The deeply rutted narrow mud track plunged down from the village to the highway through damp, cool shade, flanked by bamboo fences and rows of cassava, coconut, and papaya trees. Everywhere in this island, where there weren’t fields of rice or cane, where even two or three shaggy-headed trees gathered, shaking weary heads in the slow breeze, there in the brown and green shade, hidden as sunken galleons in murky reefs, would be houses, compounds, people, hundreds and thousands of people, and their animals. This was not the outskirts of Winnipeg at dusk, with, as far as the eye could see, the indulgence, the luxury of space, the illusion of individual freedom.
He spun onto the road and laid rubber careening down the main highway that would take him first eastward toward Surakarta, called Solo by the locals, and then southwest toward Klaten and Yogyakarta. Technically, one drove on the left, but in reality, you drove wherever there was room. This morning, he had come cross-country from near Klaten. The Perusahaan Susu Senang farm was located just off the stretch of road between Klaten and the T-intersection where you could head to Solo or the city of Boyolali. The road from the farm near Klaten to Boyolali cross-country was rough, even by Indonesian standards, and he wasn’t sure how much more abuse his little Suzuki could take.
Even this main road, a one-lane, pot-holed blacktop, left a few things to be desired. Veering instinctively from one available road space to the next, he drove down the brown and green canyon of mahogany trees. The trees, neatly planted along the roadsides, were a legacy from the Dutch colonials. They kept the roadsides green-cool in the mid-day heat. A few months from now, in the monsoons, they would be less useful. During a heavy downpour, this road could be transformed in less than an hour into a torrent of water. Kretek booths and chickens and bicycles and pedestrians would be washed away in the sloshing wake of buses, Land Cruisers, and a variety of other Japanese cars. Now in the dry heat, it was like a video arcade game, dodging buses and trucks. It seemed a good metaphor for life here in general, at least for a middle-aged white foreigner. Surprises seemed to jump into his line of vision and then disappear without warning. Sweat pooled at his neck and spilled down his spine. His lungs balked at sucking in hot diesel fumes. He rolled up his window and turned on the air conditioning. The hair on the back of his neck prickled as the sweat evaporated. He thought that if he were an American dairy cow in this place he might just drop dead, poison or no poison.
***
A week ago Ab had taken a trip to Bali, his first vacation after almost a year here. It seemed to him, with the normal half-days of work on Fridays and Saturdays, and the fact that cattle diseases never took holidays, that he had been working every day since he arrived. The days of the week were a blur.
He had not relished the flight, but it seemed somehow unconscionable to be so close to that proverbial paradise and not visit at least once. His queasiness about flying had less to do with the perils of taking off than with an exaggerated fear of landing. He was usually fine on take-off, although even that required a stiff drink these days. He was amazed and exhilarated that a chunk of growling, screeching metal, more improbable even than a bumble bee, could snap the stretching bands of gravity and spring free, leaping over mountains. The flight itself, high above green jungles, volcanoes, and wisps of clouds, was sufficiently unreal to require simply a suspension of belief. Landing was another matter entirely. How did the pilot know just the right moment, the one exact second, when that easing down to the runway was possible, was necessary to avoid somersaulting steel over scream into death at the end of the runway? It was a question, a dream, from his childhood, one that had followed him, plagued him, and had taken on new layers of meaning. He knew deep down that this fear was not about flying at all; it had something to do with his life, the fleeing from the religious traps of his childhood, the fear of landing somewhere and finding himself ensnared in some deathly, prefabricated, unquestioning mental and physical routine. Not being able to clearly articulate the question, he was no longer sure he would recognize the answer even if it stalked him, caught him with claws and teeth, wounded him.
