G.o.d, and his strict injunctions.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century the pesantrens began to be turned into schools. The Jombang pesantren school, which we had visited, had been established in 1896. But they remained religious places. They remained places which the villagers supported and to which they could go for advice. Every thirty-five days the leaders of the pesantrens in an area met to discuss whatever issues had arisen. Recently, for instance, people had been agitated about long hair on men. The leaders had done the correct Islamic thing. They had gone through the Koran and other approved records of the Prophet's time, and they couldn't find that the Prophet had said anything about long hair. So they had decided that long hair wasn't an issue. Why did the leaders meet every thirty-five days? That was a relic of Hindu-Buddhist times. The week then had five days, and the leaders of the monasteries met every seven weeks.

It was late. But a cla.s.s was going on in Mr. Wahid's own pesantren, in the house at the end of his garden. The pesantren still kept the hours of the monastery, still required a day-and-night devotion from its inmates. We went out to the garden to watch. Boys were sprawled in the front room of the teacher's little house and outside his door. The light in the room was very dim; the teacher's eyes were bad. The teacher read or chanted in Arabic, never pausing, and the boys followed in their books. It was a cla.s.s in Islamic law.

Mr. Wahid said the teacher was one of the most learned men in the area. He received no salary, only five hundred rupiah a month, eighty cents. But the villagers gave him food; the pesantren provided him with transport and had built the little house for him.

The cla.s.s was over. The boys got up. Some of them hung around us. The little teacher with his thick-lensed spectacles came out of his dim little house and stood silently and meekly beside us while we talked about him. He was only thirty, Mr. Wahid said, but he knew a lot of the Koran by heart.

I said, "Only thirty, and he knows the Koran by heart!"

"Half," Mr. Wahid said. "Half."

I didn't think that was good enough, for a man of thirty with only one book to master. Mr. Wahid and I debated the point amicably, while the teacher stood outside his house in his own dim light, silent, hunched, and modest, waiting to be dismissed: the unlikely successor of the Buddhist monks of bygone times, still living (as the Buddha had prescribed for his order) on the bounty of his fellows, but now paying them back with Arabic lessons for their children.

We drove back to Jombang with the English teacher. He got more than eighty cents a month, though he didn't say how much. But he didn't have a house and n.o.body gave him food. He managed, but things were tight. A bowl of rice from someone in the village cost him fifty rupiah, about eight cents; a bowl of rice with "something" added could set him back about sixteen cents.

The Jombang pesantren looked different in lamplight, more sedate. The main gate was closed. That was to keep the boys in, the English teacher said. We entered by the open gate near the house of the leader; the boys were too nervous of the leader to use that gate.

The lights were dim. The compound was quieter than it had been in the afternoon. But in the house called Al-Fattah they were still lounging about in their sarongs, and-as in a nature park at night, full of roosting birds-the visitor still raised a flutter. There were eight boys to a room; and the rule was that the boys-they came to the pesantren at thirteen and left at twenty-five-had to be of different ages. But there wasn't always floor s.p.a.ce for eight, and some boys slept in the mosque.

Here and there in the yard, in the very dim light, boys were pretending to study. It was pretence, because the light was so dim. The boys were looking at: a book on Islamic law, An Arabic Grammar, The Story of Islam, How to Pray. The last book had eight stage-by-stage drawings of the postures of Islamic prayer; and it perhaps wasn't really necessary, since the boys prayed five times a day. It was late in the evening; and the pesantren day began early.

The sufi centre turned school: the discipline of monks and dervishes applied to the young: it wasn't traditional, and it wasn't education. It was a breaking away from the Indonesian past; it was Islamization; it was stupefaction, greater than any that could have come with a Western-style curriculum. And yet it was attractive to the people concerned, because, twisted up with it was the old monkish celebration of the idea of poverty: an idea which, applied to a school in Java in 1979, came out as little more than the poor teaching the poor to be poor.

