Two days after he and Soesanto had returned from Cilacap, there was a big party of expatriates. Ab usually avoided these parties, or sat in the corner thinking about high school days and morosely watching everyone else, imagining they were having fun. But this evening he wanted to talk to George. There was something screwy going on with the imported cattle, something more than just a few poisoned cows in a village, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
He knew Sarah wouldn’t be there. He had run into her at Galael’s Grocery Store the previous evening, where she had pushed an International Herald Tribune into his face. “See this?” she had hissed. “See this?” The paper fell open to the second page, where the large part of an article was covered with a black, tarry substance, with a blank piece of paper stuck to it. “What are we doing here Ab? What kind of a place are we working in? This isn’t crokinole on Sunday afternoon. These are people’s lives. But all those other expatriates treat it like some kind of elaborate parlour game. ”
“Even George?”
“Even George.” Suddenly she was almost pleading. “He’s gotten mixed up in something. Talk to him. He’s your friend.”
“He’s your husband,” Ab had retorted. At which she had turned and walked to the checkout without looking back.
***
Ab pulled in ahead of George’s truck; George and Sarah owned both a mini-van, which she used for carting the kids around, and this pick-up truck, which George used for work. Ab manoeuvred his own little Jimny snugly against the cement wall with the glass shards crowning it, and killed the motor. The same people, always. World citizens, misfits and screw-ups everywhere. Citizens, really, nowhere. He could feel the heavy beat of rock and roll thumping the night air, shaking the rutted road under his shoes, as if a desperate giant were trapped inside a barrel, beating his fists against the metal, frantic in his claustrophobic darkness. The sad thing was, he didn’t even feel at home here, among the misfits.
The guard at the gate bowed and grinned repeatedly. “Yes, Agus. Me again. Couldn’t stay away.” He touched the guard’s hand and then his own chest. For a moment he stood at the open gate and took a deep breath, his hand still resting over his heart. The Wilkinsons’ white-pillared mansion was deceptively large, with its air of colonialism, the fake Greek columns and the swimming pool. But there was no yard, he had complained to them shortly after he had first arrived in the country. You could have all the house you wanted, he’d complained to Marie Wilkinson, but if you didn’t have a rolling lawn and some maples and elms, you still lived in poverty. Marie Wilkinson had patted Ab on the arm and, in her infuriatingly sweet way, warbled, “How very Canadian of you to think that. Such a dinosaur attitude.”
Ab felt stupid and embarrassed, even now, in retrospect. There were some ninety million people on this little island. Who had room for a yard? For a rolling lawn? Who was he kidding? And on top of it, this was clearly the future, as much as Canada, full of wide open spaces and still fighting stupid proxy wars for the British and French imperialists, the endless post-colonial quarrels parading as new nationalisms, was the past.
He adjusted his broad-rimmed black hat and brushed his beard and the front of his shirt with the back of his hand. Anyone from North America would recognize the black jacket and trousers as an Old Order Mennonite uniform from Waterloo County, Ontario, or Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. But even Canadians wouldn’t know that sunflower seeds were a southern Manitoba Russian Mennonite habit. And half-way around the world who knew or cared? In Canada, who knew or cared about differences of people from Timor and Java and Aceh and China? Who knew that in some parts of the world these things meant the difference between life and death?
As he approached the door, he thought: this is a mistake, both the outfit and coming to the party. All this masquerading again. It would be such a relief to go back to North America and just be…whatever. But when he’d said this once at the dinner table, Marie, in her motherly way, had patted him on the arm. “My dear, dear, dear. We expatriates see each other almost every day. At least every week. We eat together, swim together,” she leaned close to Ab’s ear and slipped her hand under the dinner table to squeeze his leg, “sleep together.” He took her hand off his leg and held it for a moment before letting it go. Marie was pushing seventy, with overseas experience dating well back into the British Colonial Service. Ab was surprised at how worn and wrinkled and yet how sensual her hand felt. He was surprised and shocked at himself for wondering how her wrinkled body would feel next to his. She continued more loudly, although no one else at the crowded table seemed to be listening,
“We cling together. It would be unbearable without the masquerade. We already know each other too well. The nakedness! The unbearable nakedness! We’re like a family, all grown up and still living together. If we didn’t have our little games, we’d all end up in the madhouse.” He thought he’d almost detected a lament, tinged with weariness and perhaps fear, in the tone of her voice, but she had quickly recovered and went on to speak of other things.
