Song and the Truth

One Every day, as soon as the sun went down, tiny lizards climbed up the walls of our veranda. "Look, the tjitjaks are here." The night people lit the lamps, in the rooms and on the veranda. The ladies who'd come to tea took their leave and went home. The day was over, and night was beginning. My mother accompanied her guests as far as the waringin tree and waved to the visitors and their children as they left. I stood on the veranda listening to the sounds coming from the Lembang road. I could hear the cars driving uphill, up the mountain, where the sun was already asleep in the volcano. Or hear them driving downhill, to Bandung, the town where the zoo was and my father's clinic. There were often parties in town, and the cars drove faster then. My mother came back; I could hear her singing before I saw her. She didn't hurry, she sauntered along, stopping now and then, so that the bright spot she formed in the darkness grew larger only very slowly. When it reached the point where I could make out more than the color of her dress, I could also see her platinum blond curls and even her bright eyes. By then she was so close that she could touch me. "Well, we've got the veranda to ourselves again," said Mummy. She stretched out on the settee and beckoned to me. "All those visitors," she sighed, "and never anyone you can talk to." The tjitjaks had found their places. On the ceiling they had frozen into wooden ornaments, but they pounced like greased lightning on any insects that strayed close to them. The lamps burned in the rooms and on the veranda, so that night could not descend on us. The night abolished the distinction between inside and outside. At night it was cool and dark everywhere. Everything was safe--people, animals, and plants--beneath a dark dome as large as the world. When the sky, the earth, and the water had attained the same dark hue, the toke arrived. I waited for the toke every night. He was the big brother of the tjitjaks. I did not need to go to bed before the first toke had called. By that time all the other nocturnal creatures were there: flying foxes, crickets, bullfrogs. Their noisy concert was in full swing. The toke rarely showed itself, but every so often it called out its own name loudly, so that we and other tokes knew where it was. The more often the toke called, the more luck it brought. Everyone could hear it, including us. The moment the toke started up, we would stop talking. We counted under our breath. One . . . two . . . three--it went on for ages. Would there be another call? Yes, one more. Quickly on: four . . . five . . . six . . . seven. Then it became more and more exciting, because once it got to nine, the luck would really start flowing. If the toke called twelve times, we would have long life, many brave sons, an enchanting daughter, and a vast fortune. Later my mother told me that the night before we left for Europe, the toke had called thirteen times. When the toke had called a few times, when scarcely anyone else was talking on the veranda, I was taken to my room. At night a new life began for me. Once the sun had set, I no longer needed to remember what had happened during the day; the night erased the hard white things just as the sponge on my mother's blackboard erased her chalk letters. At night I could say and do what I liked. I needed only to see it in my head and it happened. If I wanted to get up and go outside to see the moon, I was immediately lifted out of bed and taken out in someone's arms. The night people petted me, laughed the whole time, and asked nothing. I was given as much pink syrup as I liked by the night people, and soft green sticky cake to go with it. I was allowed to touch everything. I was allowedRuebsamen, Helga is the author of 'Song and the Truth' with ISBN 9780375402616 and ISBN 0375402616.