The following day, Ab took the white powder from Boyolali over to the laboratory at the medical school. They agreed to test for strychnine, but said it would take a few days. Then he returned to his office. From the shelf above his desk, he took down his copy of Blood and Henderson’s Veterinary Medicine, and a book on tropical diseases of cattle. Maybe he was missing something. He flipped through the books, checking out every possible acute disease he could find. Nothing made sense. He set the books aside and began flipping through the paper files from the project.
He stared at the files, his mind drifting back to the previous evening at Soesanto’s. Almost without thinking, he picked up the phone and called George at his office out at the farm.
“George, we have to talk. About that knife.”
“Great! You have something on it I assume. Is it genuine?”
“Very. But you need to know a bit more about it before you get too excited.”
“Why don’t you come for supper tonight? I’ll call Sarah and tell her. Six o’clock? It’s the end of Ramadan. We can have our own feast.”
***
It was late afternoon when Ab took a becak back to the house. Old Pak Budi, the night watchman, was dozing in his stool by the gate, which stood open. There was a motorbike in the carport next to his car, and Nancy was sitting on the front steps, a newspaper in her hand. “We need to talk,” she said, “about last night.”
Their eyes met and Ab felt his body want to reach out and touch her. “Last night. Yes. I was drunk.”
She stood up. Standing on the stair, she was exactly his height. She folded the paper and rested it on his shoulder, as if knighting him. “We were both drunk. I told you things I should not have.” Her hand dropped and she looked over his shoulder toward the street. “There are things in this country that should never be spoken aloud.”
Ab was thinking that there were things between a man and a woman that should never be spoken aloud as well. What he said was: “I am going to George and Sarah’s for supper tonight. Do you want to come? There will be children. George and I have some business to talk about. We won’t be drunk. Maybe we can re-start this…this…” He couldn’t think of how to finish the sentence. “Relationship” seemed too strong a word. “Maybe it would be good to just have some normal conversations.”
Having a telephone in Java was reserved for village heads, police, bureaucrats, and others with some political clout. In Yogyakarta it was a luxury reserved for those who could pay the several thousand dollars to the right people to have it installed. This house came with one. It was assumed expatriate visitors would need one. Or maybe they were all tapped. A way of keeping tabs on foreigners. Right now, Ab just wanted to sit down with a cold beer and not think about anything.
***
George answered the phone. “George. I know this is last minute, but do you mind if Nancy, the girl I was dancing with last night, comes along for supper?”
“Ab and Nancy. Lucky man! Hey, the more the merrier. I’ll tell the cooks.”
Ab looked over to the wicker couch where Nancy, head tilted slightly forward, was reading the newspaper. Her shiny hair fell like black silk to her shoulders, where it broke cleanly into two flows, one to her back, and one along the slender creamy ivory of her neck, skirting the low, V-shaped neckline. “George says it will be fine,” he said, his hand resting on the phone.
Nancy looked up and immediately smiled, her eyes fixing directly and uncompromisingly on his. When she set down the paper, Ab noticed that it was open to the article about the execution.
Ab and Nancy, Ab and Nancy. He said it over a few times to himself as he went to wash up.
He poured the cold water from the deep, concrete mandy over himself with a small cooking pot. Ab and Nancy. Was that how it was going to be? He tried saying the words out loud. “Let’s see if Ab and Nancy can come over for supper tonight.”
When Nancy climbed into the car beside him, he sat quietly for a moment without starting the motor, without looking at her.
“If we come back here afterwards, I can pick up my motorbike,” she said.
Ab’s mind fixed on the “coming back here afterwards.” He rested his hand on the key, still without turning it. “I’m sorry about the other night.”
She spoke to her reflection in the car window. “You should know that in my culture, personal relationships are like contracts. We just set out some negotiating positions.” She paused and weighed her words out, one by one, like fragile eggs taken from a nest. “The other night…I have never told anyone outside my family about my childhood like that.”
“I am flattered.”
She laid a hand on his arm, tightened her grip, and waited until his eyes met hers. She seemed to be both deeply full of emotion but also incredibly under control, wound up, dark, dangerous, sad, on the verge of tears, on the verge of a predatory leap. “I don’t want you to be flattered. I want you to be serious. That was very dangerous information. My life depends on it and now, maybe yours. I am sorry. I had too much to drink. I didn’t intend to endanger you.”
“So you are here now to make sure that information doesn’t get any further? Is that what this is about?” She looked away, and he thought there were tears at the corners of her eyes, and cursed himself for his insensitive stupidity.