Ab stepped into the small reception area at the front of the house. He paused in the half-dark behind the carved teak room divider separating him from the main body of the house. In the shadowed corners around him, on teak tables and marble pedestals, stood various Balinese statues and painted wayang goleck puppets, like small clusters of conspirators whispering. There were three versions of the Ramayana tales performed in Java: wayang orang, which involved real people on a stage, or once a year, outdoors, when there was a three-day performance at the Hindu temple complex at Prambanan; wayang goleck, a puppet show using these wooden puppets; and wayang kulit, which used flat figures intricately cut from buffalo hide to throw shadows against a screen. Yogyakarta was famous for wayang kulit, but the painted wooden puppets made more impressive souvenirs. On one wall, there was a rectangular glass-faced cabinet in which a row of traditional Javanese knives, kris, were displayed. Marie and Harold had always made much of their collection of what they considered to be important cultural artefacts. Ab noted that one of the knives was missing, like a missing front tooth in an open smile.
He looked past the room divider into the long room, the full length of the house, with a terrazzo floor, which could be used for weddings, funerals, or, in the case of expatriates, adapted for parties. We’re like family. What did that mean? Having evolved from small groups to tribes to nations, were we now copping out, cowards, going back to family values? This is a madhouse, he thought. Like family. Indeed.
Who really knew one’s father and one’s mother and sisters? And did they ever know him? Would his mother see in his slightly reddish nose the signs of a fallen-away Mennonite, seduced by booze and the wicked world? Would she see in his eyes the sadness, the knowledge that he had fallen not quite far enough to enjoy the world, but only to be in it? Or would she see only her boy, the one who tugged at her skirt for fresh, home-made brown sugar platz, fresh from the oven. Would she see the boy who rushed outside with it, to share with George in the snow fort dug into the heaps of ice and snow beside the driveway? Ab recalled once, at a Bible-verse-reciting competition at Wednesday night church Young Peoples’, how he had jumped up to yell, “Luke 14:26: If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.” And how, then, everyone was deadly silent. Was that really in the Bible?
***
He sighed and stepped into the crashing sea of noise and a fog of clove-scented cigarette smoke, and wafts of various after-shaves, deodorants, and sweet, heavy tropical scents worn by expats to cover the fact that they, unlike the Indonesians, sweated. Profusely. The music went from Credence Clearwater Revival to The Rolling Stones.
“Abner Duck! Oh I am sorry! Don’t look at me like that. Doo-eck. Abner Doo-eck. Welcome back! And dressed like a black Leprechaun! What a wonderful idea!”
Marie Wilkinson lifted her beaming face for a kiss on each cheek.
He leaned close. “Fiji.”
She smiled conspiratorially. “My perfume, yes. An island of tropical delights. That’s me.” Her cheeks were rouged, and she wore a tight, shiny black halter top and what appeared to Ab to be black lacy tights with no skirt. She looked down at herself. “I’m a Black Madonna, could you tell?”
Ab ladled himself a tumbler of punch from the huge crystal bowl, gulped it back and winced. It burned all the way down. He eyed the white-haired lady in the teenage tights, slowly, up and down the length of her wiry little body, knowing she was watching and that this was what she expected him to do. “You do remind me of the icons and rosaries George and I used to go look at in the stores in St. Boniface, although somewhat more degenerate.”
She laughed, leaning tipsily on his arm. “More mysterious. Our Lady of Montserrat and all that. We used to winter in Spain when I was a little girl.”
Ab was surveying the crowd. “A bit of an extravaganza for a Thursday night, don’t you think? The parties seem to be creeping back earlier into the week all the time.”
