Early the next morning, Ab and Nancy were staring out opposite sides of the chauffeured Mercedes limousine. He had said he needed to go to Yogyakarta before going on to Jakarta, just to pick up a few more of his belongings, and to say goodbye to the other expatriates. Nancy had suggested they take a little drive into the countryside on the way to the airport, and had given the driver instructions to take them to a nearby hilltop. Now, in the car, they fell silent, their hands resting next to each other on the seat, separated by some unspeakable gulf. It seemed to Ab that there was a kind of Wallace’s line there, demarcating different histories, different cultures. He thought that if they could make that dangerous journey across this line, everything would change. The world would be better, more exciting, full of unheralded possibilities. Hazy dark shapes of cedar-tree-shaped temples slipped past in the early morning mist. Once, a couple of short, swaybacked Balinese pigs appeared abruptly beside the car, snorted, and bounced away into the mist. Ab smiled in spite of himself.
The car stopped beside the road at the rim of a lush valley, and they climbed out. The driver waited in the car. The air was cool and fresh this early in the morning, this high up. There was a small path leading along the edge of the road, and Nancy walked, at first ahead, and then fell back into step with him. Gaunt, bearded, slightly balding on top, in a white cotton shirt hung over his loose trousers, Ab shambled awkwardly beside the lithe Chinese-looking woman in a red silk blouse and black pants. A Mennonite-Canadian was walking with a Chinese-Indonesian. That would be the real Canadian way of saying things. Nothing without hyphens.
He walked closely beside her, their bodies touching with the rhythm of their steps. They wandered over the grass away from the road and squatted for a moment on the packed earth at the rim of the valley. The land fell away from them, in a hundred patchwork shades of green and greenish-blue and brown, cut into sharp terraces down to the river, glistening in the sun, fine-haired paddy rice or adolescently gangly cassava on the flat areas, and broad-leafed banana and papaya trees fringing the ridges between. Nancy put one hand on the wet earth beside her and lightly vaulted herself the four feet down to the first terrace of cassava trees. More clumsily, Ab followed.
He turned to face Nancy, who was speaking. He was trying to reconcile the picturesque postcard around him with the panic that seemed to be rising up in him again. Her voice pushed its way into his frantic, disorganized thoughts. “I can’t come with you, Ab,” she was saying. “I thought that what I really wanted was to get out of here, no matter how. A marriage of convenience.” She looked sideways at him. “Don’t take this wrong, but it could have been anybody. And you, of all the people I’ve thought might be able to help me, are the first one who could really have helped me pull it off. Really. Without faking it.” She seemed very quiet for a long time.
“And? But?”
“And until I met you, it was always a bit of a joke. When I faced your question, my question, seriously, about coming with you, when I stared it in the eyes with a clear mind and a clear heart, I began to think about what ‘just getting out of here’ meant. What I would be giving up.”
“Like being watched and persecuted because of your race or your family or your political beliefs?”
“Like everything that I know and love and cherish, my grandparents who are getting old and won’t be around much longer, my family who have made me who I am, the sea over the coral reefs and the blistering sun and the volcanoes and ruinous history of this amazing country, and yes, even the things I hate and fear. There is a kind of comfort in being able to identify the things you hate and fear as well as the things you love.
“If I came with you, I would have to start all over again, in a different culture, trying to identify all those things. And when I’ve identified them, I may find that I don’t really love them and I don’t really hate them, not in the pure way I can here. They aren’t rooted in me the way things here are.”
He was facing her now, and his hand wandered from her cheek to her breast. She took his wandering hand and sandwiched it between both of hers. “I have to stay here, Ab.” Her voice was like a whisper across the waters of a calm northern lake at dusk, barely hovering above the force welling up inside her. “I have my demons to exorcise, to live with. I’m sure you have your own. You have to leave now. I assure you, the other options are not ones you would like.”
As she spoke, his mind was scrambling over what Soesanto had said about hope. His thoughts raced on to all the things he loved and hated in his own country, in his own community, the bigotry, the smug materialism with its masks of piety and concern, the real concern, the real piety. All the things he had run away from to come here. Such petty, stupid demons. Not worth wrestling. His mind was racing wildly in circles, trying to imagine her demons, her family, all the millions of important things he didn’t know about her.
She tilted her face slightly forward and then leaned with her back against the earth wall they had just descended, as if drinking in the golden liquid of the rising sun. Her silky black hair fell away from her face like a veil. Ab was standing next to her, his right hand barely grazing the smooth pale skin of her left arm. His eyes were transfixed by a clear pearl of water as it traced a path from the corner of her eye down her cheek, under the curve of her chin, into the shadows of her blouse. His left hand, now hovering a hair’s-breadth from the rise and fall of her breasts, was shaking. It would take centuries for such a slender thread of water, running continuously, to make a slight crease in a mountain slope. In one moment, where the tears traced their course, his heart was cleft.