It was a short, one-hour flight from Yogyakarta to the airport in Denpasar, the capital of Bali. He stayed at the paradisiacal white Poppies Cottages, set in a pleasant green garden with splashing streams, ponds and winding paths, surrounded by walls over which cascaded bougainvillea. He slept late, feasted under tall palms at an open-air restaurant on jaffles, specially toasted and sealed sandwiches with cheese or bananas and peanut butter, sat in the sunken tub, sprawled on the bed and watched the overhead fan circling until he dozed off. Later he walked down the sandy path to the beach, and across the foot-stinging, achingly hot white sand of Kuta Beach. Too late, he realized that this paradise was a fantasy created not by hedonistic noble savages, but by self-absorbed white folks quarrelling with their mortality. He felt old there, amid the bared, perky twenty-year-old tits, the smooth legs, and beach-surfer-boy bodies. The fluffy clouds garlanded the blue sky, singing lines from Yeats, the young in one another’s arms, no country for old men. It wasn’t so much his thirty-five years, which wasn’t, he thought, so very old. It was more the weight of his life, growing up in the midst of the 1960s culture of free love and happiness, but unable to break out of a Mennonite upbringing which defined love as bondage to Jesus and duty to community. It made a person feel old. Sitting on the sand, he looked over at the German girl with the green eyes and the tiny multi-coloured braids all over her head, trying to be lackadaisical, making conversation. Trying to be careless, like her, but his Mennonite eyes, like terriers, never having been taught exactly how to look at a bare-breasted woman, kept escaping him, nipping down for a quick check. She finally picked up her towel and wandered off to another spot on the beach, far away from him.
Ab spent the rest of that first day drinking Bir Bintang on the beach, getting sunburned. The next day he rented a car and drove up the narrow road through a village of professional stone sculptors, guarded by a giant stone Ganesh, special price for you today, and another whole village of painters, the dazzling greens and reds and yellows running amok across the canvases, rice paddies and people and mountains and amazing birds. At the rim of the quiet volcano, he looked out through the blue haze to the east. The next island over was Lombok, where local residents tied goats and chickens to trees so that tourists get a closer look at Komodo dragons, the last of the big lizards, beasts of myth and fear reduced to family entertainment. Between Bali and Lombok was the invisible Wallace’s line; on the Balinese side Alfred Russel Wallace had identified Asian parrots and other birds that resembled those of Java and Westward. Beyond Lombok, the string of idyllic Spice Islands strung out like a green jade necklace to Timor, where the Indonesian army was quietly killing the Catholic Timorians. The animals in those islands resembled those of New Guinea and Australia. Out there, stranger animals than Europeans had ever imagined lingered in lost forests. It was a watershed line in evolution and ecology, and told a story that, perhaps, contained clues to the meaning of our own troubled and brilliant human story.
Ab felt dizzy, as if he were in a Balinese painting, where there is no perspective either of space or time, where everything is in a profusion of now. And yet, beneath all the unchanging green utopian villages, the volcanic magma circled for a way to reach the surface, the Komodo dragons pondered the blond children from Holland even as they tore at the goat flesh, the rebels in the hills of Timor polished their guns, and, deep inside his own restless heart, something had stirred, raised its head, and then disappeared.
The flight back to Yogyakarta was awful. A fog, unusual for Bali at this time of year, set in around the airport the morning that Ab left. Abruptly, halfway down the runway at the Denpasar airport, the engines died and the lights went out. He tightened his grip on the edge of the seat. The passengers grumbled, but there was no word, in the half-dark plane, from either the cockpit or the stewardesses. In a moment, the mist let out a snarl and two men on a 65 cc Honda motorbike materialized beside the plane, propped the cycle on a kick-stand, and disappeared under the body of the plane. There was a loud, metallic banging and then the airplane engines kicked in and the lights came back on. Without further ado or explanation, the plane returned to the head of the runway and made a full take-off. Ab recalled what Peter Findlay, an Australian intelligence officer, whatever that meant, had said. Australia wouldn’t allow Indonesian planes landing rights because they had mostly been bought second hand from industrialized countries and hadn’t been properly maintained. It spoke well neither for the sellers nor the buyers. Nor did it inspire confidence in those passengers who knew this. Ab had not stopped deep-breathing until they were at cruising altitude.
He examined his face in the window: the bristles of brown hair over his somewhat large head, recently cut short by a street barber, the somewhat ragged beard, the boyishly round face looking somehow gaunt and weathered, the weary-seeming blue eyes. Was that just the start of wrinkles at the corners? Then he pulled out the bottle of gin from his carry-on, sipped, and stared out the window into the blurred vision of green mountains and white clouds. He recalled again what Peter Findlay, or maybe this time it had been the Brit Harold Wilkinson, had explained to him. The Yogyakarta runway was particularly short to accommodate a river cutting across the end of the valley. For landing, the surrounding mountains made it necessary to drop fast in order to hit the runway with enough room left over to come to a stop. My body is like a rickety, single-engine plane circling, circling, running out of fuel, he had thought, staring out the window at the tops of the volcanoes pushing up through the clouds, tipping back his bottle. But there is nowhere I really want to land.
***
Bali now seemed like another country, another age. He felt cold, suddenly. He turned off the AC and opened the window.
