The next morning just as Ab was finishing his breakfast, Nancy was back. She seemed giddy and excited. “We don’t have much time left together, so tonight,” she announced, “let’s just have a night on the town. Have you ever seen the shadow plays, wayang kulit?”
“The ones Soesanto used to do? No. Only the wayang orang, the ballet version with live people dancing on stage. Once, at the Ambarukmo Hotel.”
“Well, you really have been working too much. Yogyakarta is famous for the shadow plays. Your Canadian friends would never forgive you if you missed seeing at least one before heading home. And later, a real treat, a piece of my childhood: a fun house at the annual fair. Would you like that?”
Ab stirred his eggs around on the plate and smiled. “A piece of your childhood. I would love that.”
“Great. In the meantime, I imagine you have some things to wrap up at the veterinary college. You have less than a week. I have to go into my shop or I’ll go bankrupt. So, dinner and a date?”
He stood up from the table, came around to her side, and tilted her chin up with his hand so she would look at him. “Nancy, really, you could leave today, and meet me in Singapore in a week.”
She took his hand away from her chin. “We went over that. Now don’t condescend to me, please. It won’t make it any easier.”
“How can we do this? Soesanto and George are dead. How can we just go out on the town as if nothing has happened?”
Her eyes were dark, soft, steady. “We are going out because everything has happened. Because some things are no longer possible. I am trying to give you some small gifts, Ab. Please.” She pushed him gently away. “Meet me at the shop at closing time, say six o’clock.”
Tri was in the office at the vet college. Ab could see that she had been crying, but didn’t know what to say. She was typing furiously at the computer. He came up behind her and laid a hand on her shoulder. She kept typing.
“I am so very sorry about Soesanto. Has someone told his mother?”
She stopped, her hands resting on the keyboard, but stared straight ahead. “His mother,” she said softly. “Yes, someone will have to tell his mother.” She fell into silence, and seemed about to start typing, but couldn’t get up enough energy to move her fingers.
“I will have to leave the country in less than a week.” Ab felt as if he were lying in bed, talking to the ceiling again. “Nancy is taking me to see a wayang kulit this evening. Do you know, after all this time, I haven’t seen one yet? Too much work and too little play, says Nancy.” Tri said nothing. “And then she’s taking me to visit a fun house at the fairgrounds. She says it’s an experience I will never forget.”
Tri stood up, knocking the chair back against Ab, and walked out of the room. He stood, holding the chair, then pulled it out and sat on it, facing the screen. She had been typing in the Boyolali information. Ab stared at the screen. The answers he was looking for, he realized, were not in the computer. He still had five days to sort this out. Tomorrow he would start looking in earnest, but where?
***
It was dusk when Ab and Nancy rode to the Arjuna Hotel on Nancy’s motorbike, Nancy side-saddle on the back. Seated at one end of a dimly lit upstairs room were half a dozen tourists seated in chairs facing a large screen. The play had already started when they arrived, the gamelan gonging and crashing in the background, the finely cut buffalo-hide figures casting intricate shadows against the screen, accusing, fighting, triumphing. It was the struggle of good and evil played out on the world stage, a Javanese variation of the Indian Hindu Ramayana tales. The dalang was singing all the character voices in different nasal whines, the gamelan orchestra tumbling and battling behind him. Ab tried to imagine Soesanto playing the dalang. A right wing plant, to flush out “latent” Communists? Possible. The dalang was, after all, everybody. Was that how Soesanto had survived, by being everybody?
The tourist version was shortened from an all-night tale to a one-hour Reader’s Digest Condensed version. Back outside, they paid the parkir, one of the ubiquitous parking attendants, and climbed onto the motorbike. Nancy drove this time. As he climbed on behind her, he asked, “Did you understand what the singer was actually saying?”
She laughed. “No, it’s old Javanese, which no one ever taught me.” She turned around for a moment. “It’s easier to express the nuances of Indonesian social life in Javanese than in Bahasa Indonesia.” She sighed before she started the motor. “Or at least so I’m told.”
She plunged down her foot, the motor snarled into life, and she wheeled the cycle abruptly out into the street.
They left the motorbike with a parkir in front of the old post office, about a block away from the fairgrounds in front of the sultan’s palace. A plywood archway had been constructed over the entrance to the grounds, painted with the bright, gaudy colours of circuses the world over. Ab could see Ferris wheels going around, and carousels. Except for the sidewalk vendors selling essence of spider and scorpion, and the density of the crowd, and the stifling heat and dust even this late at night, it seemed to Ab that this could be a fair anywhere in the world.
Nancy guided him silently between the rides and the booths, the hawkers calling and the speakers blaring. The front of the fun house looked like the front of a fun house anywhere in the world, painted with pictures of ghoulish faces laughing. Music, screams, and laughter blared from the speakers out front. “A fair and a fun house unlike anything you would know,” she said, as if reading his mind.
They bought tickets, and stood for a moment, watching the people going in the entrance. Nancy suddenly gripped his arm and pulled him towards the door, laughing. “I think you are in for a real surprise.”
“But you’ll be with me.” He tried to reach for her, but she slipped in the door away from him.
“Catch me if you can,” she called over her shoulder. “But watch your step. It’s dark.”
She was right about the dark. And Ab was wrong about this being like a fun house anywhere in the world. He realized this as soon as he had entered and his eyes tried to adjust to the lack of light. This place, rather than just having the appearance of being old and haunted, really was run-down, ready to fall apart. They began by climbing steep stairs made of rotted wood, with planks missing. Nancy stumbled in front of Ab and he propped her up. At the top of the stair, a bright light shone in their faces, and a ghoulish, deformed creature leaped out at them, garbling out a preposterous song. Ab nearly fell back down the stairs. The creature laughed uproariously.
