1

Jake travelled light with a tidy backpack and a locked briefcase. At Dili airport the immigration officer in his curtained cubicle looked hard at his travel document, the new official passport and visa that established his identity as an Australian government aid contractor. Jake sweated as the officer took the document to his superior, an Indonesian in uniform, for further scrutiny, and was relieved when it was returned duly stamped and he could be waved through.

He felt conspicuous as he pushed out into the waiting crowd. A man in a yellow and black check shirt and jeans caught his eye. He pointed to an unmarked Datsun with a bad paint job and said he was a tourist guide. He had a business card to prove it. He could take Jake to the Mahkota Hotel.

After checking in and dropping his things in his room, Jake came back down to the desk to ask about a car. The same fellow emerged from among the indoor plants in the air-conditioned lobby as if he had been waiting for just this opportunity. His name was Rafa, he said, Jake’s first local friend. The desk clerk in his beige uniform stayed silent as the man led Jake outside to where the yellow Datsun was parked. There were no other tourists around.

Jake gave Rafa the address for Gavan Mills, the Australian water and sanitation advisor of long standing. Sandalwood smouldered in a holder by the gear stick. He wound down his window to take in the sweep of the bay as they drove along the tree-lined waterfront and smelled sea and diesel and fragrance. Somewhere near the dock Rafa turned right, past walls of government buildings, before taking a leafy side street where low houses hid behind foliage and fences topped with barbed wire. A few lean dogs were prowling about. The address on the card took them to a compound with a sign on a locked gate, a single-storey dwelling that had been converted into an office and a yard stacked with crates of equipment. No one was there. At four in the afternoon the working day had evidently ended.

Rafa grinned and they drove on. He would find Senhor Mills, he said. He knew where the Australian lived. Jake unfolded a map and tried to follow their way through the maze of streets. Dili was compact but ramshackle, stretched between mountains and sea and squeezed around the riverbed and the channels that brought water sluicing down in the rainy season. Jake was surprised by all the new construction. Indonesia had built quickly in concrete and iron for the population of officials and military who moved in after 1975 and persisted in its development ambition. A few Portuguese colonial buildings remained as landmarks behind high walls, repurposed for different government uses now. One was a prison. Others were derelict shells, boarded up like the Chinese warehouses and shops. At major intersections heroic monuments to the Indonesian occupiers had been erected. Atop the headland at the eastern end of the bay was the greatest of them all – a newly unveiled statue of Christ the King, arms outstretched over the ocean, as high in metres as there were provinces in Indonesia now that this twenty-seventh province had been incorporated.

In time Jake would come to know the city by walking hour after hour – early and late, in the cool of the day, when that became his routine. For the moment, he was confused.

After driving around and around, calling out through the car window for directions, Rafa stopped on a road out of town in the direction of the mountains at a house that was hedged by raintrees, fruiting mango trees, banana trees and wire mesh. The gate was wide open and the AusAID plumber’s truck was parked in the yard. A woman appeared on the porch and called out. A man emerged from inside and walked slowly to the gate. In work shorts and a singlet, with his rounded chest and bowed legs, he looked for all the world like the Magic Pudding. He headed straight to the driver’s door where some rancorous bargaining took place before Rafa was sent packing with a fistful of rupiah. Only then did the householder turn to his visitor and announce himself as Gavan Mills.

Jake shook the man’s hand firmly in reply. So this pink square face was him.

‘Jake,’ said Jake.

‘Okay,’ responded Gavan after a pause. It was not the name given on the minimal documentation he had been sent. ‘Jake it is. Welcome!’

Gavan ushered Jake inside and sat him on a chair at a low teak table that was hemmed in by old newspapers and piles of books. The radio was crackling in the background and a fan turned overhead. Outside, vehicles rumbled by and motorbikes roared. There were the sounds of dogs barking, roosters crowing, birds screeching in the trees, and occasional human voices calling back and forth in a manner that gave a sense of cumulative urgency to what was probably an ordinary day. Jake felt sticky and was grateful when the woman he had glimpsed in the doorway came in with iced drinks. Gavan introduced her as Teresa.

Her eyes smiled out from a soft face and a mass of dark curls. The print dress she wore – red hibiscus on a sky-blue ground – was magnificent. She looked Jake up and down. ‘You’re a tall one,’ she quipped.

To show just how tall he was Jake stood up. There was a green gecko on the wall above the doorframe, sucking on with splayed feet. He could almost touch it. It wriggled higher to get out of his reach.