She leaned up to kiss him on the cheek. “Call it an early Eid al-Fitr party. A kind of Muslim Mardi Gras, but on Thursday instead of Tuesday.” She sighed extravagantly. “If you really want to know, it’s the only day when everybody could come. Some folks are going away on holiday this weekend, and then it’s the Yogya-Semarang Hash party, and I didn’t want to be competing with that.”
“No, I don’t suppose you would.” The hash. The Hash House Harriers, as the organization was officially called, was dedicated to jogging, seeing the countryside, and drinking beer, probably in reverse order. In fact, some said it was “a drinking club with a running problem.” It had been organized initially in many of the ex-British colonies, but was now world-wide. About once a month, the expatriates in a particular city gathered at a pre-arranged spot to run a pre-arranged trail through a particular section of countryside. The expatriates were often joined in their run and fun by local people. In the case of the Yogyakarta hash about a third were Indonesians, usually from middle class or upper class backgrounds. At each hash event two people, called hares, laid a trail of their own choosing with bits of tissue paper. At the end of the one-hour run, a truck with beer and soft drinks would be waiting, songs would be sung, and beer poured over people’s heads. A joint Yogyakarta-Semarang hash would really be a big drunken bash with people from both cities meeting at some central location.
A sudden stop in the music brought Ab’s mind back to the room. “I see you’ve lost one of your kris out there. Security problem?” She pulled away and laughed. “Oh that. Been out of the case for months.” She hung on his arm. “You really must come over more often. Harold loaned it out to a friend at work. When you’ve got the genuine article, you want people to handle it, yes?” Her hand was straying down the front of his shirt and he turned toward the room, away from her.
“Where is Harold?”
She waved towards a wicker couch where her husband was decked out in full papal regalia. In real life, Harold was a British advisor of some sort to the Indonesian army. “On non-military matters, really,” Marie would say, explaining what her husband would rather leave unsaid. “Britain,” she might add with a whisper, “wouldn’t give a country like this military advice, you know, with all the secret killings in Timor and everywhere.” Ah, thought Ab, the bullshit we tell ourselves to make money. Harold himself was the perfect “advisor”; tall, rectangular-faced, moustachioed, straight-backed, he actually looked the part. More importantly, he also, always, kept his own counsel and no one else’s. Unlike many of the others here this evening, he never spoke of his work, Indonesian politics, or even politics in general. This, in a sense, made him more like most Javanese of the economic and political ruling class, and, unusually for a foreigner, allowed him to make some friends among them.
This evening, Harold was giving advice to Gladys White, his nose almost into the cleavage of the buxom blond Australian anthropologist, wife of Peter Findlay. She was wearing a pith helmet and a low-cut white robe, as if she were a missionary for a California sex cult or explorer in the jungles of eroticism. Ab considered that this might not be too far off her actual avocation. He reflected, again, on the fact that he wasn’t interested in her, and why that was. He looked back at Harold. “Black Madonna, eh?” He moved away from Marie into the crowd. “I should have known. The white abstinent Pope and his dark alter ego, the black Madonna. Quite logical, all that Catholic stuff, in an illogical sort of way.”
He was halfway across the room when he realized that his glass was empty, that he didn’t know where he was going in any case, just wanting to get away. He returned to the punch table. Marie had left. He re-filled his glass and looked again at Gladys and Harold. Gladys, the self-styled Sheila from the Outback, was telling stories about crocodiles and Aborigines. Harold was watching her bosom, taking it all in. Gladys had her eye on someone else. Ab followed her gaze: George, burly city boy playing farm boy, his curls poking out from under a cowboy hat, grinning ear to ear. He was making his way between the dancers in Ab’s direction. Ab’s eyes flew momentarily past George to the small, short-haired, olive-skinned lady with whom he had just been dancing. Claudia Hernandez was wearing a white eye-mask, white Stetson hat, very short white skirt, and high-heeled white boots. She sensed Ab’s stare and waved and winked at him.
