from Atman

I

I am walking in the direction of my house, in a hurry, only to stop abruptly after a few steps. I glance at the white numbers on the signpost, the number thirteen on each wing of the black sheet-iron butterfly. That is the distance from here to Meerzorg. There is no trace anymore of the graveyard that stretched far along the river. Between my house and the graveyard there is nothing but a small strip of pasture with shrubs growing wild, kapoewerie. Here starts the well-constructed timbering that ends behind the fishermen’s sheds, the houses, the soccer field, past the S.M.S. jetty ¹ and all the way to behind Nieuw-Amsterdam. The timbering has come too late for the dead. Names on weatherbeaten wooden crosses and the few tombstones are all washed away by the water that fiercely forced its way during early spring tide and even at normal high tide. Their bones are an uncategorized collection in the soil that is left brackish.

Here I am, looking intensely at my house with its large balcony in the front and its crooked, sagging window-frames. I feel no nostalgia, no sadness. Yet, neither would I like to see it collapse with a loud crash. My house represents but a shapeless past, an apparent manifestation that is only a deception. Nobody would notice.

It stands alone, and it is dead. One does not see the dead. Neither does anyone notice that they turn in their graves out of joy or irritation when good or ill is spoken of them or when the memories of their lives are destroyed without consideration for an eventual possibility of a functional meaning.

I enter the yard.

A bad odor of decayed coffee permeates the air under the house. A labyrinth of cobwebs between the heavy beams on which the house rests—dead flies and wasps, beetles, digested skeletons in yards of dirty tulle. I believe I can hear the sounds and squeaks of bats. I hold my breath. Afraid of monsters, behind and above me, poised to attack, I can smell my own sweat. I relax. Coffee in state of decay is an appropriate symbol of the transience of this director’s residence. Voorburg, a coffee plantation, does not produce coffee anymore. Coffee refuses to grow in the brackish soil. The irrigation system with its capital floodgates is neglected.

Everything is putrefied, rusted, mouldered, full of stench, and grass and weeds grow wild under the house and between the stones of the semicircular doorsteps under staircases in the front, at the side, and at the back of the house. Rainwater in the two rectangular tanks are covered with flaking red lead, and the black tarred cylinder phosphorizes a menacing green. Thick algae duckweed grows under the heavy, flat zinc roofs. All look poisened. Perhaps there are floating cadavers of awaries—opossums.

A magical molecular energy forces everything into a unity, avoiding a disintegration into countless billions of atoms which tear the ground, which pulverize and carbonize trees with the released energy, or which shrivel away soundlessly. All is matter, disintegrated, ready to be carried away by the bitter salt water that will penetrate, swirling fiercely like a wild, untameable prehistoric monster with scorching tongues of fire capable of decomposing everything. My house is a huge space, a hypnotizing presence, there on the right bank of the Suriname river. Here I played on these enormous porches; here I watched the ships sail past, becoming dots at the mouth of the river. Thereafter nothing.

In this garden—I can barely determine the right spot—my picture is taken, a portrait of me as a little East Indian boy that I was of course, even more than I can now imagine myself to be, or want to be. I don’t know.

Safura, our East Indian maid—she had been in our service for a long time—is initially the one whose love charged that fraction of East Indian blood that coarsed in my veins with a higher power; she made it flow faster and with more force...