‘Toke!’ laughed Teresa. ‘That’s him.’

Gavan laughed too. He laughed quite a lot, Jake would come to understand. He knew the country, he spoke its languages, he loved the people. But he was unpredictable, with a level of emotion that could be tiring. He would be Jake’s most reliable companion and guide in his time in East Timor, the one he would turn to for help. That started immediately when Gavan picked up his car keys and dangled them at Jake. ‘Let me show you around. Good to get your bearings. Nothing’s very far.’

Gavan was already explaining as they headed out in the truck. In the centre of Dili were the main government buildings, the telecommunications centre, the university, Indonesian military headquarters and the holding cells used for interrogation. Jake found himself in the middle of what he knew from briefings and aerial views. These were sites he understood as positions in a game in which each place had its colour and its function. But he hadn’t expected how much was left in rubble. For every new building there was a ruin, and in between was everything else – offices, schools, shops, depots and the makeshift compounds for storage and accommodation. People had to negotiate broken pavements and crumbling mortar everywhere as they went about their business.

East Timor was a crocodile, Gavan said. From different vantage points you could see its head, its tail, even its teeth and eyes. Her people were wary of a creature that had the power of life and death over them. The city hung uneasily between the island’s crocodile mountains and a shark-infested sea. That’s the situation, said Gavan with a shrug.

He dropped Jake back at the hotel after the tour and they made a time to start again in the morning.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ Jake said.

A Timorese woman and an Australian man had been waiting for him at Darwin airport when he got off the flight from Canberra. They picked him somehow. They had a sign with his name on it, the new name which he didn’t register at first. A fax from Dili told them who to look out for. No questions were asked beyond small talk as they escorted him to the gate for the flight to Bali and on to Dili. As he was boarding they pressed an envelope with Gavan’s name on it into his hand, thanking him. Activists, Jake assumed, part of the Darwin network. Gavan must have arranged the connection. Jake reached into his pocket for the brown envelope and passed it to Gavan.

‘Thanks mate,’ Gavan said, taking the envelope with a silent nod and stuffing it into his shorts. The envelope was thick, as if it contained money. ‘I’ll tell you later.’

Jake was in Dili to monitor the work being done on water systems in outlying villages. The role helped disguise his lack of plumbing skills. After basic training in Canberra he could change a washer and prime a pump and just about join two poly pipes together around a corner so they did not drip. With Gavan he would work the local day. But as a Canberra employee he was accountable there too. When he knocked off a from a day’s work with the plumbing contractor he acted as though he was not interested in doing anything else. Yet after eating alone in the hotel he would go out and walk the streets at dusk, gathering information. His job was to analyse from a double perspective. He would return and fill the notebooks that he locked away in his briefcase before attempting to sleep. Were the people united or divided? What did they want? What would they accept? Was there a guessable, acceptable outcome? How might the situation be manipulated?

Meanwhile the place got to him. Every day began with the roosters in a ricochet around the town. Co-co-ri-co! Co-co-ri-co! Birds ready for a fight.

—

In Jake’s second week Gavan announced that it was time for them to go up country. They drove out of town on a sealed road that soon stopped as Dili’s semblance of order fell away. Straggling buildings were interspersed with vacant lots, crops, gardens, paddies, ponds and farms, then forest encroached. The road narrowed as it climbed, ragged at the edges, pocked with holes. Young men in black marched up and down in formation. Students in another kind of uniform – jeans, t-shirts, flowing hair – stood in small circles tossing words back and forth. Women lingered with children at market stalls, exchanging messages as they exchanged goods. Girls walking arm in arm. Nuns in their habits, in pairs. Gatherings of more than two were forbidden, Gavan explained, but people didn’t always comply. Except for the militia. A noisy squad on foot rushed by them on the road, another group passed on the tray of a truck, looking, then looking away. People attended to what they were doing – mending a machine in a repair shop, buying meat from the back of a truck, checking vegetables weighed in the scales. Or they sat on a step to smoke, saying nothing to their neighbour. In this silence, this avoidance, this controlled energy, Jake sensed organisation and readiness.

Towards Aileu they veered round a cockfight in the middle of the road. That passion overrode any prohibition and all parties participated, a circle of heads bent to the patch of dirt where the champion birds, one red, one black, tore at each other with bladed claws as those who had placed their bets roared. A priest in black gesticulated grandly to divert the traffic. The rooster that lost the fight would end up in his pot.