“Ab, good to see you could make it!” George threw his arms around Ab in a bear hug, pushing his hat back off his head. “Boy, things are so bad we gotta meet at parties, eh? Could be worse I guess. Things are so hectic on the project. How was Boyolali? Got it figured out?” He set two glasses down on the table. “The road to Solo is bad. Did you ever wonder why they call Surakarta ‘Solo’? I think it’s because there’s no other place where driving sinks to so low a level of basic survival skills. You take your life in your hands every time you drive there. Still, I’m not sure that back country road from Klaten is much of an improvement. No trucks or buses, but hardly a road in places.” He started filling the glasses, talking as he poured. “Anything new?”
Ab told him about the magnet and the plastic bag. George finished filling the glasses, then topped up Ab’s glass as well and leaned back against the table. He took a sip and then said, almost to the air, “We had a few boxes of those magnets go missing at Susu Senang. That must have been six weeks ago, a few weeks before that Susilo fellow disappeared.” He puffed out his cheeks and blew a long breath. “Irresponsible, they said. Just ran away. I don’t know. Seemed steady enough to me.” He seemed to come back from somewhere else. “Two, eh? We usually just put one in, and we don’t attach little bags.” He surveyed the crowd. Like checking a herd of cattle, thought Ab. George turned to him. “So what’s the diagnosis?”
“Soesanto and I think that local butchers are poisoning the cattle to make them sick, and then offering salvage slaughter to the farmers…cheap meat for Eid al-Fitr. As for what’s in the bag…” His voice trailed off and he shrugged. “I threw it into the fridge. My best guess is strychnine, but you’d need a huge dose. There was a kind of bitter scent and the clinical signs seem right, but we never see it in cattle. Unless you send it to the abomasums, where it doesn’t get diluted in that big rumen. I’ll see if the lab over at the hospital can test for it. If not, we’ll have to send it to the central lab in Bandung, and that will take a while.”
George lifted up the full glasses and turned to face him. “It sounds like you can explain everything except: why the imported cattle?” And, he took a deep breath. “And we’re still seeing anthrax at Susu Senang.”
Ab returned the stare. “You are doing everything we said? No post mortems. Everybody wears gloves and masks around the dead ones. Lots of washing. Bury the dead. Cover them with lime. Treat all the cattle with penicillin. Vaccinate.”
“We’ve done all that. Well, I did a lot of the treatment and vaccination. Waluyo was doing the rest. He is the new farm manager.” He set down one glass, raised his hand, pointed at the ceiling, and pronounced in a deep voice, “Chosen from above, no questions asked.”
George played with the drink in his right hand, tried to look through it at the room. “Off the record. Rumour has it that Suharto was supposed to visit the farm next week. This is after all his home region, and it’s a pet project. But with the explosions at Borobudur and Prambanan, the cows dying in the villages, and anthrax on the mother farm, rumour is he’ll send a replacement. That would probably be General Witono. But Suharto is wily. He may still come himself. ” He looked down at the floor and moved his cowboy boot in a circle.
“So you think this is all political—a way to somehow get at the President?”
George shrugged and looked around. “I was going to tell you this later, but when I was digging a pit yesterday to bury and lime the cattle bodies, we dug up some human remains. Recent ones.” He glanced sideways at Ab. “I think it might be the former manager, Susilo, but nobody wants to talk about it at the farm. The rumors are all over the place. That’s what happens in a dictatorship I guess.” He looked nervously around. “I also found something else at the farm I’d like you to have checked out. Later.”
George touched Ab on the arm, picked up the second drink, and then moved back into the crowd. “Come on. Claudia has someone she wants you to meet.” He turned back just a second. “I do want to talk more later.” Ab drank half his glass and refilled it.
Claudia. That stuff again. At least, when Ab thought about her, he forgot about Sarah. God, there were days he wished George were dead he wanted her so badly. Still, dammit, after all these years. He shouldn’t have come here, to Indonesia, but how could he have known? He had thought it was over. He followed George and, without thinking, blurted out, “Have you ever been in love with a married woman?”
