Along with millions of Javanese, Ab usually ate his breakfast from one of the small street-side cafes, or warungs. Most Javanese ate out because they couldn’t afford the cost of kerosene to run cooking stoves, this in an OPEC country of all things. Ab ate out at least one meal a day on principle, to be with the people. He sometimes cooked for himself, but refused to hire a cook. A night watchman he could justify, and someone to wash the dishes and clean the house, just to keep the ants at bay. But a cook? A man who couldn’t cook was only half a man, always dependent on others to stay alive. Once, shortly after he had arrived, Sarah had told him that she understood his Mennonite neuroses, but argued that hiring as many servants as he could was a way of ploughing some of his exorbitant salary back into the local economy. Even as she argued this, she was working in the kitchen beside their cook. When Ab pointed this out, she nearly throttled him. That was before he knew that the Indonesian government refused to issue her a work permit, and that she was seriously demoralized by this.
He looked over the menu. A plate of fried rice was the usual for Javanese, but too greasy first thing in the morning for Ab. Nor could he stomach the thought of chicken-intestine soup. A bowl of real chicken and rice stew, soto ayam, hit the spot. He sat on the splintery wooden bench against the linoleum-covered counter, barely wide enough for his bowl of soto. The shop was often packed at this time of day, but with Ramadan on, all the Muslims were fasting, so he could spread his elbows a bit.
***
He stared at the poster directly in front of his nose, his mind, at first, drifting, trying to rise above the rich scent of rotting papayas, pineapple, bananas, and durian wafting up from the open sewer just outside the door. Durian: was that in season already? Durian was the fruit with the hard spiky outside and the mucoid inside, so smelly that it was illegal to carry on buses and planes in Indonesia. It was an acquired taste, like eating ice ream in an outhouse, George had said. George, who was afraid of nothing, tried everything, in religion, in life, and actually liked durian. The smells increased with the heat of the day. It would be worse later. The poster in front of him came suddenly into focus: the turquoise blue of Lake Louise, Alberta, surrounded by the snow-capped Rocky Mountains. What struck him first was not the cultural displacement of seeing a poster of a Canadian scene in Java, but, for a brief, sharp moment, an intense desire for snow, for a biting wind in his face and big flakes melting on his eyelashes and on his beard. He wished for a few moments of quiet respite in one of the snow forts he and George used to dig and build every year in the great heaps of hardened snow along the side of the driveway. He would sit there alone after school in the cool silence. What actually came to him was a memory from his time of working in Beaver Lodge.
The left flank of the cow is puckered wide open where I have just pulled the calf out, her body heat steaming around my arms. I take my time up to my elbows inside her, sewing up the uterus, and hold my hands inside so they thaw sufficiently for me to sew up the flank muscles, quickly, flaking the ice off my surgical instruments. She is tethered to a pole in a three-sided pole barn. I am up to my knees in a drift of shifting, sandy-dry snow. My feet are numb in rubber boots. When I finally get to sewing up the last layers of skin, the cow’s internal body temperature must have dropped a couple of degrees. She survives.
He pulled himself out of his memory like a shirt from the wash. That was about all the snow he needed for now: one picture and a few clear remembrances. That’s what home was for, wasn’t it? To provide comfort and strength in places far away? One wouldn’t want to live there.
***
Ab stood up and made his way into the already stifling heat on the street. He flagged down a becak. He loved these over-decorated, streamered, hot-rod bicycle rickshaws that filled the streets of Yogyakarta and other Indonesian cities, and which the government was trying to make illegal. How could a big oil-exporting country tolerate bicycle transportation? It was un-Indonesian. They had thrown thousands of them into the Jakarta harbour. Ab bargained half-heartedly with the cheery stud in the torn University of Florida T-shirt, another farm boy out of work. He eased himself into the seat in front of the cyclist, closed his eyes, and felt the bump of the wheels rolling under him. Why would anyone in his right mind want to travel any other way?