The higher they climbed the sparser the population became. Older people stayed indoors and everyone avoided the danger of the main routes. There were almost no young women or girls to be seen. Jake commented on it. Was this what preparedness to fight looked like?

‘I don’t notice any more,’ Gavan said.

Higher up, where coffee plantations lined the road, madre cacao trees soared overhead on pale trunks, sheltering the tender berries as they ripened. Below Gavan pointed out the bamboo kadoras trickling water down the rows of coffee bushes in the old way of irrigation. ‘When the coffee bushes are flowering,’ he said, ‘they have a scent you’ll never forget.’

The mountains were rushing closer now. The tangled grassland was waist-high. At a bend in the road a couple of armed officers flagged their truck down and checked their IDs.

‘Police,’ explained Gavan. ‘Nothing unusual.’

Further along was a stall made of sticks and iron sheeting and woven palm that had a table and chairs under an awning where customers could take in the view of the valley below. They stopped for a lunch of corn and eggs and balls of rice, with coffee. The proprietor turned away when Gavan asked her how things were. He wanted to know if the road ahead was passable and she nodded that it was okay. He made a trip to the washroom out the back and reported that there was no water pressure in the tap. The woman said they had to fetch water for the mandi in plastic bottles from a spring up the hill. Plumbing was the government’s responsibility. They needed a new tank and new pipes. That would make life easier. Gavan said he would do something. She did not look convinced.

The road became a switchback of hairpin bends to the top of the range. Gavan scraped the truck against the vegetation on the uphill side to avoid going too near the downhill edge where the drop was sheer. He gunned it to stop the wheels catching and bucking in the deep potholes. Trees rose like shimmering green serpents, rearing their heads into the clouds. The folds of peaks and valleys were purple in the distance. And close by were so many shapes and sizes of flowers and insects, so many darting birds and hovering butterflies that the scene snagged at Jake’s desire to be part of it.

They reached another depot that was not much more than a chugging generator in a thatched shelter. An old man rose to his feet from a mat on the ground as Gavan stilled the truck.

‘Bom dia, Uncle Nuno! How’s it going?’

The veteran put his arm across his chest in a kind of salute. He was skin and bone with a sunken face that trailed a long beard. ‘All quiet,’ he replied with a stony glare. ‘The girls up there are good. We delivered rice to them yesterday. Some clothes from Dili.’ The man’s eyes were fathomless.

Uncle Nuno had a fridge for beer and soft drinks in his stall. ‘I’ve got some parcels from the United Nations. You want to see? Made in Norway,’ he said. These were emergency ration kits that he sold on in his role as headman of the area.

How old was he? Perhaps sixty, Jake guessed.

Gavan joked that Uncle Nuno couldn’t count all his children and grandchildren. ‘That right, old man?’ He had taught his sons to fight and lost four of them in the resistance struggle. The fighting had carried on throughout the occupation despite the ceasefires. Old Nuno had been an anti-colonial guerrilla himself thirty years ago, one of the first, and was proud of that. For him this area where his forebears lived in the embrace of the great mountain was independent already, always – in spirit, forever, no matter what happened.

A red and white Indonesian flag was flying from the roof of the little outpost. It camouflaged the old man’s reality. Only Nuno’s demeanour gave away his commitment to independence. He would die for it if necessary. That much was evident as he wiped his hand on the worn woven cloth around his waist and waved the foreigners on.

—

Beyond Maubisse they came to an opening in the forest and a cleared plateau where houses of timber and thatch stood like mushrooms in a ring. Smoke rose from the village’s fires, joining with the fog that hid the grey peaks. The old women looked up from their work to watch the truck’s arrival. They tilled the dark red soil. The fruit on their trees – mango and avocado – was not yet ripe. They peered warily, safeguarding what was theirs.

At the centre of the village was a sacred house on stilts, with goat and buffalo horns strung under its eaves and a blackened timber capstone on its steep moss-covered thatch roof. Uma lulik, its doors barred shut. The men had all gone.

‘Don’t be deceived,’ said Gavan. ‘It looks deserted but these people are up with everything. This is home base for a whole network. It’s the telephone exchange. They make sure the news gets through.’ A laugh hid his wheezing cough. He was out of breath at this height.

They went from house to house, admiring corn and cabbages and a suckling sow. The women had crosses around their necks and handwoven tais in their hair. They had lost so many of their loved ones to the spirit world that they had ceased to wear mourning. Even if they were still alive somewhere in the mountains, their husbands and sons were dead to them. When there was no body to bury, they placed stones in the grave.

