Raindrops clattered across the palm-leaf roof over Dan's head. The air in the jungle had grown heavier during the night, and now it seemed more difficult to breathe. The storm worried Dan because the Chinese cargo boat for which he was waiting was due in an hour—at seven o'clock in the morning. The river would rise very quickly, and such changes disrupted things. Even so, Dan thought, the boat shouldn't have any trouble making it up here.
Seated on a bench inside the shack's door, he looked out onto the Rajang River as the storm moved up from the coast.
Sibuyoh hunkered next to Dan in the doorway. He was an Iban headman who had accompanied the American to the shack, from his longhouse a quarter mile downriver. Dan was glad to see the rains begin. After three months of dry season the roads were bright with hot, yellow dust, and the rivers seemed barely to move. From wrinkled browns and bone-dull greens, the forest now would be shiny and swollen, with blue air visible between the trees. Within a few minutes, rain formed a gray, pulpy sheet in the distance. From the shack's roof, streams of gathered water fell to the ground, forming a narrow ditch in the mud parallel to the shack's walls. Dan rested his head against the doorjamb and folded his arms. The rain would last this way all day, perhaps several days.
The forest heaved with the first heavy wind. A frond dropped from one of the coconut palms, slid down the roof and landed on the ground outside the shack. The trees rolled back in the wind. The river was still quite blue, but it was dotted with whitecaps now.
The shack was just a few hundred yards below the Pelagus rapids. This stretch of white water was a quarter mile long and descended two hundred feet from the uppermost falls. It could be negotiated only by longboats with very strong engines, and then only during the dry seasons. The rapids were dotted with large boulders. Some stuck up in the air; others were hidden beneath immense surges of water that came down with such violence that spray rose up in clouds the length of the rapids.
Now, with the rain, the rapids took on the look of dirty lava, and the noise they made reminded Dan of a long, muffled groan.
The trees cracked and danced against each other. As the ground around the shack turned to mud, the rain seemed to thicken. There was not the sparkle that comes with reflected sunlight. There was no nuance to the rain. Dan had heard the Ibans with whom he worked rhapsodizing about the surprises to be found in the monsoon. The tribesmen had myriad words for the rain, each descriptive of a certain rate of fall, of specific colors and intensities. For them, the rain provided mood. It affected the nature of sadness. Its colors conjured up loss or wellbeing, disruptive spirits in the heavens and in the mud. Occasionally the rain even caused great bravery.
But for Dan, this rain appeared simply to be gray. It got heavier or lighter. Otherwise, gray rain was little different from brown rain. Out here, when it rained, all activity stopped. Like a fire, the rain shackled the attention, and people simply watched it from the shelter of the longhouses, from beneath the trees at the river's edge, and from rickety shelters like the one in which Dan now stood. Initial fascination gave way after a time to boredom as the rain continued pouring from the sky. It was the boredom that comes when nothing is happening.
Sibuyoh rolled a cigarette between his stubby fingers. A dirty cloth was wrapped about his head. The wrinkles in his golden face were softened by the blue-gray light coming through the doorway. Sibuyoh looked down on the cigarette with an air of interested superiority. His ears were pierced, and the lobes hung down almost to his shoulders. His limbs were very thin, though there was a stringy solidity about them, indicative of the years that Sibuyoh had spent clearing the hillsides for dry paddy. He wore a brown loincloth. His thick feet rested flat on the mud floor of the shack.
"We got here just in time," Dan said in Iban.
Sibuyoh did not look up from his cigarette. He had just completed rolling it, and he now examined it to make sure it would hold together. "Yes. Easy to get wet when it rains like this." He placed the cigarette in his mouth, lit it with a Red-Chinese Zippo, and then replaced the lighter in the small bag that hung from his loincloth. "I hope the boat comes, Tuan," he said after a moment. "In the monsoon season, the Chinese sometimes give up." He blew smoke from his mouth and pondered the rain a moment more. "I've seen days when no boat comes at all." He tapped the end of the ash onto the mud floor. "I've seen weeks like that."