When he got into the office, he picked up the English-language Indonesian newspaper lying on the table just inside the door. “Press asked to curb crime reports,” said a headline. The government was concerned that too much crime reporting might give readers, both Indonesians and foreigners, the wrong idea about their country. “All meetings banned close to election,” read another headline. And “People spend too much time in the toilet and partying, and not enough demanding political rights,” says Foreign Minister. And, in small print, on the second page, a brief mention of a disturbance at Borobudur and about a man who had been taken prisoner for political terrorism in 1966. Only now, 16 years later, had he been sentenced to be shot.
“Well Dr. Ab, are you reading about the Sukabumi lass who turns into a monkey at the full moon, or the protest by the transvestites that they have been insulted by the Vice President?” Soesanto had come in, the quiet thump and swish of his cane and dragged leg across the floor. He was looking over Ab’s shoulder.
Ab folded the newspaper into squares, with the article about the shooting of the prisoner on top. “I was reading about the execution of Budiharto. Seems a bit after the fact, doesn’t it? To execute a man so long after he commits a crime? Or do they really think he master-minded the explosions at Borobudur and Prambanan?”
Soesanto took the paper and stared at the article, his face struggling, it seemed, with what could or could not be said. “Those kinds of statutes of limitations only apply to simple crimes like murder and theft. If once you have had the wrong political ideas, you are at risk for the rest of your life.” He set down the paper, his face a cipher.
Ab turned toward the computer. “And what about the President. If he has the wrong ideas, is he also at risk?”
Soesanto leaned on his cane, and over Ab’s shoulder, too close for Ab to turn around and look at the Indonesian’s expression. The voice over his shoulder said quietly, “We were going to check some computer files this morning, weren’t we?”
“Yes. Some records from all the villages in Boyolali District, including Gandringan. I wanted to see if that cow we saw yesterday was part of a pattern of some sort.” The computer had been purchased by Ab as part of his program to improve diagnostic record keeping. Although pirated computers were already becoming readily available in Indonesia, their use for a project like this was novel. It required both good data and a willingness to make it openly available to others. Ab had started with the illusion that technical information might be politically neutral, but he was rapidly learning that this was not necessarily so. Getting someone who lived in a dictatorship to design data systems that were transparent and open to questioning was an uphill battle.
He had been working in particular on setting up computerized records for Susu Senang: records on the destination of the new animals, and any disease information they had on them after they got to the village were supposed to be included. How many sick or dead ones, for instance, had there been in the last few weeks? What had the clinical symptoms been? Were the death rates in imported cattle really higher than in the local ones? Ab had written a special health-reporting program for the veterinary college and hoped the technician had been using it. Now, he tried to call up the disease reports file, but the computer program responded with: No such file exists. No files have been created. “Shit,” he mumbled.
Soesanto leaned even closer. “Is anything the matter?”
Ab put his forehead down on to the keyboard. “Nothing. Except that our disease data seem to have disappeared.”
Soesanto sat down at the desk next to him. “Yes, I had meant to tell you we have been having some problems. Power ups and downs. Tri was working on it and then suddenly all the files disappeared. But there are paper records.” He waved at a great stack of papers in the corner of the room. “If you can fix the program, we’ll just get Tri to type it in again. That’s her job.” It occurred to Ab that, after he left the country, all records of this and other possibly embarrassing epidemics could well disappear. He looked over at Tri, her tiny, supple frame, her slender arms at the keyboard, her mascara-accentuated eyes with the permanently dilated pupils, her gentle smile. He took a deep breath.
“Yeah, I guess so. I just wanted to see if we could sort out any patterns in Boyolali. Is it all in Gandringan? Is it really an epidemic, or just random deaths we happen to notice because they are imported cattle which are monitored? For all we know, that cow yesterday at Gandringan was an anomaly. Going back through the paper records is time-consuming. By the time we get it back into the computer and analyse it, the outbreak could be long over.” He wondered if this was exactly what someone wanted to happen, or if he was just being paranoid.
“An interesting concept, consuming time. Life consumes time. Is the consumption of time important?”