He turned to look out across the valley. In the swirling brown waters of the river, a slim, naked pre-teen boy was bathing his two buffaloes. The buffaloes sank with apparent tropical lethargy into the satisfying mud-warm lick of the current. Only their noses and horns protruded. Ab took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the dampness from his forehead. The boy slipped over and around his beasts, his own molasses-muffin bum lifting into the air as he curled his body and raised himself up in a hand-stand and then lowered himself into the water, rubbing the buffaloes, brushing them with a stiff palm-leafstalk brush, scratching the wrinkled, thick skin behind their horns. He clambered atop one of them, his skinny body in a crouch, glistening, then fell with a sprawling splash into the water. He paddled back and, using the buffalo horn as a handle, lifted himself up for another dive. The complex society of terraced irrigation and the social rituals of washing buffaloes reflected underlying biological necessities and complexities. Ab tried to understand this, but his mind boggled. How did one understand anything at all in a world increasingly populated with refugees and misfits like himself and Nancy? All the webs that had given them meaning had come apart. Or maybe there were just so many webs criss-crossing the world from Russia to Canada to Indonesia and back that what they had was something infinitely more wild, intricate and beautiful and resistant to their aggressive desire to understand.
Behind him, he heard the sharp slip of a knife from its scabbard and he turned to see Nancy holding a kris, not the kris, but still, a beautiful metallic snake laid across her upturned palms. “Ab, you have no idea. You have no idea at all. We just do the best we can. The world of starting over from scratch is over. We have to start from where we are and move on. Take this little gift to remember me by. My grandfather had other ideas for this knife, but I think you should have it. Hold out your hands.” She laid it across his palms, leaned up to kiss him lightly on the lips, and turned to climb back up the muddy slope to the road. He arrived at the road to see her walk toward the open door of another car on the far side of the road, a new Camry with tinted windows. Looking past her, he could see Sani, who raised his hand and moved it in a barely discernable salute. Nancy turned at the open door and stood for a moment to look at Ab, hugging herself tightly, tears streaming down her cheeks. Then she climbed into the car, and it drove away.
Ab leaned against his limousine, the knife pressing between him and the metal, pressing until it hurt. He threw the knife into the back seat and slammed the door shut after himself. The driver did not turn around to look at him as they drove off.
He checked his bags at the airport, then wandered outside and sat on the edge of a planter with orchids in it, drinking gin from a bottle in a paper bag, his feet resting on the leather carry-on case that contained the papers for General Witono. Finally, he thought it must be near the time to leave and went back into the terminal. The passenger lounge was empty and a man was just closing the gate going out to the planes. Ab looked up at the clock on the wall. The plane was not due to leave for half an hour. He ran up to the gate just as the man was turning to leave. “Excuse me, the plane to Yogyakarta? Has it loaded yet?”
The man looked surprised. “Yes. Yes, it has. Are you going there?”
Ab pulled out his boarding pass and ticket as he climbed over the low barrier. The man tore the corner off the boarding pass and Ab ran down the walkway and out onto the tarmac towards the plane. Two airport workers were holding the mobile stairs in place, watching him come. Settling into his seat, he heaved a big sigh and stared out into the bright morning light. Rubber time, they said in this country, but this was the first time he’d seen it stretched to leave early. The engines revved; he took a candy from the tray and leaned back into his seat, closing his eyes as they sped up the runway, and fell into sleep before they were even in the air.
***
The plane dropped suddenly, and the sun dazzled into his eyes, as if they had been sliding across a thin veneer of ice and snow over a northern Canadian slough and crackled through into the deafening silence beneath. He awoke suddenly out of a deep sleep, and felt himself gasping for breath. His stomach leapt up to meet his tongue. By the time he had sorted out exactly where he was, they were on the ground.
His plane for Jakarta wasn’t until later in the day. He took a taxi straight to John Schechter’s office, hoping he wasn’t out on some mountain-climbing research expedition. John was there, in the little office piled high with papers, the overhead fan turning slowly, his shirt open to his navel, his head down on a pile of newspaper clippings. Ab knocked once on the door frame and stepped in.
“Ha, caught you napping!”
John sat bolt upright, looking bewildered. He rubbed his eyes. “I thought you’d left. Forget something?”
Ab pulled up a chair and straddled it, back to front. “I forgot to find out what you saw the morning George was killed.”