‘There are only two choices,’ Gavan said. ‘Death and life. Teresa taught me that. When she was fifteen years old they put a loaded gun in her mouth to make her speak. She knew her torturer would either shoot her or he would not. It made no difference to what she would say.’

As they drove on, travelling the precipitous route to the south coast in the presence of the peak whose heights safeguarded the resistance, Jake detected a greater solemnity and respect in his companion. ‘Are you a religious man, Gavan?’

‘That’s an interesting question.’ Gavan stretched his mouth to make room for an answer. ‘I was brought up by church-going parents. Good people who instructed me in virtue. I was obedient and the result was that I practised virtue without real understanding. I stayed within the moral order but I was never tested. My obedience took me a long way. It organised my career. I was a lay preacher with authority in my community. My wife supported me. My son and daughter rebelled in their different ways. We argued and they worked out their own ideas. That was before I came up here, when the family back home started going their own way. It happens. I kept on paying the bills. Being virtuous had faded to something pretty ordinary by then.’

The truck bounced around in Gavan’s experienced hands as the track wound on, too close to the edge for Jake’s comfort.

Gavan ruminated. ‘I was here on my own and the situation was so extreme, what people had lived through was so terrible, that my routine religion became irrelevant. It was not worth hanging on to. What I found instead was the faith of these people, a driving faith, a guiding, consoling, sustaining faith. I took that on. I’ve come to share it now. I witness it in so many of the people I work with here. I feel it all around me.’

Jake looked left and right at the spectacular scenery they were passing through. The madre cacao trees had given way to eucalyptus and casuarina, sheltering an understorey and gravelly red earth below. It could have been temperate Australia until they took another curve and it was rain forest, dense, sheer and lush. Jake considered the unlikelihood of Gavan, this ungainly, unfit Australian with a face like a vanilla slice who had arrived at enough capacity for insight to understand this world.

Further along the road to Alas, concealed among trees in a sharp bend, Gavan found the opening to a track. A young woman was keeping watch. She signed them through. They ploughed uphill in low gear until they came to a clearing. There were four long sheds around a courtyard space where groups of girls were sitting on mats on the ground taking classes. An older woman in charge, her hair under a scarf, hailed the truck in welcome, pointing to where they should park. She was Sister Mina, the leader of the community.

She took Gavan’s hand in a business-like way. He introduced Jake as his colleague – another plumber from Australia to help out, a friend. She appraised the younger, taller man and let him shake her hand too. There was an air of stern mockery about the woman, her brown face creased from smiling. She had forty girls in her community taking lessons on this Wednesday afternoon, she informed the men. Instruction included technical skills as well as reading and writing in Tetun and English. The girls who knew more taught the girls who knew less. They came to her for refuge and to learn how to be useful. They had run away or been abandoned or had lost their families to displacement and death.

The girls looked up from their study as Sister Mina led the two strange men to her office space in one of the sheds where green plastic chairs around a table provided a place to talk. The nun told her visitors that the refuge was facing danger from militia elements in the surrounding towns who were in the pay of the Indonesians.

‘Hostile men,’ grinned Sister Mina. ‘They fear us! Our men!’

Her community wanted for everything: food, bedding, books, hairbrushes, underwear, a radio transmitter, spare parts for the tractor, cooking utensils. Mina was happy to accept anything from a long list. She spoke proudly of how much food they were growing for themselves – corn, beans, greens, pumpkin, taro and sour bilimbi fruit. Some of the girls went out to harvest coffee on nearby plantations, the safe ones, which brought in extra money to pay for things. But there was never enough.

‘The girls here keep busy,’ Mina said. ‘They must. Or it’s too sad. They must think about tomorrow.’ She smiled without much joy. ‘Tomorrow always comes.’

Gavan caught Jake’s eye, as if to say that this was the faith he meant.

The community had been established on the site of an old convent that had been shot up and abandoned years before. The walls of the buildings remained and part of the roof. There were holes for windows and doors. The floor was mostly dirt, covered with grass mats and plastic. Sister Mina had reclaimed the site as simple habitation for the growing number of young women and children who had nowhere safe to go. They survived by an unspoken arrangement with the nearby priests and headmen, like Uncle Nuno, who acted as intermediaries with those who policed the remote area. The community was always under suspicion and always vulnerable.

Gavan was helping them by installing a water system to bring spring water down from the mountain to the living areas and vegetable gardens to improve sanitation and make the farming more productive. Food was a problem for the resistance fighters who remained out in the hills, always on the move. Sister Mina’s community supplied what it could.

