The next day, Ab went to his office at the university. The laboratory report from the medical school lay on his desk. It was positive for strychnine. No surprise there. When he turned on the computer, the files came up. Tri had already typed the data in again. Maybe it was a technical failure. Maybe there was no conspiracy. On the other hand, the dead cattle were all up around Gandringan, and at Susu Senang. They were all imported cows. Tri was at her desk, working on some other reports. She didn’t know where Soesanto was. At another job maybe. What were Soesanto’s other jobs? Ab realized that he didn’t know. He didn’t really know if Soesanto had other jobs, just that it was probable: a private veterinary clinic maybe, or selling drugs or feed.
Ab started going through the cattle disease and shipment records related to Boyolali, and Gandringan in particular. The deaths all fit the pattern, and in some ways it was just a straight-out case of butchers trying to make a little extra money in a place where a little extra money was hard to come by. He could hardly blame them. Yet there were oddities that made Ab nervous, things that seemed to speak of other, deeper currents in a cultural and political landscape he didn’t understand, and, after what Soesanto and Nancy had said, wasn’t sure he wanted to.
The cattle deaths had started only after Waluyo became manager. Ab thought he should go up to Gandringan, to talk to the Lura again, and explain his and Soesanto’s theory. He could phone, but his Bahasa wasn’t that good, and he didn’t want to be making serious accusations without seeing the man face to face. In any case, if this theory was right, the outbreak up there would be over now, and there was no rush. The anthrax, on the other hand, would probably linger until…until what? He felt a mixture of inertia and anxiety. Where would he start working on this?
Tri left the room and then returned, and stood in the doorway. Ab looked up at her. She seemed nervous. For a moment she just stood there. “Dr. Ab?” She seemed to be struggling with what she was about to say. Then she took a deep breath and said all in one breathless sentence, “Dr. Ab please be careful, General Witono and Pak Sani are not playing games.” Then she disappeared. Ab stared after her. What was that all about?
Tomorrow he would go to Gandringan, maybe nose around some other villages in Boyolali. Then visit the Susu Senang and talk to George again. It was, he thought, a plan. He felt better already. He returned to going through the files.
Later, he stopped in at Nancy’s computer shop. It was a small store, sandwiched between a stationery store and a tape shop. The disco music from the tape store blasted out into the street, serving both as an advertisement for the store and as a sign of good will. At Christmas, the shops would be decked in bright lights, have a fake tree in the corner, and be blaring Christmas disco hits out into the street, a way of sharing their joy in the season. He could see several people sitting at counters listening to tapes through earphones, their heads bobbing up and down.
He pushed open the door of the computer store, and was relieved at the silence and the coolness. The shelves were well-stocked with IBM and Apple imitations, many of them made in Indonesia, with names like IBS and Appel. One shelf was filled with bound copies of just about any hardware or software manual you could imagine. The programs themselves could be had for the cost of the disk, and were not sold so much to make money as to keep customers happy. Not signing the international copyright convention had its advantages.
Nancy was at the back of the store, talking with Peter Findlay and Gladys White. “Well, I thought I recognized the car outside. This is the place to come then, if you want to buy a computer?”
“It’s the place all right.” Peter, suave and self-controlled as ever, reached for Ab’s hand. Ab kissed Gladys on both cheeks. Even here, in a computer store, she exuded a kind of musky energy, not the languorous, indirect Indonesian kind; it was more blatantly intense and invasive, thought Ab, and he didn’t like it.
She brushed her blond, curly locks away from her eyes. “Are you in the market for a computer?”
“I’m looking for some intelligent software to help me solve a deadly political outbreak in cows.” Nancy gave him a don’t-mess-with-the-customers look, which he tried to avoid.
Peter laughed. “Ah, a lifetime of fruitless work, I can assure you, in this country. Best to leave politics to the professionals.”
“Well, when animals die on a project where I’m the vet, it is suddenly my job as a professional. I figure if I can trace the strychnine back from Boyolali to Susu Senang, I might be able to solve the anthrax problem as well. Unfortunately, the causal pathway may take some political detours.”
Peter became suddenly solemn. “Ab, this is not a very good time to be prying into these kinds of things.”
“Meaning what?” Ab was annoyed, and could feel his temper rising.
Peter eyed him coolly. “Several months before an election, the whole world is looking this way. The government will give the appearance of clean living and integrity.” He paused, then added, “At any cost. Whoever is causing these problems with the imported cows is not playing games. I would just leave that problem alone and deal with parasites or something.”
Playing games. It was the second time he had heard that today. He wondered if someone was trying to send him a message. “It’s just a bunch of cows, Peter.” But he wondered: how did Peter know that the deaths were only in imported cows? He tried to remember with whom he had discussed this: George and Soesanto. He couldn’t remember if he had told Nancy, but she might have overheard George and him talking at the dinner. And the killer obviously knew.