"Weeks!" Dan rested an arm against the jamb and studied the water running from the roof. His green shirt was unbuttoned to the waist. Its long sleeves were rolled up above his elbows. His left hand clutched the bunched material of his shirt where it ballooned from beneath his belt. His body so filled the doorway that Sibuyoh's small face and shoulders seemed more like a child's than like those of a man of fifty. The American's face was gummy with perspiration. He had five days' growth of beard, not having shaved during his visit to Sibuyoh's longhouse.
"There's nothing you can do, Tuan. If the Chinese don't come…." Sibuyoh exhaled a puff of smoke, which dispersed in the wind that blew through the doorway. "In weather like this, no one comes."
Dan was due downriver in the town of Sibu the next day, for a meeting of development officers from the Malaysian Interior Ministry. They wanted his report on Iban reaction to a proposed road into the upriver region. Sibuyoh's longhouse had been the last stop of an extended trip Dan had made into the interior. He was anxious to make it to the Sibu meeting because Datu Zainal Ibrahim, the Minister of Interior himself, would be there. Zainal, who came from Kuala Lumpur, was on a junket through western Borneo, and, amused by the Ibans and other tribes, he claimed to have an interest in their welfare. Dan wanted the road, and even more, the Ibans wanted it. So, it was important that he attend the meeting.
But the Chinese boat did not come. By noon the rain had grown monotonously heavy, not changing at all moment to moment. A torpor settled over the shack. Dan's mood grew featureless, so that his thoughts had little variation. He was neither warm nor cold. The waiting made him restless, and he picked at his shirt or tapped the bench with his fingers. The river had come up seven feet. The earth around the shack had turned to sludge. Fronds lay everywhere. Other pieces of wreckage from the storm—shredded deciduous leaves, pieces of torn bark, coconuts, and crushed ferns and flowers—were scattered about, and Dan began to suspect that indeed the boat would not arrive at all.
Sibuyoh sat in the rear of the shack. He pulled a ball of rice, wrapped in a large leaf, from the sack at his waist, opened it, and spread the leaf out between himself and Dan. He offered some of the rice to Dan, who, quite hungry, took a handful of it.
"Does it rain like this in your land?" Sibuyoh said.
Dan fingered the rice and shoved it into his mouth. A gust of wind blew water into the shack. "I'm from San Francisco."
''The name of your river?"
"No. Excuse me, Sibuyoh. That's the name of the city I come from. It's a large place, like Singapore. Like Kuching."
"It's in England."
"No. In the United States."
Sibuyoh nodded, a look of amused puzzlement on his face. "I see."
"By ship it would be several weeks."
"So that by boat—a boat like mine—you couldn't even get there?"
The longboat in which Sibuyoh had brought Dan to the shack was moored at the riverbank. Sibuyoh had pulled it up on the shore when they had arrived at dawn. Now the boat bobbed in the rising water several feet from the bank. It was held fast by a piece of jute rope. Its outboard engine had been pulled up, so that the prop was suspended above the surface of the water.
"No, you couldn't."
"And there's rain there?"
Dan took another handful of rice. He reached into his rucksack and took out a packet of Lucky Strikes. He pulled a cigarette from the packet and handed it to Sibuyoh. "Yes, there's rain. But not like this."
"Heavier?" Sibuyoh examined the cigarette. Dan knew he was pleased to be offered one. He clearly considered a Lucky Strike as a mark of Dan’s regard for him as headman. Several visits before, Dan had given him a carton of Luckies, and Sibuyoh had embraced him, thanking him profusely, with clear and deeply felt gratitude.
"No. Lighter. And it's much colder. Like the coldest of the rainy season here."
Sibuyoh lit the Lucky Strike, then leaned back against the wall. "Do people work there?"
"Oh, yes."
"They have rice, like we do?"
"Some do. But it's not the same."
"Not the same rice?"
"No. They don't farm it the way the Ibans do."
"Do they have religion?"
'Yes."
"A rice-spirit? A spirit for the harvest?"