From the door to the shed Mina directed two of her charges to show the visitors around. The older girl, in her twenties, led the shy younger girl by the hand as they took the two foreign men into the forest. The path ran up a gulley where the stepping stones were uneven and slippery. Gavan and Jake were expected to follow but it was not easy. The girls in thongs made from rubber tyres touched the ground more nimbly than the men could in their solid shoes. The younger girl had on tight cut-off jeans and a pink t-shirt. The older girl wore a floral print blouse and a skirt woven in a black and red geometric pattern. They climbed quickly. When they stopped for a moment at the base of a buttressed tree, so tall that its crown disappeared from sight, the men had to rest.

The guides introduced themselves by name as Elisa and Rita.

‘Are you sisters?’ Jake asked.

The younger one pointed at the older girl and said, ‘She’s my big sister.’ They giggled. It could have meant anything.

Elisa, the one in charge, was more serious when she spoke, carefully in English. Their encampment was divided into different areas, she said, the living area where they started from, an area for growing things up ahead in another clearing, a place where animals could be penned, and all around there were look-outs. The girls were familiar with the paths that connected the different places and could move rapidly even at night. They were used to listening out for calls and other signs. If the cicadas stopped buzzing, they knew at once that an intruder was there. They could smell the Indonesians by their kretek, their clove cigarettes. They could read animal tracks. The girls were good guides. The visitors didn’t have to worry.

‘Do you have boyfriends?’ Gavan asked.

Rita rolled her eyes to the sky in a fashion that suggested all manner of romantic secrets. Jake was surprised at his friend’s cheekiness. Elisa scowled and became solemn. ‘I have a child,’ she said. ‘He’s with my auntie.’ She said nothing about the father of the child.

In the next clearing were neat lines of head-high corn that shone above the turned earth. Members of the community were moving about with hoes and barrows, picking tomatoes and cucumbers, tying the sprawling melons and squash, carting away weeds.

‘It’s all done by hand,’ said Gavan as a couple of girls came down the rows with buckets of water which they poured carefully into the runnels beside each corn plant. ‘Or head,’ he joked, referring to the baskets on the heads of other girls, ‘or heart. It’s a balancing act. We can help by bringing the water closer. So they don’t have to carry it this way.’

Already some new tanks had been delivered, ready to install. Jake again wondered what he was seeing, or if he was seeing things right. The crops swayed and spread over the mounded soil. Producing food of any kind was a defiant necessity. In the courtyard below where the girls were studying was a different kind of application and diligence. It made for an intricate pattern of activity and colour, like the weavings the girls were producing on handlooms. Some of the girls had babes in their arms. Others left the small children to play in the dust. They stared at him with curious eyes. There was no sense of defeat.

Rita dropped behind to gossip with a couple of girls who were tying up the vines. They tied coloured string to the plants with the best-looking tomatoes and the biggest pumpkins. This was a sign that no one should touch them except the fighters – their friends, their lovers – who would sneak in at night and harvest the best of the produce. When vegetables or fruit were found to be missing in the morning, Sister Mina would report the theft to the priest or a local headman who would then ask the militia men to do a better job of maintaining security. Jake wondered if Elisa was pulling his leg when she told him about this. He couldn’t believe the intricacy of the system in which they all played their parts.

Gavan stopped to rest while Elisa led Jake on purposefully. The path poked into thicker jungle and climbed over rocks that became a flight of steps. Something – a foraging chicken – squawked from the undergrowth and lizards froze as they passed. Jake followed his guide’s able feet, feeling noisy and propulsive, like a crashing brush turkey.

Elisa kept straight ahead until they reached a place of cleared earth that was almost at the top of this part of the mountain. There was an open shelter of thatch on a frame of bamboo and a long bench on which she invited Jake to sit. She tilted her head back with quiet satisfaction and closed her eyes. She was moving her lips in a mute chant as if praying, with no sound for Jake to hear, no words for him to decipher, removed from him as if absorbed into the mountain top, the vistas of trees, the clouds, the sky. Then she turned to him with a wide smile, her eyes bright with inward intensity.

‘This is the high place,’ Elisa said, ‘where we come to sit.’ It was a place of meditation, memory, re-dedication and return created by Sister Mina where each woman, each girl, could bring the pain in her heart and seek release. Elisa was asking for continued strength, she was giving thanks, she was refreshed. This was their community’s lulik place, sacred and strong, with the same power from the mountain that protected the fighters who hid in its crags and clefts.