“We’d better go now,” she said quietly.
George and Sarah lived in a white plaster house with red clay tile roof and columns out front that was both traditional and somewhat pretentiously new. It was not a house of their choosing, but had been selected by the Indonesians as being appropriate for them.
Nettie, six years, and Frieda, eight, circled around Ab at the door. “Uncle Ab!” they screamed in unison. They immediately took his hand and led him into the house. “Come see what we’ve made!”
Uncle Ab. Ab and Nancy. Ab could sense a life constructing itself around him, with or without his own consent. Sarah appeared just behind the girls. He stood there, awkwardly, the girls tugging at his hand. Always on the bosomy side, Sarah had gained weight since she had come to Indonesia, and seemed to have lost a little more of her thin blond hair on top. Ab thought she looked more worried than usual this evening. He recalled their brief exchange at the grocery store and pulled himself free of the girls to give her a hug. Sarah’s hug almost degenerated into a cling, and he had to resist the urge to pull her whole body against his. He sniffed at her neck, the rich, sweet scent of Opium perfume, mixed with the clean, bitter smell of gin. She wore a loose-fitting, strapless batik dress. He looked over her shoulder at George, then gently pushed her away. George, chatting with Nancy, seemed oblivious, distracted, jovial.
“Gin and tonic?” Sarah offered. Ab went over to where the girls wanted to show him their work. He eyed Sarah. She seemed to have had her quota of gin for today. “Sure,” he said.
“And who do we have here?” Nancy crouched down to look at what the girls were making with their plastic building blocks.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I should have introduced them. Nettie and Frieda? This is my friend, Nancy.” They looked up at her and returned to building their complicated-looking structure. “This is kraton susu, the milk castle,” said Frieda matter-of-factly. “It is where the cows live.”
Nancy examined the castle closely. “And what do the cows do in the castle?”
Frieda looked at her, as if unsure she could share this information. Then she leaned over and whispered loudly, “They die, and then the snakes come and take over.”
“Ah,” Nancy nodded.
Sarah, returning from the sideboard with their drinks, clinking with ice, laughed lightly. “I think we’ve all been a little depressed lately. It seems to have rubbed off. Frieda’s been having strange dreams, snakes and death.”
Ab laughed gently and laid a hand gently on her arm. “Sounds like normal Freudian to me.” He tried to sound light. She was silent, serious. He withdrew his hand. “In case you were wondering,” he said, turning back toward Nancy, “I’m only an honorary uncle.”
“Uncle Ab!” Nettie looked up suddenly from her work. “Do you know where we can get fireflies? Mom said you might know.”
“Sure, I know a place. Maybe we can go out a bit later and catch some. Would you like that?” Frieda came over and pulled playfully at his beard. “That is, if it’s okay with everyone else.” Ab looked around at Sarah and then at George.
The girls turned quickly, in unison, and descended first on George, whom they had tagged as the chief potential obstacle to this enterprise. If they could convince him, the rest would follow. “Oh please, can we?” George looked over their heads at Sarah, winked, and said quietly, “Okay, but you have to be very good during supper. No complaining or fighting over who has too much or too little. Now go back to your blocks and behave until supper.”
***
The girls returned to their play, and Nancy and Sarah remained standing above them, conversing quietly. George tugged at Ab’s arm and led him over to an alcove with a couple of wicker chairs, near the cool breeze coming in the door. He set his drink down on a glass-topped coffee table in front of him, and brought his palms up in front of himself into a tepee.
Ab sat across from him and looked up at the bright Balinese paintings on the wall. Balinese paintings both intrigued and bothered Ab. He marvelled again at how they completely lacked perspective, as if there were no past, and no future, only the eternal now. He wondered if that was not only a romantic ideal, but also how one survived under a dictatorship. The past did not exist and the future was not acknowledged.
George leaned forward in his chair. “And?”
Ab was startled from his reverie. He took a sip from his drink, looked over to Nancy and Sarah and the children, and then lowered the glass to his lap. “Soesanto showed me some weird things last night. The kris is genuine, but it apparently is very valuable and has a bloody history behind it.”
George smiled. “Damn, that’s great. What is the story?”
Ab set his drink down on the table. “George, you don’t understand. It was part of an elaborate Macbeth or Hamlet-like royal massacre seven hundred years ago. You would be stealing a priceless cultural artefact.”