WE spent the night in Surabaya. An imperial or world power doesn't remember all its little battles. But the local people remember. The British had fought the Indonesians in Surabaya in 1945, after the war. There were commemorative statues to see; and after we had seen them, Prasojo and I started on the six-hour drive southwest to Yogyakarta. We took the Jombang road again, past the unending village with the slabbed gateposts that spoke of the long-dead Javanese Hindu empire of Maj.a.pahit.

The Maj.a.pahit museum, where we stopped, had little. But there was a temple a short way down the village lane opposite. It was a green lane, full of shade. The woven-bamboo houses were without windows. A stop sign in the lane-on a bamboo pole standing loosely in a hole-was watched by a small girl. For the hundred-rupiah fee, for which she gave a receipt, she lifted up the pole: the money was for the village.

A big log hung loose from a crossbar in a thatched shed beside the lane. This was the village observation post; the villagers took it in turn to watch through the night. The log was hollowed out, with a vertical gap cut down one side; when it was struck with a mallet it made a booming noise. It could be used to give the time, to warn of thieves or fires; fire was the main danger.

And just outside the shady village, in the open, was old grandeur: the high red brick tower of the Maj.a.pahit temple, undecorated, geometric, strong, the ancient style that was the source of the slabbed diamonds and pyramids on the gateposts we had been seeing all the way from Surabaya. It wasn't much, as a monument. The statues that the tower enshrined had been taken down. But after the crowding and the sameness, small houses, rice fields in narrow strips, it gave a past to the people, and another feel to the landscape.

Prasojo didn't know the purpose or the significance of the temple. He was impressed only by the fact that it had been built without machines. Also, no mortar had been used. Lime had bonded the bricks together over the centuries: this had been the wonder of a German Prasojo had met.

We had something to eat in a Chinese cafe. "Can you tell they are Chinese?" Prasojo asked, and I said I could. The village continued; people and their little houses were always with us. Then the land became broken and we began to wind through young teak forests, the teak growing straight, the leaves big and round. It was the j.a.panese who, during the war, had cut down all the teak of Java, Prasojo said. And this was interesting; because the day before, at the Jakarta domestic airport, where there were photographs of the antiquities of Indonesia, Prasojo had told me it was the j.a.panese who had with their swords cut off or disfigured the stone heads of the Buddhas. The subject had come up again in the Maj.a.pahit museum, and I had told him that (trophy-hunters apart) Muslims had been the great iconoclasts of history, the greatest cutters-off of the noses of ancient statues. That hadn't been easy for him to accept at first. But then, understanding, he had said simply, "To prevent the people praying to them."

It was noon, humid even in the teak forests. Prasojo fell asleep from time to time. He had the driver play pop music on the ca.s.sette player in the car; he slept to that. The land flattened, opened out to a wide plain with a line of blue hills on one side and high peaked mountains far on the other. It had rained; everything glittered. The green of the paddy fields was glorious. And against this green every touch of bright colour-in the dresses and sarongs of the people working in the paddy fields-was doubly glorious, reflected, with the sky, in the water. The rice grew in straight lines; different fields were in different stages of growth.

As the light changed, as the afternoon heat faded, Prasojo stirred and became alert again. Sleep had more than refreshed him: he talked poetically about the country through which we were driving. He had been educated near here. He spoke of the beauty of getting up in the morning while it was still dark and walking with palm-frond torches to the road to wait for the bus. He spoke of the "dating" habits of the afternoon. Dating time was between four and six; there was nowhere to go after seven. The girl sat on the back of the motorbike with her legs to one side and held the boy around the waist: that was the recognized dating pleasure.

"This is the best part of the day," Prasojo said.

The sun was red. The light was red; it came red through the trees, fell red on the road. A faint mist rose off the rice fields; the blue hills went pale; and sun and sky were reflected in the water of the rice fields.

"For us it isn't easy to be abroad," Prasojo said. "We get homesick."