He swerved to miss one of those ubiquitous mini-buses which had just careened past him, the driver’s helper hanging out the door, condescending to pat the hood of Ab’s Suzuki, as if to quiet an impatient dog. Everyone called them Colts, because many of the old originals were Mitsubishi Colts, but Ab, having seen the wobbly running of newborn horses, brought other images to mind. No sooner had the Colt swerved through the breech than it screeched to a halt directly in front of him. He cut sharply to the right and around it. A wrinkled, mouse-like grandmother under a gigantic sack of carrots was unceremoniously dumped from the Colt into the grime and dust beside the road. That was how fresh produce from the mountains reached valley markets: resilient grandmothers. In the same authoritative sweep of his arm, as a buffalo’s tongue might encircle and pull up a clump of elephant grass, the helper pulled in a neatly pressed student, trim in his white shirt and blue pants. It was not entirely clear that the student was waiting for a bus, but those kinds of details could always be worked out later. In this country, if you weren’t for a moment paying attention, you could be pulled into things pretty quickly. Ab always paid attention, except when it involved women, where he paid attention to the wrong things. Four hundred years of Mennonite history couldn’t, after all, be overcome in a lifetime.
He passed the cluster of sheds that served as a bus stop, a kretek shop, and local hobnobbing place for the underemployed millions. A smoky whiff of cloves fanned his face. Damn, those kretek cigarettes smelled good. This was followed by the ubiquitous fried chicken and the sweet rot of old bananas and papaya. All was inextricably mixed with the blast of American country music from a kiosk selling pirated tapes. He breathed it all in, filling his head with the overwhelming celebration of scents, so far from the austere prairie air of his childhood.
Ab mulled over his situation. He was here on contract with a Canadian government project to import North American dairy cows into Java. He was the veterinarian who was supposed to keep them healthy, and train a counterpart, Soesanto, to take his place over the period of a couple of years. Ab’s childhood friend George Grobowski was the animal scientist who was overall project manager. The idea was to make Indonesia self-sufficient in milk production, rather than relying on imported powdered milk from New Zealand. Susu Senang was the first stop, after quarantine, for all the cows on this project. From there, after a period of acculturation to the tropical heat, vaccination and treatment for parasites and infections, cows were distributed to small-holder farms throughout central Java in a kind of pyramid scheme. The farmers got one or two cows, but were then required to buy extra feed and to sell their milk back to a cooperative run by the main farm. Given the cheap price of imported powder and the crowded landscape of Java, Ab thought the idea was hare-brained, but not the worst development project he had ever seen. Besides, like many expatriates in these kinds of jobs, he had motives besides altruism for taking the job.
Ab and George had grown up as neighbours and best childhood buddies in Winnipeg. They had met Sarah when they were all in their teens. She was from the village of Plumstein, Alberta, but her widowed father had sent her to a Mennonite summer camp on Lake Winnipeg. Two years older than Ab and George, she had then attended the same Mennonite high school in Winnipeg as Ab as a boarding student. George, whose mother was absent and whose father was, at least to him, unknown, lived across the street from Ab with his grandparents. George was aggressively gregarious, and seemed, to Ab, to be lacking a certain sense of belonging, of home, both physically and spiritually. It was the kind of friendship that created distance even as it begged proximity. George seemed to find Mennonites, particularly some Mennonite girls, aggravatingly interesting. The three of them remained buddies all through their teenaged years. Ab had had it in his mind that he would someday marry Sarah. He had always, somehow, known that. He thought of it as God’s will. They were after all both Mennonites, and George was officially Eastern Orthodox, although he seemed to have, in his search for belonging, espoused a New Age mix of any and all religions.
Sarah was the only one who seemed to have career plans. She had always talked about being a veterinarian, and her enthusiasm was infectious. Without any clear direction, and wanting to spend time together, George and Ab had also signed up for animal science and biology classes. Then, in 1967, when they had completed their second year of university and Sarah had completed her undergraduate degree, a bombshell: George proposed to Sarah. They were married the following year. Ab left to go to veterinary college in Saskatoon, then to a job in northern Alberta, and then on to study tropical veterinary medicine in Edinburgh. Sarah completed a master’s degree in biology, and, while George worked on his own master’s, worked for a few years as a research assistant at the university. They were both working in 1974, paying off debts, and Sarah was talking again about veterinary school, when Frieda was born. By that time, George was moving up in the feed co-op where he worked. And then Nettie came along, and Sarah’s career seemed to go on hold.