Dan grinned and looked out the door. The rain had not changed. "No. It's not the same."
"How can the people be happy then?"
Dan shrugged. How could he explain to Sibuyoh, he wondered, the exotic humdrum of his life? The Iban would be amazed by the pencils and adding machines and high buildings in San Francisco. He imagined Sibuyoh and himself hunkering on the corner of Union and Columbus, sheltered from the rain by an awning. The noise of the place and its sputtering cars, its coffeehouses, Saints Peter and Paul church, its buses—all of it would conspire in a grand mystery to confuse Sibuyoh.
Or how explain a slide rule? The Iban would look over his shoulder while Dan, at his desk figuring a problem, worked the rule back and forth.
"The future, Tuan?" Sibuyoh would say.
"Yes, that's right," Dan would reply.
Just now, Sibuyoh lifted the cigarette to his lips, although he paused a moment, with a new thought. "A people without a rice-spirit can't be living a good life."
"I think you're right."
Dan considered the difficulties of his life here…. Sarawak…. 1966…. An American civil engineer, on contract to the new Malaysian government from the Agency for International Development…. Simple enough. Maybe that explained it all. But as the rain ground against the shack's roof, he felt his mood deteriorating. He was simply biding his time here. Building roads? Wonderful endeavor. But what could it possibly mean in the end? Did it improve these people’s relations with the rice-spirit. Did it save lives?
"Sometimes I worry I'm not doing anything here," he said in English. The odd-sounding conglomeration made Sibuyoh laugh. He and Dan had known each other for several months, and the Iban frequently chided Dan for his lapses into that odd language. He had once told Dan that English reminded him of pigs snuffling in the mud.
"What was that?" Sibuyoh asked in Iban.
"Oh, just that I often think these trips I make into the jungle, my visits to the longhouses, the long discussions with the Ibans about what the Malaysian government wants from them..." Dan turned from the rain. He saw Sibuyoh's eyes, like black stones, staring at him, awaiting the rest of the sentence. Dan fell into silence. He had been wandering. He didn't know what to say.
The Iban pushed his spent cigarette into the mud floor. It sizzled a moment, then expired with a last wisp of smoke. "Pardon me, Tuan, but I don't understand."
"It's just…you see, it's just that I've come to your country from thousands of miles away, Sibuyoh. My people are different from yours. We live differently, in different houses. Strange, cold weather. Machines and customs you can't imagine. And I came all the way here for a reason I don't really comprehend. I sit in the jungle, listen to the river."
Sibuyoh waited with patience through this reverie. Finally he nodded. "It's no mystery. We have the same custom. It's called—"
"Bejalai."
'Yes, that's right. When the young men go away for years, even. An adventure. I forgot you know the Ibans so well."
"But the Iban knows why he's going. And when he gets there, he knows what he has found, doesn't he?"
"He hopes so. Though it's all a matter of luck. He can't be sure what will happen when he starts out. No one knows what's going to happen, Tuan." Sibuyoh slapped Dan's knee and broke into laughter. "Not even the white man. Although you may think you do."
“Yes, okay."
"When I was a young man, I followed the bejalai far up the Rajang River. Above Belaga. Very interesting up there." Sibuyoh nodded, affirming his own opinion. The Rajang was the longest river in Sarawak. "The Ibans there are savages, of course. No manners. Don't know how to eat." Sibuyoh imitated a man slurping his food from a bowl, his fingers spread across his face. The Iban laughed, and his three gold teeth shone in the dull light. "But very beautiful women, Tuan. Very beautiful."
"What'd you do there?"
"Worked for the Chinese on a boat. Worked for the missionaries." Sibuyoh nudged the dead cigarette with his toe.
"How long?"
"Nine years."
"Why did you go? You particularly?" Dan recalled the kind of longing he had felt in his office in San Francisco, when he had looked out at the bay and thought how he could change everything for himself were he simply to get on an airplane and fly away to a jungle somewhere. He had not been dissatisfied, really. He was not a failure. It was simply that the individuality of the idea had so thrilled him.