They got homesick for everything. For everything we had experienced that day, the freshness of the morning, the heat of noon, the relaxation and colours of the late afternoon. For everything we had seen on the road and in the fields: the cycle of the rice crop, the changing tasks, the men carrying loads in baskets on either end of a bamboo pole, the bicycle rickshaws, the horse carriages (different regions had different styles of carriage). To an Indonesian everything about his country was known; no detail of house or dress or light went unconsidered. Every season had its pattern; every day had its pattern. When Prasojo went to Arizona his first thought, waking up the first day, was, "I am not in Indonesia."

All this was drawn out of him by the fading light, the best time of the Javanese day. The road was full of people yielding to the pleasures of that time of day, relaxing, chatting. The horse carriages were busy. Boys and girls rode together on bicycles-Prasojo pointed them out to me.

And he told me of some of the oddities of his time in Arizona. One morning he asked the man next door what, as a matter of courtesy and friendliness, he would have asked an Indonesian: "What are you going to do today?" In Indonesia the man would have said, "I will go to my rice field. I have to do so-and-so today." But in Arizona the reply-from a man of thirty-was, "That's my business." Or Prasojo would go, as he might have done in Indonesia, to the house of a friend, going for no reason, only for the reason of friendship. The boy's mother-in Arizona-would say, "What do you want?" Which, in Indonesia, was rude. "We are not as individualistic as that," Prasojo said.

In Java when a man wanted his paddy cut he would send a message to his fellow villagers. They would come and help and get some paddy in return. Prasojo's grandfather, a farmer, liked to have his evening meal in the front of the house, so that he could call out to his friends as they pa.s.sed, "Come and eat with us." That, of course, wasn't possible in the town. In Jakarta you would be full up in no time. But his mother still had the sharing instinct; and that could get her into trouble with his father and sometimes lead to tears. Though, painfully, she had learnt that she couldn't feed Jakarta every evening, she still, when she went on a train journey, took much more food than she needed for herself and her family, simply to have enough to give to people who might be with her in the compartment.

Yet, Indonesian as he was, Prasojo had travelled with delight. During his time with the American Field Service in Arizona he had been overwhelmed by the variety of the human race. He hadn't liked the Dutch because of the colonial past (some weeks later he told me of a disagreeable physical encounter between his farmer grandfather and a Dutchman); but in Arizona he had met a Dutch boy and had got to like him very much, and he had been glad to shake off his feelings about the Dutch. And how nice it was to be able to call a German boy "Hitler" and have the boy see the joke; and how nice it was, when Prasojo refused pork, for someone to say, "Hey, when are you going to give up that religion of yours?"

He had lived first with a Lutheran family, then a Presbyterian, then an agnostic; and he had got on well with all of them. But he remained Indonesian enough to be unable to answer when someone in America asked him, "Do you prefer the United States to Indonesia?" Prasojo didn't want to wound the American who had asked the question; at the same time he couldn't say that he liked Indonesia less than he did. Out of his Arizona experience there had come to him the wish to be a writer, and he had written a hundred-page autobiographical essay, Merden Bukan Casa Grande, "Merden is not Casa Grande." Casa Grande was where Prasojo had stayed in Arizona; Merden was the name of his village in Java.

At sunset we came to the temple of Prambanam. It was astonishing, after all the photographs, to see the mighty tower so near the main road, so much part of a village scene; it wasn't easy to believe in it.

The ninth-century Hindu temple-early photographs show only the great base, with a moraine of fallen stones-had been reconstructed by the Dutch, and not in any falsifying way: blank stones were used where the original pieces had been lost. The temple had been the centre of an enormous complex. Restoration work was still going on. The stones of smaller temples were neatly laid out and marked. Yet the village was encroaching. Outside the fenced-off monument area rubbish was burning in the remains of one of the smaller shrines which still had some carving. Prasojo said, "That hurts me." Yet again the wonder for him seemed to be only that men had built something so big without machines, had carved so well without machines.