George turned slightly without hesitating. “Hell yes, been married to one for, um, fourteen years.” He paused a minute and lowered his voice. “She stayed at home tonight to read. She’s into Wallace’s Malay Archipelago now. Says Wallace, who was tramping around in the Spice Islands, apparently discovered evolution before Darwin, but Darwin got all the credit. Says if I want to understand Indonesia I should read more.” He turned suddenly, so that Ab bumped into him. “Hell, if you can just read about places to understand them, why go anywhere?”
Ab looked around. “Is this helping us understand Indonesia?”
George guffawed. “Got a point there!”
They returned to manoeuvring their way between Queen Elizabeth, Gandhi, Davy Crockett and Tinkerbell to the far side of the room.
Claudia was talking with a lithe, very beautiful Chinese woman. She seemed almost too beautiful to be real, her black hair catching and reflecting the lights as it flowed down either side of her perfectly proportioned face. She moved with slow, sinewy grace, like some rare jungle cat. Briefly, the thought slipped through Ab’s slightly inebriated brain that, like a jungle cat, she could kill, with one quick stroke of her hand. Then the pedestrian commander of his Mennonite brain took over and wondered if she were another opportunist looking for a man to marry and take her out of the country. There were a lot of young women in this oppressively beautiful country looking for a ticket out, usually a white male professional ticket. If she was an opportunist, he considered, she was also a gorgeous opportunity for a man rapidly slipping past his prime. Maybe a bit young, though. He approached Claudia from behind and laid a hand on her bare back. She leaned back into his hand, turned and smiled warmly. George was at her other side, putting a drink into her hand. As he did so, his hand slipped along her arm and fell lightly along her body, as if by accident. Claudia took Ab’s arm, leaned up to kiss him on the mouth. He held his tongue back, barely. “Paloma Picasso,” he said as their lips parted.
“Ab, mi amore, mucho gusto, you have such a wonderful, romantic nose. And I have just the lady for you. Nancy Martono, dressed as…” She looked her up and down. “An Indonesian? Meet Ab Dick, Canadian veterinarian, unattached, congenial. Dressed up as a…” She looked him up and down. “Some kind of Mennonite. We have those in Mexico too. Thought I wouldn’t recognize it, didn’t you?” She turned to the woman. “What more could you ask for?”
Nancy held a glass up to her eyes and looked at him through it. “What kind of a name is Ab Dick?” she said in perfect English.
“Same as Nancy Martono, if I know Indonesia. A mispronounced name of convenience.”
“Convenience. So you’re a criminal hiding from the law?” She smiled and brought her glass down to chest level, as if to focus his eyes at her cleavage. He resisted the temptation and looked over her shoulder. Claudia was slipping away. He wanted to ask her to dance. Nancy’s answer startled him and his eyes jumped back to hers.
“Does that mean you are?”
She shrugged. “Then what convenience?”
He stared at her for a moment, trying to gather his thoughts. “Well, not to make too fine a point, in Canada, in the 1950s, a lot of people from non-English countries changed their names to get jobs. Or to fit in, because the English thought the names sounded ridiculous. See what you’ve done? Got me started. Our family name was something between ‘Duck’ and ‘Dick’ which neither the French nor the English Canadians can pronounce. We did everything and then still didn’t feel at home.” He looked down into his drink.
“So my father thought Dick was easier to pronounce than D U-with-an-umlaut K or even Doo-eck. He didn’t realize it was also a bad joke. He could have gone back to the pre-German Flemish origins. Anthony Van Dyck was a famous student of Rubens. At least the middle name puts the “fun” back into the name. God, I’m whining and getting pedantic. Too much to drink. I grew up in a Mennonite city with Harry Dicks and Peter Dicks and Peter Peters. Misguided attempts to belong in a culture that just laughed us off.”
Nancy was grinning.
Ab chugged back the rest of his drink, looked for somewhere to set the glass down, and, seeing nothing, looked at Nancy again. “See, even you fall into that trap. I would have thought a Chinese person in Indonesia would know better. I have heard that many of you changed your names after the mass slaughter of ’66. I know. My stuff is petty beside the Chinese question here. At least with us it was just getting laughed at and shut out of jobs, not having our throats slit.”