Then he had actually done it.
"Many go," Sibuyoh said. "I had no reason, myself. It's a custom."
Dan held his hand out the doorway. Runoff from the roof splashed over it and continued to the ground. The rapids had turned foamy brown. After a long silence, Sibuyoh reached again into his bag and brought out another ball of rice. He handed it to Dan, who unwrapped it and laid it out on top of his rucksack.
And it was true enough, Dan thought, the work he did out here had some importance. The Ibans understood what he was trying to do. Travel in this country was by boat and by foot. The only road outside Kuching, the capital city, was made of gravel and went a hundred miles to the north toward Sibu. New sections were added to it month by month. But they were very small sections, built with great difficulty through jungle, unstable mud, hills, and mountains. Dan's current job was to stump for the road and for arteries to it among the upriver Ibans who would be affected by it.
The Ibans were considerably surprised whenever he came to visit because of his ability to speak with them and understand what they wanted. They were not much appreciated by the Malays who ran the government. They loved it when someone important showed an interest in them. Few white men spoke their language. Indeed, whenever Dan arrived at a longhouse for a visit, the first thing he heard about was the other white men who could speak Iban. His few years in Sarawak had taught him who those men were, and he had met some of them. It was a very small, respected group of people. Dan was gratified to be a member.
Nonetheless, the closer he came to the truth in his understanding of this country, the more cast away he felt within it. The jungle and the mountains surrounded him and convinced him that he was simply a stranger. Always a stranger. Even now, the air settled about him without motion. He was enveloped by it, and his spirits slowly fell apart. Dan worried that this was the end to which all his work in Sarawak had really come—a missed boat, waiting, a stifling rain.
Sibuyoh took a bit of the rice between the fingers of his right hand, and rolled it into a ball. "Did you come here because you were unhappy?"
"No. It was to find out what the rest of the world is like, that's all."
"The rest of the world." Sibuyoh reached up to brush away an insect that had tangled itself in the cloth around his head. "And so, where we are sitting now, Tuan—“ He turned toward the doorway and laughed. “This shack…this is the rest of the world?"
Dan grinned also in the gray, wet light.
Sibuyoh looked up into the sagging roof, which was hung with cobwebs. To protect against malaria, the government sprayed all the buildings from time to time with DDT. The ridgepole and rafters of the shack, which were crusted with the white residue of the insecticide, looked like bones. Sibuyoh stood and walked to the rear of the shack, hunkered there, and pointed into the dark cobwebs. His laughter grew to a phlegm-ridden outburst. “The rest of the world!”
Dan stared into the rain. The river was the color of brown mud. He watched a large cluster of branches and trunks that poised a moment at the top of the rapids. Sibuyoh's laughter blended with the roar of the monsoon in the trees. One day I'll leave, Dan thought. My work will be taken over by some other bureaucrat, and I'll be forgotten. The roads he had built would fall away in storms like this, washed into the rivers.
The trunks appeared to be part of a large clump of river wreckage, trees washed out by the storm. But the wind-torn fronds and branches stuck up into the air. They disappeared into a dark trough as they started down the rapids, then reappeared, turning about and listing. They surged past some boulders and dropped into another trough.
"Sibuyoh." Dan couldn't make out the wreckage for a moment. He beckoned to the Iban, to join him at the door. "What's that?"
Dan pointed to the rapids. The Iban stared a moment into the distance, then took in a breath. "It's a boat, Tuan. There are people on it."
The boat careened down the rapids. Three men attempted controlling it with paddles. They had put palm fronds upright in the gunnels to act as sails. But the wind had long ago shredded these, and the remaining tattered sticks were what Dan had first noticed. Eight people huddled in the boat. Three others were in the water holding to the boat's gunnels.
"There must have been another boat," Dan said.
“Yes. Capsized. Hit a boulder or something."
"We've got to help them." Dan hurried out the door and, suddenly, the storm battered against him.
"But how, Tuan?" In the roar of the wind, Sibuyoh’s voice could barely be heard.
