From Atjeh to Mejong Lodaja , part 8 Reading time approx 18 min
Tiger tracks were still being found around the pagger and Boeyoeng was not happy that the predator was so close to the kampong. He had a vague idea of an obligation towards the tiger, because he had settled in his territory, but he had never had to concern himself with such questions. His mother, Meutiah, pointed out that he had to find out whether it was an ordinary tiger of flesh and blood, or a ghost tiger. 'A ghost tiger?' 'The tiger could be an ordinary animal that is hungry,' Meutiah explained, 'but it could also be an ancestor.' Boyyung was shocked. Why hadn't he thought of that? With a shock he remembered how Engko's mother had opposed the tiger safaris organized by Willem Vorman in Atjeh. Like Willem, he had not wanted to listen to her because the desire for adventure was stronger than the supernatural voices from the forest. His mother subtly pointed out to him that he had neglected his duties. 'The forest is a sacred place inhabited by ancestors and spirits. They are closely connected to the wild animals that live there. The trees that you cut down to make this place habitable may have been the home of the ancestors. Did you ask their permission?' Boeyoeng felt uneasy. His mother was right. He had neglected all that. 'Tjoet firmly believed that the souls of the ancestors live on in the tigers,' his mother added. He refused. 'But we no longer live in Atjeh. We are on Java now. Things can be very different here.' He walked between the two kapok trees out of the kampong and studied the paw prints around the pagger. There wasn't much to read from them. It had rained and the tracks had largely disappeared. Engko came to him and he pointed out where he thought he could still see something. 'It must be an ordinary tiger,' he said unconvincingly. 'What makes you think that?' asked Engko. She looked at him with wide eyes and he saw the concern on her face. That surprised him. Engko was not easily scared. She had no fear at all of the crocodiles in the river and she managed to scare a wild boar with a loud scream, he thought she was like her mother. Fearless. But now he saw uncertainty in her gaze. He knew that she was thinking of the many children who played their games unprotected every day in the fields and by the river, and of their own son Tau. 'He ate the buffalo, that's why I think it must have been a regular tiger. A ghost tiger might want something else.' 'What do you think a ghost tiger would want?' 'I don't know exactly either. Maybe something immaterial, a scented offering or something. Think about it, did your mother never say anything about it?' They walked around the pagger for the second time and searched the ground. 'I can't remember anything about it. My mother was more into exorcisms than tigers. I only remember her telling us not to kill tigers because they housed the souls of the ancestors.' Boeyoeng crouched down and felt a hole in the ground with his hand. 'It wasn't a ghost tiger. It was a regular tiger and that's dangerous enough. Basta!' 'And what do you plan to do about it?' Her question irritated him because he didn't know the answer. 'Now he's attacked the karbouw,' Engko persisted, 'tomorrow he might take one of the villagers. We do have a problem.' The question kept haunting him. The doekoen came at just the right time for Boeyoeng too.
