Ab awoke with his head throbbing. He rolled over to hug his long, firm, cylindrical pillow, what the local Javanese called a Dutch Wife, no doubt after considerable colonial experience. He rolled over the other way and sat up on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hands and running his hand back through his hair.
Nancy. They had gone for another walk after George had left. She had talked about her childhood. Her grandfather, imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II, had later joined Sukharno’s forces against the Dutch and had had some influence in government when Indonesia gained independence. In the 1966 Night of the Generals, when an alleged Communist coup led to a very real and very bloody counter-coup, her parents had been murdered at a road block while walking home from a political meeting. Her grandparents, fearing for their lives, had left six-year-old Nancy, the only child of an only son, to be raised by a white missionary family. Her grandparents had separated and gone underground to hide from the terror. The Chinese were targeted during the rampage, and her extended family thought that she would be safer with a white missionary family, ostensibly an adopted orphan, rather than remaining with her grandparents, running from vigilantes in the countryside. After the coup and during the subsequent chaos, with his old mentor Sukharno under house arrest, her grandfather had managed to travel at night, cross-country, and eventually in a fishing boat, to the island of Bali, where he had found refuge with a sympathetic Buddhist family. Her grandmother had made her way through family connections and a series of small, well-paid boats across the water to Singapore.
Nancy’s grandmother eventually moved back to Java and made contact with her husband, but remained estranged from him, and lived in a separate house, albeit one of his traditional family homes. Nancy’s grandfather, ever the resourceful survivor, had done well in business as the political situation stabilized and was regaining some influence with the new government of General Suharto in Jakarta.
“I didn’t know any of this until a couple of years ago. I spent all my formative years thinking I was an orphan. The missionaries who raised me left the country when I was sixteen. I thought my grandparents were dead. They had no idea if I was dead or alive. If I was alive, they didn’t know how to track me down. We only rediscovered each other, through a network of Chinese business connections, when I turned twenty and was looking for money to open a computer shop. Now I spend my life trying to discover who I am, to recover something I lost.” She leaned against him, not looking at him, talking quietly to the space in front of them.
When they returned to the house, the party was still in swing. They stood in the entryway. He felt their bodies soften against each other, and turned to face her for a kiss, and then said, “So, are you looking for a man to help you escape from this place?” And she pulled away. “Not a slob who eats sunflower seeds,” she said, standing up and walking with a slight, graceful sway back into the party.
Why had he said that? Why did he always sabotage his potential relationships? Was he so afraid of landing somewhere after years of flying?
He pulled on his clothes and walked out into the main part of the house. The terrazzo floor was cool under his feet. He had managed to get a rented house from the university; it was in the older, Dutch style, with high ceilings and over-head fans, and, out back, servants’ quarters, which were empty. There were two washrooms, one with the usual western-type shower and toilet, and the other with a squat toilet and a mandy, a deep concrete tub which you filled with cold water. You then used a pot at the end of a long handle to give yourself a splash-bath. Both the storage tub and the acting of splashing water over yourself were called mandy. Mandy and to mandy. He wasn’t the first expatriate, nor would he be the last, to have tried to use the mandy as a very awkward climb-in bathtub.
He went into the Asian bathroom, where he brushed his beard and his teeth, pouring boiled water into his cup from the gallon jug he kept there. At least this place had a yard, with several trees in it. That was one of the advantages of some of the older houses. It was a colonial advantage, he thought, as he pulled the gate open, feeling satisfactorily guilty, but what could be done about it now, in retrospect? Who was he to reject a house the university had offered him, slighting his hosts? Once a week the neighbour’s gardener would, for a fee, cut the lawn and trim the bushes.
He slipped quietly out into the street and felt a weight of worry lift like a huge bird away from him. He headed out to the main road, wondering about Nancy. He wondered what he wanted to have happen. He wasn’t sure he could deal with all the complications of sharing his life with another person. He made the old deal with himself, the kind of deal he had made all through his growing up. If Nancy somehow came back into his life, despite his rudeness, then he would know that God willed for him to woo her. Otherwise, well, God willed something else. It was all up to God. As he walked, he pushed his hand into his trouser pocket, played with a handful of sunflower seeds he found there, then, impulsively, emptied them all out into the open ditch beside the street.