"Your boat. The engine's good, isn't it?"
'Yes, but it's dangerous out there."
The rain coursed down Dan's back. His shirt became spattered with drops, then was inundated. He walked toward the bank where Sibuyoh's boat was moored, and after a moment Sibuyoh joined him. The rag about the Iban's head was plastered by water to his neck. He stood with his hands on his waist, and his skin, which was tattooed with dark blue designs, gleamed.
"We've got to move quickly," Dan said.
"I won't do it."
"But we can't let those people drown, Sibuyoh."
"If we go out there, we'll drown." The Iban stepped toward the shack. "This is stupid, Tuan." He turned toward Dan again. "You don't understand this river."
Dan pulled the boat to the shore and jumped in. He removed the tarp from the engine and pulled the starter cord. The boat floated into the river again, dangling at the end of the rope. When Dan could not get the engine started after several tries, Sibuyoh pulled the boat back to the shore. He untied the rope, turned the boat about and motioned Dan to the bow. Pushing off from the shore, Sibuyoh angrily started the engine and headed the boat into the middle of the river.
Dan's mind rushed with wild fear. The disabled boat turned about and listed, righted itself and disappeared in a trough at the bottom of the rapids. It came up again. A spray of brown water hurdled the bow and dispersed into the rain.
"A ghost's taken you!" Sibuyoh put a hand up to his forehead to shield his eyes from the rain.
"Hurry up!" Dan’s order—in English—got no reply from Sibuyoh, who turned the boat down the full surge of the river. Water pummeled the sides of the boat and spilled into it. The spray blotched Dan's vision. They could not make headway on the stricken craft. The river flowed so quickly and forcefully, and there were so many obstacles, that Sibuyoh shouted that they might be wrecked just trying to get away from the shore. For a moment, the drifting boat disappeared. Dan could see nothing in the squall. Sibuyoh's engine sputtered and quit. He pulled the starter cord several times, then lifted the prop from the water to examine it. They turned about, without direction, until the engine started up again, and Sibuyoh was able to head the boat downriver.
Finally, they approached the disabled craft, but Sibuyoh could not bring his boat close enough to make contact. The prop on the other boat had broken, and the boat now turned in circles down the current. The people on board were all Ibans. Their craft was a single piece of wood carved from a large ironwood trunk. The gunnels were shredded by wear. Moss grew in patches along the sides. The three men struggled to paddle it, but the force of the current was too strong for them. After several minutes, Sibuyoh approached the boat from the rear. He came up behind it slowly, and Dan moved to secure the two boats together.
He reached over the side for one of the people in the water, an old, small man, anguished, his undershirt torn to shreds. Dan pulled him up onto the gunnel and reached over to grab his shorts. Sibuyoh's boat lurched as one of the men jumped into it from the other craft. Dan was thrown into the river.
The old man clawed at his neck. Dan tried pushing him away, but the man would not let go. They struggled, and Dan's mouth filled with water as they sank down. His throat clogged. He began choking. The old man fought to use Dan's body as a line to the surface. Dan pushed him away
He gasped as his head broke into the air. The Iban had disappeared. Dan remained quite close to the boats, which were now intertwined, people strewn about them like weeds. Sibuyoh tried helping people from one boat into the other. There was a danger that Sibuyoh's boat would capsize, and he fought off one of the men to keep his craft steady.
The rope between the boats came loose. Sibuyoh grabbed for it. Screaming, he held fast, despite the rope's sudden jerking between his hands. One of the others helped him secure the boats again, and Sibuyoh sat down, holding his hands painfully together. As Dan swam toward him, Sibuyoh suddenly pointed back into the river. Dan turned and saw a woman flailing in the water. She was drowning, and Dan swam to her. She reached for him the same way the old man had. Dan fended her off. He swam behind her, a few feet away. Her eyes followed him, and he dived beneath the surface to escape her. Reaching out, he grabbed her legs, pulled her beneath the surface, then wrapped his right arm around her chest. When they came up, the woman sobbed and gasped, cries indistinct to Dan, fearful screams. He swam backward toward the boats. Dan panicked as he realized the boats were moving away from him.