Even before he joined the loerah, as custom required, the dukoen walked to the megalith in the middle of the kampong. There he placed both hands on the stone, on the spot where the tiger had been carved. 'Here I am, uncle,' he said. These were enigmatic words that soon took on a life of their own. People associated them with the story that the traveling storyteller had connected to the village. Some people even thought that the story had called for the coming of the doekoen and it was not long before the magician was addressed as 'Doekoen Matjan, Tiger doekoen'. But apparently the tiger was not his first concern. After he had spoken to the loerah, he came to Boeyoeng and Engko and asked about the poesaka, the sacred heirlooms of the kampong. 'Poesaka? We have no poesaka,' Boeyoeng claimed, but Engko thought differently. 'We have Habib's scimitar, I brought it from home when we came here. It's an heirloom from my mother.' 'That old thing?' Boeyung sneered. 'It's resting in the attic of our house.' 'That's where the poesaka should be,' said the new doekoen. With due respect, Engko fetched the relic from the attic. She had never thought of it as poesaka before, but it was indeed a sacred heirloom. With Habib's scimitar in her hands, Engko felt connected to her mother again. As if it had happened only yesterday, she vividly saw her mother galloping onto their property in Meulaboh, laughing wildly because of the saber she had captured. There had been a wildness in that laugh, almost a ferocity that made her invincible in Engko's eyes. None other than Habib Abdoerrahman Al Zahir had fallen victim to Tjoet's assassination attempt, the sultan's grand vizier. For Tjoet, the scimitar was the greatest trophy she had ever acquired. Engko felt a special power emanating from the weapon. She saw her mother – the warrior! – so clearly again, now that she was holding the sword in her hands, that it seemed as if she only had to reach out her hand to touch her. A fierce burst of pain squeezed her throat and she closed her eyes. For a moment her mother was very close and at the same time painfully unreachable. For a moment it seemed as if Engko was in another world. When she opened her eyes everything was normal again. She saw that Boeyoeng was looking at her without understanding. The doekoen took the scimitar from her without removing the batik cloth in which it was wrapped. He weighed it in his hands and Engko wondered if he felt the same power that she had felt, but he showed nothing and gave it back to her. 'Every year the poesaka has to be cleansed in a special ceremony. We will start that soon to prevent the ancestors from becoming restless.' He spoke kindly but firmly. 'You are the founders of the kampong and according to custom you must preserve the poesaka.' To Engko it sounded obvious what the doekoen told them but she could see that Boeyoeng was impatiently waiting for the moment that he could broach that other subject that was occupying his thoughts. She gave him a silent sign to urge him to be patient; it was not polite for him to start talking about something else of his own accord. Outside she saw Meutiah pacing back and forth in front of the house. Her mother-in-law pretended to sweep up some bits and pieces with a broom, but Engko knew that she was trying to catch every word. When the scimitar was safely stored away in the attic, Boeyoeng rather bluntly asked the question that was burning on his lips. 'How should we face the tiger?' It was to the credit of the doekoen that he did not show his annoyance at the abrupt question, but answered promptly. 'First of all, you must get into the habit of not mentioning his name,' he began. That would insult him. Call him "Grandfather." That is a polite form of address. If you observe the rules, he will protect you from all kinds of dangers.' Meutiah stopped sweeping and came closer. With a gesture, Engko indicated that she could sit on the threshold. 'Boeyoeng's mother found the tiger inscription on the megalith,' she explained to the doekoen. The doekoen did not seem to mind; he paid no attention to the old woman. 'The tiger will protect your fields by keeping the wild boars away, he will chase away thieves and show you the way home if you get lost in the forest.' 'Protect our fields?' exclaimed Boeyoeng. 'But he ate our karbouw.' That may have been an ordinary tiger. But we don't know for sure. Grandfather will also protect you from all the big predators, but because you haven't followed the rules yet, it may be that he has allowed an ordinary tiger in to punish you. You and your wife are the founders of the village, you are responsible for making sure that everyone knows what to do.' Engko thought of the tiger trap that Boeyoeng had wanted to design in Meulaboh, together with her father. How simple everything was back then. 'I'm not the right person for this,' Boeyoeng said to the doekoen. She had known Boeyoeng long enough to know that he just wanted to be a farmer who worked his land and didn't want to have any other trouble on his mind. But the doekoen was right. 'It's true,' she admitted. 'We are the founders of the village. What should we do to reconcile Grandfather with us?' 'I will help you,'the doekoen assured them. 'I know the rituals, I know what sacrifices he demands.'