At the office, Ab looked over to where Tri was typing the paper records into the computer.
“Tri?”
She turned and flashed him that wide-eyed wide-mouthed smile. “Yes, Dr. Ab?”
He stood up and came to her side, almost put his hand on her shoulder, reached for the pile of files instead. “Do you mind if I look at some of these while you type?” He placed his hand on the files. “Are you finished with these?”
“Yes, finished. Anything else?” She rested her hand an inch from his and leaned forward slightly. From where he was standing, he could see down inside the front of her loosely fitting sun dress, way too far down, far enough to see that she wasn’t wearing a bra. He could see, as he and George would have said in high school, everything. He turned his head away.
“Dr. Soesanto has not come in yet today?”
She smiled brightly. “Maybe he went to visit his mother in Surabaya,” she said, touching his arm, “Or maybe at the bird market. He sometimes goes to look at sick birds at the bird market. Have you been there?” Ab took her hand gently off his arm like a small animal, set it down, and patted it lightly. He shook his head.
“You should go. The Yogyakarta bird market is very famous.”
Ab didn’t know that Soesanto had a mother in Surabaya. He never talked about his family. He’d never make a good Mennonite.
Ab was trying to avoid looking at Tri. Her hand seemed to be creeping back towards where his rested on the folders. He slipped the folders out from under her hand and went back to his desk and began reading the reports. “Um, thanks. Maybe I will some day.” It took a few minutes to get his mind to pay attention to the words on the page in front of him, until the silence at his back was broken by the sound of typing again. Restless, he got up and went down the hall to the library, where he was allowed through the locked doors to actually handle the books. Most readers had to request something specific, which they were then allowed to look at in the room, under the vigilant eye of the librarian. Books were a guarded commodity in the university. Ab was looking for a toxicology text.
That evening, Ab drove to Soesanto’s house. Dusk was falling quickly, and restaurateurs were setting up tents, lighting lanterns, getting their grills started and rolling out mats that spilled off the sidewalks and into the main roadway. Ab noticed several large snakes slither out from the open sewer at the roadside and across the road. Soesanto’s street was a mixture of sand and mud, as if it had once been finished with a fine graded surface, and then left to sag and wrinkle in rain and sun. Ab stopped in front of the small, low house, half-hidden among papaya and banana trees, overgrown with bougainvillea. The ground trembled slightly, as if a truck was passing, and he steadied himself against the car for a second.
A short, wrinkled woman wrapped tightly in a bright green and blue sarong, grinning toothlessly, met him at the door. He touched her hand lightly and brought his own back up to his heart in a gesture of greeting. He was led into the small front room, set off from the main house by an ornately carved wooden screen, decorated with a scene dominated by Hanuman, the monkey king from the Ramayana. This waiting area, common in Indonesian houses so that strangers at the door would not have visual access to the main dwelling, contained a small bookshelf and a glass-topped coffee table with legs consisting of teak cobras. Javanese seemed reluctant to invite foreigners into their homes, and this was Ab’s first time in Soesanto’s house.
He had, in fact, driven over without an invitation, and wondered if this was what he should have done much earlier. He also wondered if this was a terrible blunder of etiquette and if he would be invited past this waiting room. He stood with his back to the room and perused the books. They all seemed ancient, worn, well-used. There was Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago, Raffles’ History of Java, Blood and Henderson’s Veterinary Medicine, as well as some novels by Promoedya Ananta Toer. Maybe Sarah and Soesanto should have a book club.
Ab could hear the thump of the cane on the terrazzo floor, followed by a moment of silence as the good leg moved forward, and then the thump again. He turned to meet Soesanto, dressed in a traditional black shirt and brown-and-white Yogyakarta batik sarong and cap. “Ab! What a pleasure!” They greeted and then he waved toward where the old woman disappeared. “My housekeeper. Stone deaf. Hardly speaks. Lost two kids and a husband during Suharto’s housecleaning in 1966.” He stood for a moment leaning on his cane. “You like my books?”