“The Chinese question?” She flicked her hair away from her eyes with her free hand and looked at him expectantly.
“Jews of Asia and all that,” he mumbled, feeling incredibly self-conscious and stupid.
She laughed. “And here I thought Jews were the Chinese of Europe. Damn, I’ll never get my history right.”
She wrapped one arm lightly around his neck, the other resting on his shoulder with her half-full glass of punch. “Let’s dance.” It was a slow dance. Vintage 1960s. He could not resist. His arms slipped around her waist, and immediately began inching up. “Since you were so good at Claudia’s perfume,” she whispered into his ear, “what’s mine?”
He put his nose close to her neck. Pure sex. “Unlike us plebes from the crude West, you Indonesians don’t sweat. You have your own, sweet, individual scent.”
***
Claudia was dancing with George, leaning into him. Across the room John Schechter, her American husband, the tall, bleach-blond volcanologist, was fondling Gladys’ back, but his steely blue eyes were fixed on George and Claudia. John spent his days, and not a few nights, climbing in and out of the crater of Merapi, the active volcano on whose flank Yogyakarta was built. Ab would not have been surprised to learn that John’s blondness was from working near fire, a pure, ashen heat. He seemed like a smouldering, heaving, lava dome, on the verge of rupture. He had married Claudia while exploring volcanoes in Mexico.
“You don’t really want to dance with Claudia,” Nancy whispered into his ear. “It’s not safe.” She laid her head on his shoulder. At that moment, Peter Findlay cut deftly in on George. Findlay, the slim Australian, worked in “intelligence.” It seemed an open secret, although no one knew, really, what he did. Talk to the underground opposition, they supposed. He let the rumours circulate, and gave no pretences. Ab noted that John relaxed visibly and turned to face Gladys.
Nancy raised her head abruptly from his shoulder and turned to look across the room.
Ab looked at her. “What’s up?”
“I should be asking you. You’re the one who went from wound-up tight to floor cushion relaxed.”
“I did?” He dug his fingers into his trouser pocket and fiddled with a handful of sunflower seeds, let go.
He looked into her eyes, dark deep pools, throwing up shimmers of inquiry, lightness layered over deep sadness. A shiver went down his spine. She laid her head back down. “You did.” Lust, that was it, that was the shiver down his spine, right down through his scrotal sac and on down to the adductor muscles, which were supposed to keep his legs extended.
He looked away over her shoulder at Harold Wilkinson and then Peter Findlay. “Don’t you think it’s odd that British intelligence and Australian intelligence are working here, but not the Americans? I mean, don’t you think they would be here, after all their involvement in the 1966 coup?”
She put her head back and looked into his eyes. “How can such a smart man say such stupid things? Just think of somebody who goes to all the parties and works odd hours in dangerous places.” She settled her head back down into the crook of his neck.
“Well, that really narrows it down, doesn’t it?”
Marie was at the tape player. She faded out the slow song and popped in another tape: rock and roll. She grabbed her husband by the hand and began to leap about. “She’s so smooth. She does it as if it were her music. Her music was…I don’t even know. Long before that stuff.” The music drowned out his words. He let go of Nancy, dancing without thinking, without a partner, though Nancy continued to move close to him.
“This music reminds me of 1967,” Ab suddenly blurted out. “I hate it.”
Nancy stopped abruptly and dropped her glass on the floor. It shattered and sparkled across the terrazzo as the other dancers, some of them in bare feet, skipped away. The music continued to blare and the dancers made a wide circle away from the shards. The Indonesian housekeeper, a grandmotherly woman, appeared with a broom and dustpan, and began sweeping up, oblivious to the commotion around her. Nancy and Ab stood motionless. He shrugged. “I guess the late 1960s weren’t very good for a lot of people. Let’s go for a walk.”
He turned and walked to the main door. He stood there, his ears ringing from the noise, until he could feel her presence behind him. She laid her hands on the back of his shoulders and pushed him ahead of her out through the gate. In the laneway, she pressed her head into his back. “I’m sorry, that was stupid. How does anybody know what these things mean anyway?”