Ab tried to read the slight smile on his face. “In the face of an epidemic it is. I suppose we’ll need to go up there and do a more thorough investigation.”
The telephone rang. Soesanto picked up the old black phone. “Yah? Kenapa? Berapa? Yah, bisa.”
He hung up and turned to Ab. “That was your friend George. A new shipment of cows has arrived in port at Cilacap. He wants the animals checked before they get trucked up to the farm. If we want to do health checks on them we should go…” He looked at his watch. “It is about a six-hour drive. We can still get there tonight.”
Within an hour they had packed bags and equipment—needles, drugs, papers, pencils, labels—and were on their way. They took Ab’s Suzuki, since a local government functionary, whose connection to the project was unclear, and whom Ab had never met, was using the project Land Cruiser and driver for unspecified project business.
Ab tried to take his mind off the road by talking with Soesanto. Here in the car, away from anyone else who might understand English, he seemed willing to talk, his tongue loosened like a knife from its sheath. Soesanto pulled out a package of kretek, lit one, and watched the end crackle as he sucked in.
“That is bad for you and bad for me, you know.” Ab looked at the sunflower seeds in his palm, which he was about to pop into his mouth. “My habits are messy but at least people don’t die from eating seeds. And I’m getting as much smoke as you are.” Even as he said this, Ab drew the sweet clove scent from Soesanto’s kretek into his lungs.
Soesanto took the kretek out of his mouth, looked at it sideways, pulled a strand of tobacco from the corner of his lip. “Worse even than you imagine, Dr. Ab. We used to have a surplus of cloves, so the government invented these clove-cigarettes to use up the crop and make some money on the side. Of course we Indonesians being a patriotic bunch took up the cause, helping the economy. Now we are hooked and have to import cloves to make the damned things.” He paused to take a deep draw. “On the other hand the invisible hand directing the market economy is making tons of money, and it’s population control, you know, after the fact, all that untreatable cancer, so it’s not all bad. And what’s the story on your sunflower seeds?”
“In southern Manitoba, the province where I grew up, it is the equivalent to smoking. At least for the religious group I belong to.” He waved in an off-hand way, as if it didn’t matter. “We were not allowed to smoke. So we were encouraged in our seed addiction. Now, when I’m anxious, I chew to relax.”
Soesanto eyed him through a haze. “And does it relax you?”
Ab rubbed his beard. “No.” He considered this a moment. I could quit, he thought to himself, if I could find a good reason. Isn’t that what all addicts said?
Soesanto dropped his kretek, ground it into the rubber mat with his foot, and looked out the window. “We don’t study the toxic side effects of things like kretek here. Anymore.” He became thoughtful. “We had a great toxicologist at the veterinary school once. Lost his job in 1966.”
“Were there many?”
“Half the faculty. Two-thirds of the student body.”
“And what happened to them?”
Soesanto looked at Ab as if trying to plumb the depths of his ignorance. He shrugged his shoulders. “Gone.”
“Gone? Left the university?”
Ab could feel Soesanto’s whole body tense up beside him and felt the intensity of his gaze into the side of his head. “Permanently, physically, gone. Deleted. Killed. Like a million or more people all over the country. In 1965, Indonesia had the third largest communist party in the world. We had three million members, twenty million supporters. Indonesians had two big choices: the nationalist party drew all those who cared only about Greater Indonesia. The Communist Party attracted anyone who had a social conscience and thought we should take an active role in reshaping the Cold War world. We were neither Soviet Stalinism nor American capitalism. We helped create a third way, the non-aligned movement, and became a world leader. In 1955 our President, Sukharno, brought this Third World together in Bandung, just up the highway from here.
“That was how it was in 1965. But I think neither the Americans nor the Soviets liked independent-minded people. It was either for us or against us. By a couple of years later, seven generals were dead, Sukharno was under house arrest, and Suharto was in power. The one general left standing. It was a bloodbath. In some places the slaughter was a settling of old scores, religious, political, or otherwise. In other places it was a simple butchering of all Communist Party members, or Chinese-looking people.”