“I thought Toer was banned.”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On the year, the time of day, someone’s whim, whether or not your visitors read, or notice books. He’s been banned by every administration since the Dutch, and is the most widely read novelist in the country.”
“You keep them in full view? Why not back in a library somewhere?”
Soesanto smiled. “If someone is out to get me, I doubt they’ll check my bookshelf first. Anyway, when the thought police come looking for evidence, they’ll ransack the place until they find something. There is no point anymore in hiding who I am.”
They sat down on the brocaded, over-carved chairs, and the woman brought in a tray with a bottle and two glasses. “A perfect housekeeper,” he added, as she retreated. He poured the glasses, raised his and signalled for Ab to do the same. “Two-day-old palm juice. Getting a bit ripe, but good for the stomach, and the spirit.”
“To the spirits,” said Ab, taking in a big mouthful and feeling it hit his gut like a large, live fish. “Ha! Ripe is right.” He held the glass down to his lap and stared at it. “If she’s deaf, how did she know I was here?”
“You felt the earthquake?”
“I saw the snakes moving first, or I would have thought it was a truck passing.”
“I have to double check sometimes too, although we don’t get many trucks here. I looked out the window about the same time you arrived.”
They finished their glasses and started on seconds before Ab reached down to the bag he had set on the floor at his feet. “So, I have something I would like to show you.”
Before Ab could zipper open the bag, however, Soesanto stood up. “Ah, you are my guest. Let me first show you something. Please, follow me.”
He led Ab back through a large room, almost the full size of the house. In the corner was an ancient writing desk littered with papers, and a glass case on the wall, similar to the one at Wilkinson’s house, with many traditional knives in it. The case still had spaces for more. They passed a wooden dining table, and then walked out through the kitchen with the cement counter-tops and a door leading off to the side, a general washroom and mandy, and out into a backyard. Ab was hit by a wave of red-green-yellow-black feathered air, resplendent with screeching, high-pitched whistles, melodic songs, the stifling stench of feathers and bird-shit, an exuberance of colour and noise. It was the biggest aviary he had ever seen, the whole back yard screened over, tree to tree to tree. Soesanto leaned on his cane and grinned at Ab’s shock. He stuck his finger through the screen and a small parakeet flew over, landed on his gnarled finger, and bent over to chew at it with his beak. They couldn’t talk for the noise and just stood there, as in the midst of an off-beat opera chorus. Ab felt simultaneously stunned, asthmatic, and elated.
***
They retreated to just inside the door and watched. Soesanto said, “You know how we Javanese love birds in cages?”
Ab laughed. “I noticed. And only in cages. Never flying free.”
“So I go to the bird market, as I did today, and buy as many as I can and bring them here,” he paused, “where they are half-free, at least.”
“And why not let them go completely?”
He sighed. “Because they will just fly back to the cages for food anyway, and be caught again, or killed in the attempt.”
Ab stared. “What’s that red and purple and green parrot-looking one?”
“Black-capped Lory.”
“The one with the long silky tail over there.”
“Lesser bird of paradise. You don’t know birds very well?”
“I’m from the prairies. I recognize the chickens scrabbling around in the bottom of the cage. I know about crows and meadow larks. And Canada geese. A few ducks.” Then, under his breath added, “Mostly members of my own family.”
“Next time, I’ll walk you through the names of these birds, something to remember me by when you leave, something learned from a poor third-world veterinarian educated by Communists. But you said you had something you wanted to show me. Come, let’s go back to the front room.”
Soesanto topped up their palm wine and when they had sipped, and sat down, Ab pulled the kris from George out of his carry bag. He laid it on the low table before them. Ab felt as if he were laying a precious gift before a king, an old knife in its ornately etched brass sheath. He could hear a sharp intake of breath from Soesanto as he gently touched the finely etched metal lying before him. Slowly, he pulled the knife from the scabbard. “Look,” he said, his voiced hushed into a hoarse whisper, “look at the damascene, how finely it is decorated. I have a whole collection, but none like this one.”