Peter paused, weighing his words carefully. “The farmland those cows are on is a piece of fertile land on the most densely populated island on earth. This is all about control, Ab. It’s all about power.”
Gladys put her hand on her husband’s arm and squeezed it. “I think we’ve had enough of that,” she said brightly. “So, how is Tri working out in the office? She used to be so loved at the Australian consulate, I tell you, and they were sorry, well, I think a lot of the men were sorry, to lose her.” She laid her head against Peter’s shoulder and winked at Ab as she said this. Her husband pulled away, annoyed.
“People’s previous work records are not a matter of public discussion,” he said through his teeth.
Nancy continued to focus her I’m-busy-with-a-customer-who-might-actually-buy-something look on Ab.
Ab thought he had heard enough, and didn’t want to upset Nancy. “Yeah, well, maybe I’ll go listen to some tapes next door for a bit.”
Nancy relaxed and smiled. “Good idea. I’ll come around as soon as I take care of these customers.”
Ab walked next door to the tape shop. What was that about Tri? Had she been a plant by the Australians? That would explain how Peter knew that only imported cattle were affected. Jeeze these spooks had their hirelings everywhere, and if they thought that a few sermons about danger would somehow stop him, well, then they didn’t know him very well, did they. He had grown up with sermons about the dangers of hell. Suharto’s dictatorship was nothing.
Selecting several tapes of traditional Javanese music at random, Ab inserted one into an empty player, put the earphones on, and closed his eyes. The ringing, percussive sounds of the gamelan filled his head. The notes seemed at first to be random, leading nowhere, deep, sinister gongs and lighter, bell-like rings scattered in a dark space. He tried to imagine the slim, dazzlingly clad dancers of the Ramayana or Mahabharata tales gliding or leaping across a stage, each slight, improbable motion of the finger or head bearing great significance. It seemed like life here—the random events of millions of people on a small island, the pregnant nuances he was sure he was missing. The crashes and gongs in his head gathered momentum, and from the sounds came images of dead cows, Sarah, George, and Soesanto, Nancy arose serene as a Buddha, signalling something of life-and-death importance with a slight movement of her wrist.
When he felt the real Nancy’s hand on his shoulder, he almost jumped off the stool. He pulled the earphones off. “God, you scared me.”
She picked up the tape box and turned it over in her hand. “You like the gamelan?”
“Like. Don’t like. I don’t understand it. I think if I could understand gamelan music, I could begin to understand this place. Understand you. It’s all or nothing, I think, on this one. If I can solve one, I will have solved them all.”
She laughed lightly. “Moonlight and running water.”
“Moonlight and running water?”
“That’s what they say the gamelan sounds like. If you understand moonlight and running water, you will understand me also. You want to go out for supper?” She rested her hand on his shoulder and then massaged the back of his neck.
He turned the tape over in his hand. “I think I’ll buy this. A souvenir to mull over on cold prairie nights.” He motioned to the girl behind the counter that he wished to buy the tape he had been listening to. She filled out a bill, which she handed to Ab to take over to a cashier wicket, where he paid out the equivalent of three dollars, which was slightly more expensive than, say, a tape of the Beatles would be, since foreign-music tapes in the country were mostly pirated, while Indonesian ones were actually recorded here, with paid performers. From the cashier, he received a receipt, which he took to a pick-up counter. By the time he had made this little circle in the store, the tape was waiting for him, wrapped in brown paper.
“Talk about labour-intensive systems,” he said as they went to where his car was parked. “They’d never get away with that in Canada. Management would say it’s inefficient.”
“Did you have to wait long for service?”
“No.”
“Was the tape expensive?”
“No.”
“Do you think somebody’s losing money on that business?”
He laughed. “Okay, okay, so it’s efficient. I’m just saying, in Canada…”
“In Canada, perhaps you don’t value people. Perhaps your economy is based on the stupid notion that people exist for the economy, and not vice versa. Perhaps you do not depend on each other to survive. You depend on things. Here, if you do not have people to depend on, you have nothing. You could begin by understanding that.”
“Are you sure you are just twenty-two? You seem to understand way too much.”
She smiled slightly. “A short life, but very intense. Before you get into the car, we’ll need to load up my motorbike.”
His shirt clung sweatily to his back as he loaded the motorbike into the back of the car. So who am I depending on? They got in and Ab pulled out into traffic, almost bumping a becak bearing two blond-haired camera-laden tourists, all legs and elbows like a couple of large, bony, Charolais calves stuffed into a baby carriage.
“Dutchmen, come back to see the old colony,” he mumbled.