The two craft turned and lurched down the river. Dan held tightly to the woman, who continued fighting him. Suddenly the boats halted, jammed against a large tree trunk beneath the surface. Dan and the woman collided with Sibuyoh’s boat. He threw out an arm but could find nothing to hold to. Splinters tore at Dan's back. With one of the other men, Sibuyoh took Dan by the shirt, and held on long enough for the American to grab the gunnel. The Ibans took the woman into the boat. Dan was hauled up as well. He choked and flopped into the rear, which was cluttered with muddied, squirming bodies.
The woman lay next to him. Her sarong was twisted about her legs. Her stomach rose and fell in spasms, and she cupped her hand over her eyes, protecting them from the rain. One of the children, a girl, stroked the woman's hair, cradling her head in one hand. The girl tried removing pieces of mud from her hair, but there was so much mud that her efforts had little effect.
A man sat in the bottom of the boat at Dan's feet. He appeared almost to have died. His face was dark and lined with exhaustion. His hands lay separately in his lap. His shoulders slumped to the left. When Dan turned over, the man dropped a hand onto Dan's ankle. "Thank you." The voice was a gravelly whisper.
Dan turned away. The vibration of the engine as the boat made its way toward the shore felt warm to him, and he began a kind of daydream in which there were few images, rather washes of liquid warmth that took him over.
Fifteen minutes later, Dan stood on the lower bank, three miles below the shack. Rain fell over him in a flood. He attempted wiping the mud from his shirt to no avail. His clothing and his skin were the same yellow-brown. His hair was filled with river silt.
Sibuyoh secured the boats to a tree on the shore. Blood glittered on his palms, and he dipped them into a big puddle of rainwater. He winced as he attempted washing them.
Dan turned toward the higher shore behind him, but stumbled in the mud so that his arms plunged into the water. He righted himself. The Ibans from the boat now sat on the high bank—many of them lying on it—like rubble. There were six adults and four children. They had lost one…the old man.
Dan reached for a branch, and pulled himself up the bank. He stopped a moment to rest. His back hurt where he had twisted it when he had fallen from the boat. He looked down at himself, alarmed by his resemblance to the mud in which he stood.
"You saved them, Tuan." Sibuyoh reached down to help Dan to the bank. At first Dan paid no attention to the Iban's remark. Sibuyoh stood at his side and wrapped his hands in some rags he had brought from the boat.
"We both saved them, Sibuyoh."
Sibuyoh broke into weary, slow laughter. "No, Tuan. It was you. You jumped in the river. You pulled them out."
"I only pulled one out.”
'Yes, but if you hadn't insisted, I wouldn't have gone at all." Sibuyoh shook his head. "I'm not crazy, Tuan." He looked into his hands. The rags were stained with engine oil and blood. "These are poor bandages." He held the hands out, palms up in the rain.
Dan's legs ached as though they had been beaten with a club. Water ran down his arms to his hands, then in minute streams from the ends of his fingers to the ground. The stricken Ibans remained scattered in the mud. They were frightened, sodden, broken down. But they were alive. Dan looked up from Sibuyoh's hands into the sky. Rain fell down onto his face as though from a single point, silver and gray lances of water. He felt the storm was trying to blot him out, to erase the memory of what had just happened. He would not allow it. Dan opened his mouth and let the rain fall against his tongue. He felt his own heart beating within the muddy shell of his skin.
© 1988 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
—
Note: No Plagiarism Software, also known as Artificial Intelligence, was used in the composition of this story. The story comes from my 1988 collection with the same title, The Day Nothing Happened, which will be re-published in 2025.
“Terence Clarke: Recovering The Arts” columns are free of charge. Subscribe to them here. Or, if you wish, you can help us financially with a paid subscription at $5.00 per month or $50.00 per year. That, too, can be done here. It’s your call.
We will not share information about your subscription with anyone.