Ab had not looked closely at it until now. He bent over to get a closer look. A snake wound its way up the wavy blade to the hilt. The blade had an intricate lacework of what appeared to be dwarves, monkeys, and Hindu figures, with Sanskrit words inscribed on it, polished to a fine thin-ness as if by much use.
“This kris is very old, back several hundred years, maybe more. Let me check something.” He pushed himself to his feet with his cane, went to the bookshelf, and pulled down a dark, well-worn leather-bound volume. He flipped through the pages, then stopped and put his finger on a section of text. He leaned over to look at the knife again, muttering to himself. He looked carefully up at Ab. “Where did your friend get this?”
Ab shrugged. “He…he said he found it in a shed. Why?”
Soesanto scanned Ab’s face, then picked up the knife and fondled it. “This kris is very special. Very special. If it’s the real thing, and I think it is, it goes back to the 13th century. It was commissioned of the empu Gandring by Ken Arok. He was driven mad by the thighs of the beautiful Ken Dedes, which he saw when her dress caught as she descended from her carriage. ‘Her lap radiates a blaze,’ he is said to have written. ‘Her feminine organ glows like fire.’”
He paused and Ab looked up. “That’s pretty high up her thigh he was looking.”
Soesanto grinned. “I have your attention now?”
“I’m that obvious?”
“Don’t ask.”
“The story?”
“Ah, Dr. Ab, listen well. Ken Arok used the kris to kill the husband of the beautiful Ken Dedes so that he could marry her. But Gandring was rushed into finishing his work because Arok was so anxious. A good craftsman does not like being rushed. So he put a curse on Arok, so that he and his children and his children’s children would be killed by the kris.”
“And?”
“And Arok killed the husband, married the queen, ascended the throne at Janggala. With the support of the clergy, he revolted against the sovereign Kediri and set up a new capital at Singhasari.”
“I’m not surprised about the clergy,” murmured Ab. “America. Pakistan. Afghanistan. Israel. Countries run by fanatical clergy. And then there’s the story of King David, the man after God’s own heart, who lusted after his neighbour’s wife.” He paused. “Makes you wonder about God.”
“Arok was, in the end, assassinated by a kris.”
“Almost the same story. God is a passionate and tragic lover. That’s the message. Figures.” Ab was stroking the oily damascene of the blade. “Did you say Gandring?”
“I did.”
“Like the village we were at a few days ago. Gandringan.”
“You noticed.”
“Any significance?” He looked at Soesanto, who shrugged. Ab gripped the blade between thumb and forefinger. “Yet it seems flimsy for a weapon. I wouldn’t want to do an autopsy on a buffalo with it.”
Soesanto picked up the knife and held it high over his head, then broke in one motion into a choreographed forward-reaching stance, the knife held out at arm’s length. “For thrusting, if you are Javanese. And then,” he circled behind Ab, “there is the Balinese execution style.” He stood silently behind Ab, pulled a handkerchief from the sash under his shirt, and laid it with a flourish on Ab’s right shoulder. He rested the point of the blade on Ab’s right shoulder. Ab stayed frozen. “Then with one quick motion, he takes the 18-inch straight Balinese blade, plunges it down directly into the heart, withdraws it in a clean movement, wipes it on the cotton cloth, and replaces it. Merciful. Bloodless. Also an effective method if you’re sneaking up behind someone.” He returned to the other side of the table, resting the blade in one hand, grinning. “Of course, this is a Naga kris, Javanese, not quite as long as the Balinese type, probably a bit messier if used for those purposes, but effective in skilled hands.” He set the knife down on the table again and sat down, hands folded in his lap. “And then there are the Bugis, as in the Bugi-men. Here, let me read from Wallace.” He retrieved an old book from the bookshelf behind him, and flipped it open.