“They’re harmless now. They can come back and spend all the money they want. At least they haven’t come back to try to save us from something.” It was a dig, and Ab knew it, but he bit his tongue. Nancy watched the becak stop while one of the men climbed out to take a picture of the other.
“You know, all those people who are telling you to back off? You should listen to them.”
“You mean I should listen to you?”
“Of course. And Peter.”
“And Soesanto.”
“Him too? So you see.”
She watched a becak full of flowers careen around a corner and barely miss ramming into a bicycle. A funeral wreath flew off the top and landed on the cyclist. The becak driver and the cyclist both laughed. “He has the kris right now, right?”
“Who, Soesanto? Yeah. Yes, he does.”
“Good. At least you and George are not mixed up in that.” She gently massaged the inside of his thigh. Ab wondered if she realized what that gesture did to him. She seemed to be lost in thoughts entirely different from those going through his own mind.
They were at a red light. He watched a girl walk by with a tray of saté on her head. She had that slow, languid walk that seemed like pure sexiness to Ab, but must surely be just a slow adaptation to the heat. Her hips moved rhythmically.
“Do you like it?”
He startled, blushed. “What?”
“The way that girl walked.”
“Oh. I was just thinking how someone like me could easily misinterpret it.”
“Yes. As you probably did. Like many other things. Did you know that, besides being a veterinarian, Soesanto was an active socialist intellectual in the early sixties? He did popular adaptations of the wayang kulit shadow puppet plays in the villages. He was a dalang, singing and playing all the parts.”
“Soesanto?” Ab tugged at his beard, wishing he could chew on some sunflower seeds. He tried to imagine Soesanto singing. “I thought everyone who works for any government institution was screened for latent communism. How could he get through that? An American degree and a gimpy leg would hardly hide such blatant latency.”
She was silent a moment. “The handy thing about latency is that those who have power can use it to whatever ends they please. When people say ‘veiled’ this or ‘latent’ that, it’s a cover for manipulation. The government needs educated people. Not many left after 1966.” She paused. “Or maybe he is a right wing plant to expose real latent Communists.”
“I don’t think I believe that.”
“Which could just mean he’s good at his job.” She paused, as if wondering if she should say something more, then added, “Or he has had friends in high places.”
“Who?”
She shrugged, waved her hand in the air. “High places. That would explain a lot.”
“Yeah, but a theory can explain a lot of things and still not explain the crucial things.”
Nancy shrugged her shoulders. “One way or another, I only want to say, if Soesanto tells you to stay clear, he knows something.”
“If Soesanto were a plant, this whole cattle-poisoning business could be a big frame-up to set somebody up. George suggested there’s a plot afoot to assassinate Suharto, or, at the very least, one of his generals, like Witono. But maybe it’s really all just a sting to catch the plotters.”
“Could be.”
“If Soesanto is genuine, then he himself could be in danger if he gets too deeply involved.”
“Could be.”
“Could be, could be, could be. But what is?”
She reached up and massaged the back of his neck. “Soon, if you continue to think like that, you will understand the gamelan,” she said.
He reached past the stick shift and rested his hand briefly on her knee. “But only if I persist, and ignore all this advice I’ve been getting to back off and leave.”
“Sometimes your life is worth more than understanding music.”
“And sometimes, understanding the music is the whole point of life. What else is there?”
They ate rice and fried chicken, cooked over an open grill, at a sidewalk restaurant on Jalan Kaliurang, the main road from the city center going up the slope of Mount Merapi. The street was filled with people talking, smoking, debating. Ab was watching people go by. A three-year-old with a cigarette in her mouth. Three young college students in white shirts and dark trousers, their heads together, looking over their shoulders as they talked. Four young girls with Muslim headscarves, several steps behind the boys, giggling. When he looked up, he found Nancy staring at him. She reached over and touched his hand where it lay on the table.
“I’ll miss you,” she whispered.
Startled, he turned to face her, took both her hands in his, and leaned across the table. “What do you mean?”
“When you leave,” she said.
“So come with me.”
She pulled her hands away and, it seemed to Ab, brushed a tear from the corner of her eye, then reached forward and patted Ab’s hand. “Ah, Ab, Ab, I wish. If you only knew how much I really wish.”
“What?”
“I think I’d better go home. Help me get the motorbike out of the back of your car.”
He was left, sitting by himself, wondering what had just happened. His heart felt wrenched. At home, he lay awake for a long time, and had just drifted to sleep when the call from the minaret startled him awake again. It still looked dark to him outside, but the muezzin singing through the loudspeaker must have been able to distinguish the dark thread from its background, his sign that sunrise had begun. The first, faint, unseen rays of the sun must be creeping into the sky. Ab closed his eyes, and drifted off to sleep again.