A group of local girls, skittish at this time of day, ran up and down the four stone stairways, called out to Prasojo and me, and went giggling along the bal.u.s.traded terrace. The sky was fading above the wet fields; the temple felt old.

The bal.u.s.trade was carved with scenes from the Ramayana, the Hindu epic that Java and other countries in Southeast Asia had made their own. A thousand years after Prambanam, the epic still lived in Java. Prasojo knew it well, from the puppet theatre. He knew the characters, the stories; he understood the moral issues they raised. Monuments like Prambanam used a difficult theology, Hindu or Buddhist, to proclaim the power and near-divinity of a king. The theology had faded; the kings and priests had gone; the softer side of the old faiths survived, as a civilization.

Prasojo was Muslim; he had friends among the new Muslims. But he was as yet far removed from the new Muslim wish to purify, to create abstract men of the faith, men who would be nothing more than the rules. Prasojo possessed his Javanese civilization too completely for that: it was his civilization that he had been talking about during the drive.

FRIENDS and chat were important to Prasojo. He had friends in Yogyakarta. He spent the night with them, and he said later that five of them had gone to a restaurant-for an hour-and they had had a "great" time.

He had said that he wanted us to get out early in the morning so that we could see the students of Yogyakarta cycling to school, seven abreast, ringing their bells and laughing. Why did they cycle like that in the Yogya traffic? "Because they are so happy." And they were happy because it was appropriate to their time of life, and that time of morning. But it was those cycling students-and the other pedal traffic-that created the jam that delayed Prasojo. So I missed the students.

Still, Prasojo had brought one of his friends: to me, from Prasojo's talk, a kind of mythical figure: the friend, part of the ritual and security of Javanese life. Prasojo could not conceal his delight in his friend. He touched him; he spoke smilingly about him to me. And the friend, while he was with us, was silent, yet never bored, content to be with Prasojo.

The Jombang pesantren had been a trial. But Prasojo had high hopes of the pesantren at Pabelan. Pabelan was the pesantren showpiece. It was the "traditional" Islamic teaching inst.i.tution which had been extended into a school of a sort that some thought perfect for Java: not a diploma factory (it gave no diplomas), "unstructured," teaching appropriate skills, a "cooperative," self-supporting, teachers and students working together, no one strictly only a teacher, village and school sustaining each other, no one absolutely a villager, no one absolutely a student. This was how I understood it to be: an educational commune, a self-help organization, something in harmony with the village life Prasojo had told me about.

It was an hour's drive from Yogya, on the road to the Borobudur temple: village and rice all the way, the earth here volcanic and rich. We turned off into a tree-hung lane, and at the end saw a number of whitewashed Javanese houses in a large sandy compound, with coconut trees and royal poinciana trees. We found the office, in a roughish village house, and there my difficulties began.

There were two men in the office. One of them was Taufiq. He was thirty perhaps, small, round-faced, with a tremendous constant smile, and an easy deep laugh. He denied that the office was an office. And that confused me right away, because there was a gla.s.s case with many folders.

Taufiq then said that there was no office staff. Pesantren people took it in turn to be in the office, which was why-and this greatly amused Taufiq-to some visitors the office didn't look like an office at all. Taufiq was in the office that morning as pesantren spokesman only because it was his turn.

But what about continuity? Who looked after the folders in the gla.s.s case? Either Taufiq didn't answer or I missed what he said. He introduced the other man in the office-a well-set-up young man, speaking English fluently-as a village leader, a village headman. This man wasn't my idea of a village headman. And, trying to deal with all the puzzles Taufiq had already set me, I missed some of his explanations to Prasojo about there being no teachers in this school.

I began to listen again when Taufiq said in his equable way, "We live at peace with nature."

The ecological concern rang an alarm: it sounded modern, but it had also been deemed Koranic, and for both those reasons it had been incorporated into the new Islam. And I returned fully to the conversation when Taufiq said that we were strangers, but we were welcome. We could stay for lunch, we could spend the night. It was the way of Pabelan: to be a Muslim was to serve your fellow man.