He turned and slipped his arms around her. “They listen to each other.” They stood still and listened. From the house came the continuous thumping of the trapped expatriates. From down the lane came what sounded like a sermon blaring over a loudspeaker.
“I used to know a guy who sounded like that when he preached. I think he saved me once.”
“Saved you?” She stood back from him.
“Yeah, saved. It’s what happens when a preacher makes you cry and then you ask God to come into your life and then God promises not to torture you forever. Bill Janzen told us about saving the poor people in Asia, and then he sang a duet with his wife. And after church we came home to a house overheated from the oven being on all morning, and we ate a big beef roast, with mounds of mashed potatoes and boiled peas and carrots. Then Dad had a nap and Mom and my sisters did the dishes.”
“And you?”
“Sat in my room. Bored. Story of my life. Like I’m boring you now. Let’s go see that preacher.”
“Yes, let’s. The preacher.” She seemed delighted at the thought.
***
They walked through this typical urban neighbourhood, past another white, walled-in house similar to the Wilkinsons’, and then a small knick-knack store barely big enough to turn around in. They passed a ramshackle bamboo hut set back in an overgrown field, with two black and white cows grazing in front. Then they turned down another lane, some white-washed mud-walled houses, a palatial mansion, a bamboo hut. The lane opened out into a soccer field. The field was full of people, wandering about with their kerosene lanterns, like the grey and brown lost souls of purgatory. George and me, sitting in the snow fort in our front yard, fantasizing that Jael Freed from school might join us, hopefully with her blouse half-unbuttoned. It is after supper, in the semi-darkness, recounting the scariest stories we know. Why do they always have to do with sex or religion?
At one end of the field, a large movie screen was set up and just below that, a one-ton truck was parked. They followed the general push of the crowd toward the screen. Nancy leaned against his side and took his hand. He did not resist. The back of the truck was built up like a camper, but with side doors that were swung open to reveal several shelves of colourful boxes and bottles. Off to either side of the truck were sales booths. The trucks and booths were lit up with many-coloured lights. Christmas in purgatory, Ab thought.
The preaching was coming from a man with a microphone standing next to the truck. “Jamu Jago!” he exclaimed, “for seminal weakness, for tuberculosis, for smoker’s cough, for all your beauty aids.” Ab strained his understanding of Bahasa Indonesia to the limit, attempting to make the words say what they obviously didn’t. “Now take this product here,” the man went on, as if expounding the second point in his sermon. He held up a bottle. “Made from natural oils, will make your skin smooth and clean.”
Nancy squeezed his hand. “Good preacher?”
He put his arm around her and held her close. “Yeah, good preacher. I’m convicted already. Where do I go to be saved?” He dropped his arm. Every time he thought he understood this culture, he was brought low.
The preacher went on for ten minutes and then his voice seemed to give out. Very loud disco music blared over the speakers and Ab stood transfixed as three dwarfs appeared on the roof of the truck, in floodlights, dancing ludicrously to the music. They jiggled and jumped for five minutes, at which time another preacher took over, to expound on the virtues of some other products.
He felt his arm being squeezed. “They travel around the country. Later, there will be a Karate film, from Hong Kong.” She paused. “A Chinese film but the words dubbed into Bahasa Indonesia, so not really Chinese, you know? That’s important here.” The squeeze on his arm tightened. “Come on, let’s go buy some beauty aids.”
She pulled him to the nearest booth. As they approached, a very raggedly dressed man with a persistent, harsh cough was talking with one of the two white-shirted young men behind the counter. The salesman pulled a bottle from the shelf and showed it to the man, who nodded. The salesman then pulled a glass from under the counter, poured some of the brown liquid into it and handed it to the customer. The man horked out a fierce, deep, phlegmy cough, spit on the ground beside him, then drank the liquid in one gulp and handed the glass back to the salesman, who wiped it off with a towel and set it back under the counter for the next customer.
“Good way to keep yourself in business, passing around dirty glasses like that.”
“Yes, but all natural,” said Nancy. He wasn’t sure if she was joking.