The question caught him off guard. “You know what I saw. Claudia must have told you, or didn’t you talk about things like that when you were together?” He scowled.
Ab waited, feeling triumphant.
“I didn’t see anything. I didn’t get as far as the farm.”
“You turned around half-way there?”
“That’s right. What’s it to you?”
“I don’t believe you.”
Ab stood up, put one foot on the chair, and leaned on it. He spoke in an urgent, firm undertone. “I never did what you think I did with Claudia, John, although in retrospect I wish I had, and I don’t even think George did. She’s better than you deserve. Waluyo may have killed Susilo and Soesanto, but he wouldn’t kill a foreigner. I think you just used that as a cover to get rid of George. I just think you were pissed off at Claudia and her alleged lovers.”
Ab felt in control now. Everything was working out. He had to leave Indonesia, but all the threads would be tied up and he could start again, clean. He articulated each phrase slowly, to let it sink in. He could see John tensing up at the mention of Claudia’s lovers. When Ab reached the end of his sentence, John exploded into a laugh.
“You are such an asshole. Harold and I talked about the possibility that you might stumble across the truth. But you really are too stupid for words.”
Now Ab was off guard. “Harold? Wilkinson?”
Schechter’s face broke into a crooked, sarcastic smile. “Oh him. A light bulb?”
John ran his fingers back through his hair. He stood up and walked over to the window, silhouetted against the light. He rubbed his chin, as if considering something. “You really want to know who killed your friends?” A smug smile crept across his face.
Ab laughed. “Of course I want to know. Why wouldn’t I?”
John turned to face the dust-covered window. “What the hell. No one will believe you anyway.” He started drawing smiley-faced circles with his finger in the dust. “Try this story. There are a couple of Communist stooges left over from 1966. Let’s call them Susilo and Soesanto, just for simplicity, okay? One of them works on a farm as a manager. It used to be his farm in fact. Now it belongs to a General. Let’s call him Witono, who lives in Jakarta. He has big plans for it. Lots of foreign money coming in. New cars. Holidays. Susilo looks for ways to get it back. He does stupid things, like steal cow magnets and attach them to strychnine pouches. He plays games with the country butchers. They like this game. They make money on it. Even the Australians are happy. They are encouraging this. They have their own reasons for wanting to make the General and his friends unhappy.”
“Findlay,” mumbled Ab into his hand. “Peter Findlay.”
Schechter clapped his hands. “Such a bright boy! But Witono is unhappy.” He draws an unhappy face on the window. “Cows are dying. His project is looking bad. The President himself might start to be unhappy. You don’t want the President of Indonesia unhappy. Now let’s say one of Witono’s agents, who are everywhere, gets the word. Snuff. Susilo is gone.” John X-ed out a drawing on the window.
“Agent is promoted to farm manager.” He added a new happy face off to the side. “Problem. The body, which has been buried on the farm, is discovered by a bumbling foreigner. Worse yet, the weapon is also found. The agent-cum-manager, not too bright, two ears short of rabbit, has kept the weapon, to which he seems to have a personal attachment. Plus, the weapon was borrowed from a friend who borrowed it from another friend, who is expecting the weapon back, and neither of those friends wants to be connected to any of this. There could be complications. I’ll come back to those in a minute.”
He moved to a different part of the dirty window.
“Now let’s say there’s a family. A nice family, well, surviving fragments of a nice family. Let’s call them the Sentosa family just for fun, Grandma, Grandpa, and granddaughter Nancy.” He drew three smiley-faced stick figures and turned to grin at Ab. “There are more Sentosas in the family. But those are the only ones you need to know about. The Sentosas are the money behind the farm. They have the foreign connections. They are friends with everybody, especially the British, but also the Americans and even the Australians. They are what make the General legitimate. Generals, like drug runners, need a legit connection. This is also good for the Sentosas. Without this connection to the General, they are, let’s say, vulnerable. They have these different-looking eyes, you see, and no amount of name-changing can change those special eyes. The General doesn’t really like them. But he likes their money. The President likes their money, too, so the General can’t really just walk in and kill them and take over the project, even though he has the power to do so. Still, he could ruin the Sentosa family with a few well-placed rumours. He doesn’t really want to do this either, because it might threaten the deal itself, but never underestimate fear. Especially after 1966, there are no idle threats in this country. So there is a very delicate balancing act going on, and everybody wants stability. Stability is good for the family, good for the economy, and good for the General.