Ab pushed on quickly and caught the back of Nancy’s jacket. “Hey, that thing was real. What…?”
“A dwarf. They paint themselves up. It’s not a bad-paying job.”
He thought he would be ready for the next one, but was carefully avoiding gaps in the rotten wood floor. He could see through the floor to a level below with scenes of evil-looking creatures and strange noises. “A person could actually, really, fall through here and break their legs,” he called to Nancy above the din.
“Or their neck,” came her voice from a pitch-black spot, slightly ahead and below him. “Watch your step,” she added, as he suddenly dropped half a metre on to a platform of sagging plywood. At that moment four evil-looking beasts seemed to dance out of the thin air and reach for Ab with a blood-curdling cry. He pushed himself quickly to his feet, bumped into a wall directly in front of him, and turned through an opening that led on to a narrow walkway along the outside top of the fun house roof.
Nancy was standing there, her hand pushing lightly against a very rickety-looking hand-rail. She was grinning. “Are we having fun yet? By the way, don’t lean on this,” she said. “You might fall over.” He looked over the edge into what looked like a series of bamboo frames and broken boards.
“Is this still part of the fun house?” he asked.
“Ah, yes. We have to walk along here and then enter again back there.”
“You’ve been here before.”
“Of course. Like I said—a piece of my childhood. I don’t think they have repaired this in twenty years I’ve known it. It is one of the constants in my life.”
Three children came out of the fun house door and passed toward the back, laughing excitedly, gabbing about what lay behind and what might lie ahead. Nancy followed them and disappeared. Ab was about to follow when he felt a body pressed against his back and a hand on his arm. He turned. It was Tri. “Dr. Ab. Please. Be careful of Sani Sentosa and his family. And this house. It is not safe.”
“Ab, you coming?” Nancy had poked her head out of the door at the back, then disappeared again. He turned to where Tri had been. She was gone. What the hell was that?
He grabbed the flimsy railing and made his way along the walkway. From inside, he could hear a loud crashing noise, and shouts, but he was not sure if it was part of the normal fun house noises. Suddenly anxious, he hurried after Nancy. Almost immediately, he was set upon by a small, hard body, and sent stumbling headlong down a set of rotten wooden steps, tripping and falling down a full metre before he hit a platform.
When he landed, someone was clinging to his leg, about the size of a child but with a grip of steel. He swung his arms and legs violently in the dark and the grip loosened. He yanked himself away and stumbled on. The downstairs of the house was more of the same: dead ends, screaming dwarves and children, loud, beastly cries played over the speaker system. Something clutched at his beard, but he yanked it away and plunged through a pitch-black spot and out through a series of wet curtains into the air outside. Nancy was standing there, staring at a dense knot of people that was slowly moving toward the fair exit. She turned when he came out. He thought, for a moment, that she was both surprised and relieved to see him.
“The house owner said there has been an accident,” she said quietly. “They say they are taking the injured woman to the hospital.” For a second, as the small crowd turned a corner under a light, Ab glimpsed the body on the stretcher. It was Tri. Nancy turned and put her head against Ab’s shoulder. “Such a dangerous place, that. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you here.”
He could feel her body against him. “But it really is so much fun, yes? Do you want to try some rides?”
Ab looked around. All the rides looked home-made and genuinely dangerous. “No, I think I want to go home. I think I have had enough of your childhood.” He reached around her from behind and squeezed.
They were back at the motorcycle before either of them said any more. “Are the dwarves in there supposed to actually try to kill you?” he said.
“Sometimes it feels like it. That’s what makes it exciting.”
He paid the parkir and climbed up behind Nancy on the motorcycle. “This was more than feels like it.”
“Sani Sentosa’s family,” he mused out loud.
Nancy turned around with a start. He could feel her body stiffen.
“What?”
Even there, in the half dark of the street-lamp, he could see her pupils widen. “Oh, nothing. I was just wondering out loud if the infamous Pak Sani has a family.” She turned, and, without answering, started the motorcycle. He had to grab on quickly as she sped into the thick of the traffic.
Back at the house she didn’t say anything. They did not turn on any lights, but went to the bedroom and lay, fully clothed, in the dark, quietly staring up at the ceiling, the overhead fan circling. She went to the living room. He could hear her rummaging through the drawers of the buffet, yanking them open and then slamming them shut. She came back and stood in the doorway for a moment.
Ab propped himself up on one elbow. “Did you lose something?”
She seemed to consider this for a moment, then opened her hand. She was holding a cigarette, which she lit up, and then came back to lie down on the bed.
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
She didn’t answer.
Ab waited a moment. A car drove by outside.
Nancy leaned over the edge of the bed, stubbed out her cigarette on the terrazzo floor, and then turned back and put her leg up over his thigh. She played for a moment with his hair and beard. Then she rode up on top and leaned over, pinning his arms back. “Promise me two things. One, that you will never, never mess with that kris Soesanto had and two, that you will leave the country when you are supposed to.” She was leaning over him, pinning his arms back, deadly serious.
“But…”
“Promise!” Her voice was almost at a scream. He tried to sit up, but she held him. She leaned forward so that her hair fell around his face like a tent. “Promise, please.” She was pleading now, quietly, her voice quavering, her eyes fixed on his. The urgency of her request and her physical strength surprised him.
He lay back. “Okay, I give up. I promise.”
She rolled back and lay beside him. “Good,” she said. Ab wondered if now was the moment he had been waiting for, but with two friends dead, and a hard promise extracted from him by a woman who pushed him to the edge of passion, and held him there, at the rim of an abyss, the time just didn’t seem right. He lay awake, breathing slowly, deeply, feeling his own tense muscles slowly retreat into themselves, listening to her uneven breathing, not daring to look if her eyes were open or shut.