George glanced over at Sarah and Nancy and the girls. They seemed preoccupied. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Listen, I told you that we dug up Susilo’s body, right? Anyway, it really was him, that body we found.”
Ab narrowed his eyes and took another drink. Where was this going? “Soesanto knew him. Says he was a toxicologist. From what Soesanto said, he didn’t seem like one to just run off because he doesn’t like the job, not after all these years.”
“And then there’s Waluyo, the new farm manager, who was hand-picked by someone. No one I ask will tell me who made the appointment. Which I guess in this place meant that Susilo had to be retired, which in Java, for an old Commie, means he had to be killed.” He picked up his drink from the table in front of him, swirled it around a few times, and set it down. “I think Waluyo is a spy for someone in Jakarta, to watch his investments. And I would guess that the person pulling the strings is General Witono, who has been delegated to sign all the approval papers for this project.”
“I thought the project money was put up by that wealthy Chinese businessman, Sani Sentosa.”
“Pak Sani. But I suspect that Witono wouldn’t approve the deal with Sentosa unless Waluyo was hired.”
“George, where are you going with this?”
George rubbed his hands nervously, looked over at the women, and dropped his voice to almost a whisper. “It’s like I said at the party. If this is true, and if that kris is the murder weapon, wouldn’t everybody just want it to disappear? Why else would it be stashed in an old storage shed?”
He coughed and raised his voice out of a whisper. “Anyway, the cattle up at Gandringan, in Boyolali, that’s a different problem. Opportunist. Somebody’s getting that butcher the poison, the magnets, and he is taking advantage of the already troubled project to get a little cash. The farmers are probably in on it. If a project animal dies on their farm in the first six months, it gets replaced at project expense. I would have thought that Susilo might be doing it, but it hasn’t stopped since he was killed.”
“That’s Waluyo’s home village.”
“There you go then. Motive, means. That one should end after Eid al-Fitr, so, day after tomorrow. But the anthrax at Susu Senang is something more. I don’t know what. The cow deaths discredit the project, so the government, Witono in particular, but his boss Suharto as well, looks bad. This is Suharto’s home territory. He doesn’t like trouble here. He or Witono may have to come out himself to settle things.”
“An assassination plot maybe?”
George paused and looked out the window. “Jesus I hope not.” He played with his glass some more, frowning at it. “That would really complicate things.”
“You mean it would make it almost impossible for the project to carry on.”
“Yeah. The project. It would really complicate the project too.”
“I took the stuff into the lab at the medical school to have it tested. But let’s suppose we are right, that the deaths up at Gandringan are strychnine. Maybe if I can track down the source of the poison in Gandringan, it will also lead to the people who are responsible for the anthrax outbreak on the mother farm.”
“Yeah, maybe, but you told me at the farm the other day that if you crowd a bunch of cows into a small space and add some drought and then some rain and some stress, bingo, you get an anthrax outbreak. The spores could have been there for a century, waiting for a crowd of foreign cattle to give them an opportunity to germinate.”
“But you were giving vaccines and antibiotics.”
“Yeah, if they work.” George paused. “If they’re not being tampered with.”
The cook looked in from the dining room. “Ready!” she called.
“Well, let’s change the subject for supper,” said Sarah. “I’ve been hearing this cow story all day and I think it’s time for a change.” George looked up with a start. Nancy and Sarah had been standing just within earshot, nursing their drinks.
“I’m game for that,” added Nancy.
“Here’s a change of subject,” said George as he stood up. “At the Wilkinsons’ the other night I was talking with John Schechter. He said there’s no political opposition to Suharto in Central Java. It’s all in Jakarta. He was adamant about it.”
Nancy laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Ab asked, turning to her.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Ideological Americans,” she said. “And gullible Canadians.”
The table was set out with a steaming plate of rice, mixed, stir-fried vegetables, saté, deep-fried shrimp, and a kind of beef stew. “This looks fantastic,” Ab said, pulling up a chair between Nettie and Frieda. “Is it all right if I sit between these two pretty girls? Or do they already have boyfriends?” The girls giggled.
Sarah held out her hands. “Let’s all hold hands for a short grace.”
During supper, they could hear the home-made bamboo fireworks exploding and music coming from various directions. Eid al-Fitr, the feast day at the end of the month of fasting, was starting. The celebrations would go all night and all the following day. From every mosque the chanting and singing blared out over the city through the megaphones. A banging of drums approached down the street and they all got up to stand in the front yard and watch a procession of young girls in long white gowns and head coverings, chanting in Arabic, “There is no God but Allah! Allah is great! Allah is our God!” They passed by bearing torches and banging on make-shift drums.