“Remember those complications? Well, you see, not only did this hypothetical Nancy fail to retrieve the knife from Waluyo, but a bumbling foreigner, in trying to check out the souvenir value of the kris he has found, has it shown to Soesanto.” He drew a rounded figure at the side with a stick-knife and connected it to the stick man representing Soesanto. “Soesanto has seen this knife before, and is a smart man. Some startling connections jump out at him about the journey this kris has taken from the glass case where he first saw it: Wilkinson to Nancy, who seems to have appeared conveniently from nowhere at a Wilkinson party, and who seems to be over at the Wilkinson house a lot. Nancy to Waluyo. We all know Waluyo is working for the General. Well, he’s also working for Sentosa. That’s what that anthrax stuff is about. Just to keep the project not too valuable, and the General at arm’s length. The General can’t manage without the foreign experts, and Sani has the right connections for that. But Nancy-girl, this is a new one for Soesanto.
“So, Nancy has to get the kris back, for her family. And what better way than to get really close to someone who can get it back? She also has to say goodbye to Soesanto. Can’t be helped. He knows way too much. But she’s a big girl. She’ll get over it.
“Anyway, getting rid of Soesanto, a dangerous old leftie, that’s good. Like dumping ballast. No one, well no one except some loser Canadian veterinarian who will soon go home, will miss him or investigate. The loser Canadian will forget anyway when he gets back to Canada. Distracted by work, girls, life. But damn. The bumbling foreigner who found the weapon actually saw Soesanto’s killer doing the deed. Just happened to be there to pick up the knife. Geeze, you’ll have to get rid of him too. And better do it before he tells his veterinary friend. That could get really messy. A quick stab. Okay, he’s gone. Now things are starting to look better. Hmm, might even be able to frame Waluyo. That might come in handy. Now just get the other guy out of the country.
“Now let’s get the knife back where it belongs and everybody is happy again. Phew, that was close.”
Schechter mock-wiped sweat from his brow and turned around suddenly with a bright smile. “Maybe the veterinarian will even get to marry the bumbler’s widow. Hot damn, wouldn’t that be a happy ending?”
***
Ab had been frozen during this monologue, stunned. In this country knowing too much can be fatal. How many people would you kill for your family? Family is all that matters. Ab’s mind did not want to go there. He did not want to know this. It was a lie. A lie. How could John know all this? Unless. Think about somebody who goes to all the parties and works odd hours, she had said. Damn. Double damn. He was so stupid.
Ab stood, frozen in the doorway; his body numb. This was more than he could bear. “No way. That’s crazy. Waluyo is the one. He did all the killings. It’s the simplest explanation. George saw him kill Soesanto. And for all I know, Waluyo is working for you, and you’re the one who took Wilkinson’s kris. Now you’ll have to kill Waluyo too, won’t you, god-damned Americans?”
John laughed. “Oh yeah, sure. Blame the Americans. I wish I could take the credit. I really would like that. But Nancy’s already two steps ahead of us. Waluyo will probably get a kris, but it will be a fake. In any case, if I know the Sentosas, the Wilkinsons will get the real one back, where it will be kept safely under lock and key. Waluyo works for himself. He plays whatever it takes. Like everybody here.”
He was watching Ab, a bemused sneer crossing his face.
“You can’t believe it was her, can you? Such a nice girl. She really loves you. Only she arranged to have you accidentally killed a few times, didn’t she. Remember the fun house? The near accident in the fog at the hash? Probably something in Bali too, if I guess right. My god that girl can bumble things. You’d almost think she cared about you.” He put his hand to his chin, as if pondering this as a real possibility.
“Why are you telling me this? How do you know this? Why are you making up these stories?” Ab was backing down the hall.
John raised his voice after Ab. “But don’t feel too bad. Findlay thought they were friends too, and he’s supposed to be doing intelligence for a living. At least Tri is all right, just a few bruises.” He snorted. “It was nothing personal. George just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, with too much of the right information.” Ab stood at the outside door, pushed it open. He really, really didn’t want to hear this. “And just for the record. Claudia is the perfect cover. We’re the perfect team. Like you and Nancy were. Problem is, what could they do with you once the job was over and the General survived his visit to the farm? A dead foreigner is too messy, and they’ve already got one of those. Besides, once you’ve had a man’s penis inside you, well, it is harder to kill him. Kind of creates a soft spot.” He chuckled at his own joke. “Send you home. That’s easier. Back home, they’ll think you are a paranoid loony.”
Ab began talking loudly over-top of John’s voice as he walked out the door. “Nice try, John! Good story but it just won’t wash! You don’t know anything. You’re just jealous because all the guys were popping Claudia! You don’t know the half of it!” Back out on the street, Ab shook his head from side to side, covering his ears.