“Why Chinese?”
Soesanto folded his hands in his lap. “There were rumours that the Chinese were communist infiltrators. They had money. They were Christians and friends of Christians. They were different.” He pulled out another kretek. “We went from having the third largest Communist Party in the world to have no party at all. Where I worked there was an ad hoc committee to decide who should be killed, and who should be spared. There were people who sold official nationalist party membership certificates so that you could prove you weren’t a Communist.”
“And your toxicologist?”
“According to the reports, he moved back to his family farm near Klaten.” He raised his kretek and exhaled a cloud of blue. “The farm which is now the base for your project.”
“And then?”
“He was not happy about the expropriation of his land for the public good. He hung around and worked on the farm, first as a farm hand, and then was hired as manager for the project. Some foreigner thought he seemed to have the right experience. Then he, too, disappeared. Recently, actually. Just a few weeks ago.”
Ab let this sink in slowly. “And you?”
“Why am I alive?” He leaned down to rub his bad leg. “Good question. Suharto was America’s civilized answer to Pol Pot. He only killed half as many people as Pot. Makes a person want to flock to the American side.” He straightened back up, thinking, turning over rocks in his mind that he must have visited a thousand times before. “For one thing, I am not Chinese. And why would they shoot a guy with a gimpy leg? What harm can I do? Harmless and non-Chinese.” He grimaced, looked over at Ab, looked out the window. “I was in the Soviet Union in 1965, studying virology. Actually I was in Europe at a conference when the killing started, and a Russian colleague at the conference managed to get me a graduate position in the U.S., in Michigan. I worked on the effects of cold stress on the immune system of calves.” He smiled through the clove-tobacco haze. “Wonderfully appropriate, don’t you think?”
“Why come back?”
He drew hard on his kretek and thought a minute. He waved his hand for Ab to look out the window. They were slowly making their way through a seemingly endless stream of children on bicycles and on foot, all in their maroon and white or blue and white uniforms.
“Children coming home from school,” said Soesanto. “Millions. Maybe without hope. Or maybe some hope for a future. Some small measure of justice. All that sentimental gut-wrenching stuff people die for.” He paused. “Or live for. I would have had nothing to live for in the U.S. Here, my life still means something.”
“You feel safe now? Gimpy leg and all? After all these years?”
Soesanto fell silent, leaned forward and rubbed his bad leg again. “You want to hear another irony? That Russian colleague of mine was actually working for the KGB, and came to the U.S. with me in ’66. But he didn’t want graduate studies. He was after money. Said he could use his KGB skills selling cigarettes as a symbol of freedom. You convince people to smoke because it’s a symbol of freedom. You get them hooked. A kind of slavery to large capitalist enterprises, not much different from Stalin’s state businesses. A lot more money than selling Brezhnev as a symbol of justice, but not all that much different.” He chuckled quietly. “And a lot of the best customers are the same people who fled the Soviet terror. They’ve become slaves by nature, and refuse to see it.”
“And you?”
Soesanto regarded his kretek as if it were some strange archeological artefact he’d just picked up. “Small comforts. It’s all some of us have left. If I live long enough to get cancer, I will have had a good long life.”
Ab pulled himself away from the mental and emotional confusion he felt arising within him. “So your colleague is living his capitalist dream, and you, now you have democracy.”
“We can vote now, for the government party.”
“Only for the government party?”
“Everyone who works for the government must vote for the government party.”
“But how do they know? It’s secret ballot, isn’t it?”
Soesanto snorted. He looked down at his shirt, a government issue batik from Suharto family factories, tugged at the lapel.
“And if you don’t vote for them?”
“You lose your shirt.” He smiled at his own joke. “With you in it.”
They were driving past rice paddies now. Everywhere rice at practically all stages of harvest, all made possible by an intricate irrigation system, itself dependent on a complex arrangement of mutual social obligations. And separating the rice fields, rows of orange trees, or cassava, or bananas. Nothing wasted. How much further could you push this system before it reached a limit? Was it a delicate house of cards? Was it at the limit now? Was there any way of knowing?