A Roman fell upon his sword, a Japanese rips up his stomach, and an Englishman blows his brains out with a pistol. The Bugis mode has many advantages to the suicidally inclined. A man thinks himself wronged by society—he is in debt and cannot pay—he is taken for a slave or has gambled away his wife or child into slavery—he sees no way of recovering what he has lost, and becomes desperate. He will not put up with such cruel wrongs, but will be revenged on mankind and die like a hero. He grasps his kris-handle, and the next moment draws out the weapon and stabs a man to the heart. He runs on, with the bloody kris in his hand, stabbing at every one he meets. “Amok! Amok!’ then resounds through the streets. Spears, krisses, knives and guns are brought out against him. He rushes madly forward, kills all he can—men, women, and children—and dies overwhelmed by numbers amid all the excitement of a battle…It is a delirious intoxication…”
Soesanto closed the book, sighed, stood up to replace it on the shelf. “Running amok: our great contribution to the global vocabulary. Useful for describing British football matches. And then there is the modern corruption, we Javanese or Bugis or Sumatrans get upset by a newspaper report and rush in a riotous mass into a town and massacre a few hundred or a few thousand or maybe a million Chinese or Communists or anyone we don’t like. Then we stand amid the blood and silence and weep crocodile tears for what we have done.” He stroked the blade, as if remembering something.
“Now sit back. See this.” Soesanto, suddenly changing his tone, stood the knife very carefully on its tip.
“Good trick,” Ab started to say when the knife catapulted suddenly into the air, flipped over several times and slammed into the white-washed plaster wall, driving itself in up to the hilt. He was aware that Soesanto was watching his face very carefully as this happened; what he felt was a thrill of fear, confusion and scepticism. This could not be happening.
“If one thinks the right thoughts, the Naga kris will transform itself into a snake,” Soesanto said, looking at the knife in the wall.
Ab cringed internally, as if a small fierce animal were cornered at the back of his mind. “Do you believe in this…this…?” He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the wall.
Soesanto stared at Ab. “You mean, as a scientist. I don’t seem like a fool or a sorcerer, do I? Well, as a scientist, I study the average. I study large categories of things. Any good scientist acknowledges that there are always exceptions. Never say never and all that. No hypothesis is ever proven true, only not proven false, for now. Every good biologist knows this. Our theories explain ninety-five percent of the data. But it’s the five percent that is interesting. In fact, you could even say that free scientific thinking demands that these kinds of odd events must take place. If they don’t, then either we have perfect understanding, which given our evolutionary origins as great apes is unlikely, or that the world we live in is a perfectly predictable clock, which is also patently false. That’s what makes something interesting. It’s what demands that we use statistics—if there were no variation, exception, oddity, then you could study one animal and know all animals.”
“Some would say you can,” Ab interrupted.
“Do you believe that?”
Ab thought. “Only at a trivial level, like where is the heart and number of legs. But every animal is particular, a product, necessarily, of an individual history.”
“Okay, and the second rule is like unto the first, that science, at least experimental science, is not designed to study exceptions.” He paused. “It is not something to believe, or not to believe. Always defer to the evidence, even if it defies theory. Some things have power because you give them power, and some things have power in themselves.” He paused. “This one is also said to be full of mischief.”
“Full of mischief?”
“Once it is drawn, it likes to draw blood.”
Ab stared at the knife in the wall and finished his glass of palm wine. “I think I should go home now.” Soesanto looked thoughtfully at the knife. “Would your friend mind if I keep it for a few days? I just need to check a few things more about it. If it is genuine, then it should probably go to a museum or…in any case, it is not every day I get to handle such a kris. Don’t worry. I’ll keep it locked in my case, the one you were looking at it when we passed through the house.”
Ab hesitated. “Sure. I guess so.” He was not sure he wanted to have the thing in his house anyway. “What about the mischief?”
Soesanto walked over to the wall and rested his palm on the handle. “I shall go catch a chicken out back for tomorrow’s supper.”
At the door, Ab turned again. “Really, Soesanto, you flipped that knife, didn’t you? It was a trick, wasn’t it?”
Soesanto smiled. “I’d better go find that chicken before the knife gets hungry.”