Then, just over a year ago, out of the blue, this opportunity had come up for the old friends to reunite. George had applied for, and gotten, the job as project manager for a dairy development scheme. Surplus dairy cows were being “given” to Indonesia by a large American dairy company. In truth, it was a way of dumping surplus cows as farmers in the American Midwest were consolidated into larger farms or went out of business. Canadians were providing the management expertise for the project. What they needed was a veterinarian to help the faculty at the local veterinary college recognize the diseases that imported cattle might suffer from, and to provide the best veterinary care possible. Was Ab interested? Ab, with recently acquired credentials in tropical veterinary medicine, thought: Why not? It was a chance to work in an interesting place with old friends. He arrived just a few months after George and Sarah. Now that he was here, he realized something else: why he had gone to work so far away from Winnipeg, but closer to Sarah’s home of Plumstein, why he had never settled into a steady relationship with anyone. He was still, deep down, not over Sarah.
His wandering mind jerked into the panic-mode present, a hood-mounted foghorn blasting into his back window. The Colt was off again, snorting at his back bumper. The driver’s helper hung out the side door and waved an annoyed hand at the little Suzuki. Ab wiped the soot-filled sweat from his forehead and reached into the bag of sunflower seeds on the passenger seat next to him. He was tempted to ease out further into the middle of the road. Who would defer, the Colt, or the on-coming full-sized Mercedes bus from Yogya? From the wrecks of both Colts and buses that littered the roadside, Ab knew that he wasn’t the only one who occasionally tempted fate. The Colt blasted its horn again, nosing around him. Without thinking, he pulled to the right, toward the middle of the road. The Colt pulled back. He was starting to feel good again.
***
He was now in the wake of a big Mercedes diesel bus, World War Two vintage. A great black cloud of particulates swam through the shimmering heat, billowing into his face. This was the scent of the modern tropics, progress with an industrial face: partly combusted ashes and diesel fuel. He rolled up his window, wiped the profuse sweat from his forehead again, pulled at his beard, brushed a few sunflower seed shells from his shirt front, took two deep breaths and shifted down. His sweaty hands slipped on the wheel. The Colt behind him blasted its foghorn furiously. The two magnets in his pocket were pressing against his leg and he lifted his hip to pull them out of his pocket and drop them on top of the dirty coveralls crumpled up on the seat beside him, just as he had to swerve to miss a man on a bicycle carrying two large rolls of palm-leaf matting. Just past him, he dodged a horse cart before the bus in front of him slammed to a full stop. He swung the Jimny around the bus, but the Colt behind him was double passing. Suddenly, around the edge of the Colt, a motorcyclist was triple passing, almost into the face of an oncoming truck.
A beggarly looking chicken made a frantic dive for an imaginary grain of corn on the road just in front of him, leaving fluffs of feathers hovering in the air. These were the closest living relatives of the majestic Javanese Jungle Fowl, progenitor of all the world’s races of chicken. Reduced to ragged beggars in their own paradise, they were marginalised, reduced to scavengers by fat white imported birds fed imported feed in imported houses on the outskirts of the big cities. Welcome to the future. In his rear-view mirror, Ab could see that the chicken had made it back to the safety of the roadside. A girl on a bicycle, also swerving to miss it, was not so lucky. She had plunged off the road into the hot, slick, sun-glaring surface of a newly planted rice paddy. She stood up, dripping and laughing.
Ab looked beyond the road at the paddy fields in various stages of planting, sheets of black water or blinding mirrors where the sun hit them or bright green or slightly yellowing. Separating the paddies, like fence-rows, stood thin cassava trees or newer leguminous plants brought in by development workers to squeeze even more out of this little bit of land. Ahead of him, the man on the motorcycle had already disappeared into the haze.
Waluyo, that was name of the guy on the motorbike at Gandringan. Was he connected to the cow poisonings? Morose little devil. Used to hang around the veterinary school. Now, according to Soesanto, Waluyo was the new farm manager at Perusahaan Susu Senang. He would have had access to the magnets. The cows were distributed from there one and two at a time to smallholder farmers in the area: a master-serf relationship, since the farmers were then in hock for life to the owner of the big mother. This was called, by some at least, development.
Ab took a deep breath. If Waluyo was killing cows, what was in it for him? And then he thought, if I am driving dangerously around a tropical island trying to change a complex culture I don’t understand, what is in it for me?