They arrived at Cilacap after dark to discover that the cattle had already, at least so they were told, been checked over by local government livestock officials. “I guess we can give them a quick check over the fence tomorrow. Maybe take a few temperatures. Listen to a few rumen movements.” Ab looked at an opened package of the drug the quarantine station workers had given the animals as a preventive treatment, then handed it to Soesanto.
“Why would they use this? You and I both know it doesn’t work.”
Soesanto handed the package back and smiled. “Ah, you and I, yes, we know that.”
“You don’t think the quarantine station director knows that?”
“The quarantine station director just takes orders from Jakarta. Maybe someone in Jakarta got a good price on this. Maybe from a factory owned by Sani Sentosa, a friend of the President, the money behind the project.” Soesanto spat on the ground beside him and paused. “And a good friend of your expatriate colleagues the Wilkinsons, by the way.”
They sat outside their guest house in wicker chairs. Ab leaned back and wondered what to do with that last bit of information. He stared at the porch ceiling, covered with tiny lizards. He watched as a cecak approached a fly near the bare overhead bulb. Bang. Fly gone. Or maybe somebody wants to see these cattle dead, was the thought that crossed Ab’s mind. Drinking milk was a habit introduced from Europe and northern Asiatic cultures, so this dairy production project fit neither the culture nor the climate. Still, there were enough socially mobile people in this country who wished to emulate western ways that somebody could make a fast buck bringing dairy cattle into Java as part of an aid program. Every step of the way—shipping, quarantine station, trucking, the distribution farm, villages— someone was making money. You could bet it wasn’t the farmers.
“Do you think there’s someone who really wants these cattle dead?” Ab said, abruptly.
Soesanto drew long on his kretek. “They are a special gift from the President to the people. Why would anyone want them to die? Probably all just Third World inefficiency, don’t you think?”
There was a long silence. Soesanto narrowed his eyes as the smoke came back into his face. He stubbed out his kretek and set it down carefully beside him, staring into the darkness. “Think, Dr. Ab. How did that farmer say his cow died?”
“Well, they get stiff and then…”
“Think again, Dr. Ab. Remember what he said.”
A long pause. A couple of neurons connected in Ab’s brain. “They will die…unless they are killed for salvage.”
“We might want to find out if they all die that way.”
“But why?”
“Think, Dr. Ab, think. What is coming up in a few days?”
“Coming up? What do you mean, coming up? Oh.” He felt stupid. “Eid al-Fitr.”
“The feast of. When there’s a big market for meat. We might want to find out how the cattle are butchered, and which butchers are involved, if there’s more than one. They’ll want halal meat, which means there must be at least one proper butcher involved. I would start with the fellow we saw in Gandringan.”
“Salvage butchering…brilliant, brilliant. Could get it cheap that way, and sell dear.” Ab laughed through his nose. “Okay, so let’s say it is deliberate poisoning. Say with strychnine, which is what I suspect. I’ve never seen strychnine poisoning in a cow. It’s a dog poison. I don’t think it’s in the textbooks. You’d need bags of it. Where would you get it?”
“Dr. Ab, you’re the foreign expert. I can’t do all your work for you.”
“By the time I get the lab work done to prove it, track down where it came from, prove the butcher did it, the feast of Eid al-Fitr will be over, as will the epidemic.”
“Which will be noticed after you leave, so you can take the credit.”
“The old epidemiologist’s trick. Start your investigation after the epidemic peaks. You will always look good.” He paused. “But there’s still something missing. It seems too easy. I think this has to do with more than just cheap meat. After all, it’s just the American cows dying. And what about the anthrax at Susu Senang? Those are non-salvageable. Is there a connection? What was Waluyo so worked up about up in Gandringan?”
Soesanto was drawing deeply on another kretek, massaging his bad leg. He wasn’t about to say any more.
They stared out into the darkness, Soesanto smoking, Ab chewing and spitting seeds, filling the night air with cross-cultural debris.