Willem Vorman would have called them Moezelmannen, the Mohammedans of Mejong Lodaja who faithfully turned to the east five times a day for prayer. The men took the initiative to build a beautiful house of prayer where they could recite the Koran. When they had completed that task, the next goal was a pilgrimage to the holy city. The pious Ibrahim managed to motivate a small group of four men to make the journey to Mecca with him. It was a costly undertaking that required years of preparation, but there was a lot of solidarity with the men and the entire kampong contributed. The pilgrims stayed away much longer than expected and the families began to fear that they would remain in the holy city for good. But now they were back. They had an air of scholarship around them that they derived from the presence of Sajjid Aziz who had lived in Mecca for several decades and had received instruction there from prominent Islamic scholars. The hajis moved into the prayer house and Sajjid Aziz announced a few new rules. Women were urged to cover their upper bodies, dietary restrictions were introduced and boys and girls were no longer allowed to sit next to each other in classrooms. Children who used to tuck a leaf behind their ear when they went into the forest, to protect themselves from the forest spirits, were told to call only on Allah – praised be his name – to protect them. The villagers effortlessly submitted to the stricter rules, but the doekoen stuck to traditional ancestor worship. Since its arrival a few years ago, the cleaning of the poesaka had become a recurring ceremony attended by the entire kampong. Every year, just after the rice harvest, the scimitar was respectfully removed from its wrappings and coated with oil. The associated ritual actions restored the balance between the people and the spiritual powers. The ceremony was also an appropriate time to honor the ghost tiger. Offerings for Grandfather were laid out in a field just outside the pagger: eggs, raw meat, uncooked rice, flowers and cigarettes made from corn palm leaves. Despite their assimilation to Islam, the people still held great reverence for the doekoen and for his relationship with the spirit tiger that protected the kampong. Thus, a kampong had grown slowly around the megalith in the jungle. The village founders, the doekoen and the loerah were the connecting factors that created unity among the inhabitants who had found their way to Mejong Lodaja from all directions. Some were Mohammedans, some adhered to the old traditions and a few, like Engko herself, carried distant traces of Christianity. People respected each other and worked together to develop the village. The only dissonance was the animosity between the doekoen and the loerah. Using the ritual tiger as a means of pressure, the doekoen managed to prevent the loerah from gaining too much power and demanding too large a share of the harvest for himself and his family. It was a precarious balance. With the return of the hajis, a third party entered the force field. At their invitation, a kiai, an Islamic pastor, came to Mejong Lodaja. Together with Sajjid Aziz, the kiai questioned the great influence of the ancestors on the community. The pair disputed the doekoen's power because it was allegedly derived from contacts with so-called spirits. They denied the existence of a spiritual tiger. They spoke out against the annual tradition of cleaning the poesaka. Slowly but surely, the balance of power shifted. There was a division in the village. The doekoen did not simply allow himself to be expelled from his position, many villagers remained loyal to the traditions, but others sided with the hajis. Society became more complicated than Boeyoeng could ever have imagined and colonial authority also asserted itself. By order of the Dutch, the regent had to recruit men to be sent to Atjeh. Boeyoeng did see the need to support his beloved Meulaboh, but the reinforcement was intended for the wrong camp. The boys had to fight against the Atjehnese. Kadoehan, the loerah, who had no connection with Atjeh at all, did not feel like exposing his villagers to a war he had nothing to do with. But he had no say. There were no volunteers, so the regent's demang appointed the young men who had to report. One of them was Kadoehan's son, Artaredja. The sending of the young men was an unexpected factor that brought the warring parties closer together again. Engko and Boeyoeng, together with the doekoen, organized a ceremony in which the young men were given protective amulets and the hajis strengthened them with prayers. The village watched their sons leave with sorrow.