“Which brings me to something maybe Nancy can help me with,” said George as they returned to the table. “One thing I must get before leaving this place is a kris. Nancy, what I want to know is how you know if you’re getting a genuine article, or if someone is just putting one over on you.”
Nancy played with her fork, turning a shrimp over and over. “You can buy them on Malioboro Avenue.”
George laughed. “Yeah, but those are the cheap ones for tourists. I’d like the genuine article. Say I had a chance to buy one privately. How would I know it’s the real thing?”
“I think you should stick to the tourist versions,” she said quietly. “One should be respectful about things that are important in someone else’s culture, don’t you think? Anyway, with a kris, it may not be the knife itself that creates problems, but who owns it. These aren’t tourist antiques. A real kris has history and in Java history means…” Her voice trailed off.
George cleared his throat and scratched the back of his head uncomfortably. “Of course, I’m not saying I don’t respect it. That’s not the point. I mean, people hang icons and crucifixes in their homes, or even family Bibles and doilies from Russia, don’t they?” He looked at Sarah, as if continuing an argument with her. “And that doesn’t mean they don’t respect them. In fact, I could make a good argument for saying I’m the only one here who really does respect them. Other people collect meaningless trinkets. In my travels, I collect icons, crucifixes, old Buddhas. I want to add a kris to the little multi-cultural shrine I’m building. I’m a firm believer in keeping all my options open. What could be more respectful than that?”
Nancy set her fork down with a clink on the plate and her voice turned suddenly sharp, an edge of anger to it. “The trouble is, if you keep too many such options around the house, perhaps one day, when it’s too late, you will inadvertently find that one of them wasn’t an option you really wanted. Maybe it’s not your option. Maybe it’s somebody else’s. To be blunt and to finish my sentence, history in Java means blood.” She took a deep breath and her voice turned soft again. “I’m sorry. That was a bit of an outburst, wasn’t it?”
Ab, whose mind had flung itself back to the display at Soesanto’s, stood up suddenly from the table. Friend or no friend, he was tired of George and his endless games. “Time to go get fireflies,” he announced. Everyone agreed readily, as if relieved to change the subject.
***
They packed into Sarah’s mini-van, which she drove, and bumped down the crowded, pot-holed narrow streets to a dirt track just outside of town, a quiet, dark road between rice fields that Ab often visited when seeking out the nearest thing in Java to a starry prairie night. He stopped the car and turned off the lights. They could still hear the pop of the fireworks in the distance, but close at hand was a display of a different sort. “Look.” He pointed to the fields beside the road. A great sheet of fireflies twinkled and shimmered over the top of the water. They climbed out of the car and stood momentarily in silence. It gave Ab a sense of standing on some fragile foothold in space, with stars scattered in the darkness all around. He felt suddenly incredibly isolated and lonely. Sarah stood still in the darkness while George rummaged in the back of the car for a butterfly net. Nancy was already out along the ridge between the paddies, the two girls in tow. Ab stood next to Sarah. He could feel the warmth of her body. “It almost looks as if they’re synchronized. Look, see how one area lights up, and then goes dark, and then the next?” He was silent a moment, then added, “Nature’s illusion of meaning.”
George, Nancy and the girls mucked around the edge of the field, awed and excited, filling their jars. Ab and Sarah stood quietly watching the others. “What’s up, Sarah?” he asked quietly.
Sarah leaned back against him and gripped his hand, furtively. “Oh Ab, Ab, I’m miserable and afraid and I don’t know what I’m afraid of. I know George found that awful knife. It’s a murder weapon for God’s sake. Sorry. I should leave God out of this.”
“If it’s any consolation, I did talk to him. And Soesanto has it now. Maybe we can just leave it there.”
She squeezed his hand, let go, and wandered off a short distance. “That would be just fine with me. Delay a while. Tell George you are still investigating. With all this other stuff on the farm, he doesn’t need any extra problems.”
She sighed. “And I don’t know what I’m doing here. Nothing.”
“Raising daughters.”
“Yeah, well.”
Ab moved closer and she leaned against him. “You know that’s not what I was talking about. That’s not what my life was supposed to be. At least not my whole life.”
“Hey guys, come out here. Look what we’ve got!” George called from the glittering darkness. Sarah walked out toward the field. Ab followed. “We got our feet a bit wet, but don’t yell at the girls. I take full responsibility.” George was in a state of elation. “Anyway, don’t look at their feet. Look at the fireflies. And look at the moon just coming up behind Merapi. God this is a beautiful place.”