“I wonder if a guy could sell sunflower oil at the Red River Exhibition in Winnipeg that way.”
“What’s that?”
“Never mind. I’ll have to take you some time.”
She smiled. “Perhaps you will.” She turned to the man at the counter and bought several small bottles from the shelf. “Can I put these in your pocket?” She placed them into his jacket pocket. “What’s in there, your birdseed?”
He reached in, took out a handful and examined them. “My version of Jamu Jago. My culture. They give me power. Without them, I am nothing.” He stared absent-mindedly toward the truck, then realized that George was over there, talking animatedly with John Schechter.
“Wrong. Like all cultural artefacts, you give them power.”
She followed his gaze. “Mr. George knows a lot of things and a lot of people.” She took Ab’s elbow and guided him toward the dark edge of the field.
“In this country knowing too much can be fatal,” she added as they stepped back into the full darkness of the lane. Ab felt her hand settle comfortably into his as they entered the laneway.
He frowned. “Do you mean Claudia?” They could hear the party already from the end of the lane.
“No, I didn’t mean Claudia,” Nancy said quietly, but his mind was already elsewhere, thinking about Schechter’s temper outbursts, and her comment didn’t really register until much later.
***
They walked slowly, and when they returned, the crowd was more boisterous, and was gathering for a parlour game of some sort at one end of the room. Nancy went off to the bathroom. Ab elbowed his way to the punch table and downed two glasses in quick succession. To his surprise, George was at the table, filling his glass. “One more drink and I’ve got to go,” Ab said. “I’ve had about all my little culture-shocked brain can handle. That was quite a show up at the field, eh?”
George spilled part of his drink and wiped at his mouth with his shirt. “What show? Oh, that. Listen, come out with me to the car for a minute.” They walked out to George’s truck. He reached into the passenger side and pulled out an ornately etched, tarnished brass sheath with a knife handle protruding.
George placed it into his hands. It felt warm.
“Where did you get it?”
George pushed the truck door shut and leaned against it. “I was looking through our locked supply shed and found it back behind some boxes of antibiotics, kind of stuffed down under a pile of rags. I didn’t tell anyone. Well, only you and Schechter.”
“Jesus, George. You stole it? What did Schechter say?”
“I didn’t steal it. It was just there. Schechter said something cryptic about backing off. Whatever the hell that means. Anyway, I hear that Soesanto, the guy you work with, is a bit of an expert on these things. I wondered if he could check it out. See where it came from. How authentic it is.”
Ab stood there, staring down at the knife in his hands. “You said you think you found Susilo’s body at the farm. Do you think it’s the murder weapon?”
George lifted his cowboy hat and ran his hand back over his head. “Listen, Susilo was an old Communist. If it is the murder weapon, nobody really wants to find it. They’d want it to disappear, just like Susilo disappeared, don’t you think?” When Ab didn’t say anything he seemed more agitated and went on. “Listen. Who would know? Can you imagine what a great souvenir it would be? Something with a real story. Anyway, can you check it out?” He walked around to the driver’s side of his truck and opened the door and climbed in. Ab recalled what Sarah had told him. He signalled for George to open the passenger window, then leaned forward, the knife pressed between him and the door.
“On the way back from Cilacap the other day, Soesanto and I stopped at the black sand beach near Wates, those terrifying monster waves, the howl of the hot wind from the South Pole. Said every year there were tourists who thought they could swim in it. Bodies never found. He told me that maybe I should leave the cattle epidemic alone, both the poisonings in Boyolali and the anthrax at the main farm. I should steer clear of this whole business.”
George started the motor. “We can’t really do that, can we? It’s our job. Just have it checked out, okay?” He pulled away before Ab could answer.
Ab put the knife into his car and then turned back toward the house. Nancy was standing at the door, watching. He had a sudden dizziness and pain in his head. He bent over. Nancy came up and rested her hand lightly on his back. “I think you’ve had enough,” she said. “Better get away while you still can.”
It was only later, much later, that he understood what, exactly, she meant, and by then it was too late.