Kampong Mejong Lodaja did not really flourish, but it did not wither away either. It almost did so when a cholera epidemic struck in 1894. The disease came and went again, taking many victims with it, including Engko. She was buried at the megalith that was henceforth 'tempat istirahat', the resting place of the village founder. For weeks, Boeyoeng withdrew behind the bamboo walls of his house. He prayed to Allah, he prayed to the ancestors, he prayed to the tiger and all the spirits of the forest, but nothing could bring Engko back. His retreat came to an end when he realised that he was not the only one who had to mourn a death. The loss of Engko as village founder was a heavy blow to the entire kampong and to Tau in particular, although the boy soon found peace under the loving care of Meutiah, his grandmother. The travelling storyteller visited the kampong from time to time on his wanderings and brought news from Atjeh, which was especially eagerly listened to by the parents who had a son in the war. One day he told them the story of the head in the jar. The villagers of Mejong Lodaja listened in amazement. The story was about an Atjehnese warlord, Teukoe Makam, and about a colonel named Van Heutsz. The colonel's troops had been hunting the teukoe for a long time. They could not catch the man and Van Heutsz felt that his prestige was being damaged. Finally his men found the warlord when he was lying in bed at home. He was seriously ill. They captured him and triumphantly carried him on a stretcher to the lieutenant colonel on duty. His wife and children were also arrested. To their horror they had to watch as their husband and father was thrown from his stretcher and shot dead. As if that shock for the family wasn't big enough, he was also beheaded before their eyes. What happened next to the woman and children, the travelling storyteller could not say. He did mention that the head of Teukoe Makam was put in a bottle of spirits and put on display in the military hospital of Koeta Radja. If the parents of Mejong Lodaja had still hoped for a little bit of fair treatment of their boys by the Dutch, that hope had now completely evaporated. 1899 was a year that brought joy but also sorrow. Meutiah, Boeyoeng's mother, died at the age of fifty-nine, five years after the passing of Engko. Another great loss for Boeyoeng and his son. For Boeyoeng it felt as if another bond with Atjeh had been severed. The joy of the year 1899 lay in the fact that not long after the passing of Meutiah, Artaredja, the son of loerah Kadoehan, returned to Mejong Lodaja. The boy had been away for six years, he was silent and unwilling to tell what had happened. He brought with him an older man whom he called Joes, an Atjehnese who did not speak and who had shown him the way through the jungle of Sumatra to the Soenda Strait, from where they crossed over to Java together. Artaredja owed his life to the man. Although the families were disappointed that he came home without his comrades, his arrival gave them hope that their own sons would return too. Over the next few years, the boys did indeed return one by one, except for a few who had lost their lives in that senseless war. Boeyoeng, who was initially happy to welcome an Atjehnese into his village, made several fruitless attempts to ask the man Joes about his home island. He thought he saw something familiar in his features and would have liked to know who his family was. But Joes did not speak. No matter how hard Boeyoeng tried, he could not make contact and, disappointed, he eventually gave up. In 1899 the travelling storyteller came by again and this time too he brought news of the latest events in Atjeh. Boeyoeng listened with a growing longing. This time the storyteller told about the death of another Atjehnese warlord, Teukoe Oemar, the hero of the holy war in Atjeh. The man was already a legend in his lifetime. He had fought side by side with his fearless wife Tjoet Nyak Dien for years. He made the Dutch believe that he was on their side, they entrusted him with large sums of money and a quantity of weapons with which he eventually turned against them. 'The betrayal of Teukoe Oemar', his U-turn was mentioned, and the Dutch would never forgive him, but the Atjehnese people had deep admiration for his deed. The story made an impression on Boeyoeng because it reminded him of his mother-in-law, who was a namesake of the heroic Tjoet Nyak Dien. Now Teukoe Oemar was dead. On the beach of Meulaboh – of all places Meulaboh! – the Dutch had captured him. The undisputed leader of the Atjehnese armed forces had lost his life, but his wife Tjoet Nyak Dien fought on undaunted – an aside that the narrator added almost laconically to his story, but which filled Boeyoeng with pride, as if it were his own mother- in-law who bravely continued the fight. It also filled him with homesickness for his beach in Meulaboh. Since Engko was no longer there, he withdrew more and more into himself. He was thirty-six years old, but he felt that his task in Mejong Lodaja was done. He had founded a kampong, had a son and lost a wife. He had buried his mother here as well as her new husband. It was enough. He wanted to return to Atjeh.