Frieda and Nettie were excitedly showing their little jars of glowing flies to Sarah and Nancy.
Ab stood next to George, a little ways off, looking up at the sky, his voice a bare whisper. “Maybe Susilo brought in an animal he knew had anthrax to start the outbreak. Sani got wind of it, killed off the old Communist. That restabilized the situation.” He looked again at the sheets of fireflies turning on and off across the paddies. “Doesn’t explain the ongoing problems, though.” He kicked at the dirt in front of him. “Do you worry about yourself in this?”
George laughed as he turned toward the car, where the others were waiting. “That night at the party, Schechter told me his protection could only go so far, whatever that means, but I’m guessing a dead foreigner is too much trouble. The Indonesians would never risk it. Besides, if your theory is right, the killing in Boyolali should stop now, and I should get all the help I need to stamp out the anthrax at Susu Senang.”
Ab stared a moment at the fireflies. What if this is a way to get at Suharto or one of his friends, he thought.
***
When they arrived back at the house, the children were asleep, and they carried them from the van into their bedroom and tucked them in.
Ab followed Sarah into the kitchen to help prepare some tea. She was in a meditative mood. She drummed her fingers on the counter, waiting for the water to boil. He put his hand on her moist shoulder, but she shrugged it off like a fly.
“Don’t.” She turned around. “I have this whole sense of not belonging here. Home is where you know which objects and people have power over you, for good or ill, and how to deal with that power. I guess that’s followed me from when I was a kid. We didn’t even belong to one of the main Mennonite migrations from Russia in the 1870s and the 1920s. Did I ever tell you? My brother and I were born in the mountains between the Soviet Union and India. My parents were trekking out of Russia after Stalin died. My Mom died in childbirth. I was raised by an Indian nanny. And then, when we finally got here, I mean there, to Canada, that promised land, we didn’t even belong among the Mennonites, never mind all those englische folks. And then I go off and marry an Englische…and end up…” Her voice trailed off and she turned back to watch the tea water.
“Well, not exactly English, with a name like Grobowski.”
She looked back at Ab, brushing her hair back with one hand. “You know what I mean. An Englische like everybody else in Canada, including the French. And George, well, he’s even more englische than the English, he tries so hard. I really do weary of it sometimes.”
Ab laid a hand gently on her shoulder, then withdrew it. “So what is it that he really wants?”
She leaned back against his hand. His fingers tingled. “I wish I knew. I wish I knew.” When they turned back toward the living room with the tea tray, Nancy was standing in the doorway. Ab thought she looked more vulnerable and lonely and beautiful than anyone he had ever seen.
Later, driving home, Nancy wrapped a shawl tightly around herself. Ab smiled. “If you want to come to Canada, you must realize that this is not a cold evening. This is warm.”
Nancy said nothing until they were back in the driveway. She seemed distracted, almost angry. He turned off the car and sat quietly again. Nancy started to get out, hesitated, then stayed. “You know, I really envy people like you and Sarah. You grew up knowing who you are. You take it for granted. You quarrel with your past. But it is your past. It is the roots from which you have sprung. Whatever the soil and the rain, you grow into some form of the same plant.
“I, on the other hand, don’t even know what happened to the people who protected me and who raised me. I lost touch when they went back to North America. I barely know my own grandparents, who barely seem to know each other. I have only just recovered my past, and it is a stranger to me. My parents are a collage of stories and vague memories.”
When they got out of the car, she came around to meet him, rested her hand on his chest, and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Her hand trailed down his side and he reached for her waist, but she pulled away. “George shouldn’t mess around with that kris he gave you at the party,” she said, “or with politics. Things aren’t always what they seem in this country.”
He watched her walk over to her motorbike. His mind was racing. How did she know about the kris? It had been dark in the street when George gave it to him and he and Nancy had not discussed it afterwards. “I don’t have that kris anymore. Soesanto is examining it for a few days.”
She swung her leg up over the seat and rested her foot on the pedal.
“Do you want to meet tomorrow and go for a walk on Malioboro? We could meet at Superman’s.” She seemed to ponder this. “Ten o’clock?”
“Okay,” she said, as she pushed down the pedal to start and drove out into the street.
“I gave up my sunflower seeds,” he said, quietly, to himself, into the darkness, as Budi pushed the gate shut and sat down again on his stool.