Jake shifted awkwardly on the bench beside her, bowing his head. He accepted the information that Elisa was sharing with him as a gift: her revelation of a source and a spirit from the rocky outcrops that disappeared in the clouds above them.

‘I pray for my son,’ she said, turning to Jake. Her skin was golden. He held her gaze until she turned away. She looked to the sky again, wrapping her arms around her chest. ‘I pray his father live.’

‘We lost Rita,’ Jake said, breaking the silence.

‘That girl so naughty.’ Elisa laughed, brightening. ‘Okay, we go.’

‘Can we go any higher?’ Jake asked. Between the trees that shielded the special place where they were sitting was a stone path that seemed to lead further still.

Elisa did not respond. Instead, almost dancing, she skipped back down the path they had come by, jumping from stone to stone. Jake trailed her without the same grace. Soon they were back in the cropping fields among the corn, melons, beans and tomatoes. Gavan had found Rita and returned to the lower level where they were eating bananas with Sister Mina. The nun said that her sentries were patrolling the area day and night now, young men who could move invisibly through the trees, boys who were alert to anything out of the ordinary – the snap of a twig, an animal being disturbed. She wanted her girls to be safe.

Here too a red and white Indonesian flag fluttered deceptively from a pole in the courtyard. If they were accused of supporting independence they could point to the flag. Everyone understood and again nothing was said. But when it came to the hoped-for referendum, they would not be afraid to vote for what they really believed in. So many people had died already, so much was destroyed. The only way was to determine their own future. When that day came, they would no longer be fugitives or slaves in their own land.

Gavan took further instruction from Sister Mina about the logistics of bringing water down the mountain for the community and the surrounding areas and storing it in tanks over the dry season. As well as being able to irrigate their crops, it was important that the women and girls could wash properly. She did not want girls disappearing from class when that time of the month came and they needed to be clean.

Gavan and Mina shuffled papers at the table in the office while Jake waited outside. He saw an envelope that looked identical to the one that he had delivered to Gavan from Darwin. The same envelope, thick with money, slipped in among the papers for Sister Mina.

Rita rode into the yard on a little Timor pony, whipping the animal with a goad for the visitors’ benefit. It was one of the artefacts from the community workshop, carved wood and plaited leather. She twirled it like a baton as she waved goodbye.

Then Gavan was behind the wheel of the truck and he and Jake were heading back down the way they came, lurching from side to side on the winding descent, watching out for unmarked landslides.

‘Is it safe for us to come up here?’ Jake asked. ‘Are we being watched?’

‘Everything we do is in plain sight,’ said Gavan. ‘We’re just doing a job. Don’t worry. You’re safe with me at the wheel.’

There was a roadblock at the halfway point where their documents were checked again. A fellow in camouflage greens and an AK47 over his shoulder gestured at Jake to remove his dark glasses.

‘Militia,’ grunted Gavan. ‘Not even police. They just set up shop here. None of it’s legal. The camouflage gear is merely a fashion statement.’

‘Those weapons are more of a worry,’ said Jake. ‘Lucky we’ve got nothing to hide.’

‘That’s right. Only bad guys wear shades,’ advised Gavan.

Turning his back, the militia man in his black t-shirt and white headband let the foreigners through.

—

Driving with Gavan to worksites became a regular thing and gave Jake the opportunity to see many corners of the country. It made him more aware of what he could not see of the past and the future, and the hidden currents that lay between. With Gavan to interpret he had a chance to talk to the people on whose land they put in tanks and pipes and pumps and filters. He got to know the different security outfits stationed along the main roads, the headmen and women in the towns and villages who took credit, the priests who blessed the work, the nuns who came with practical suggestions, the kids and the crazy ones, those with scars and injuries, boys and girls with the soulful eyes of elders who would yet have to take responsibility for what might come. These young people lived from day to day, running around, busying themselves, playing, flirting, telling stories. At the same time they were living for the larger destiny of their place in the world.

Jake observed them, the kids with signs of malnutrition, stunted sometimes, almost all of them as lean as boards, the skin drawn tight on their bones. He listened to those who tried out English on him and understood what he could. Under Gavan’s tutelage he learned to differentiate their languages and accents, how they were educated and what their life experience had been. The diversity of people was testimony to a complicated history, including those who had been transmigrated from other islands in the Indonesian archipelago. Jake learned to notice clothing, headgear, adornment, hair, teeth and any wounds that might be visible. He couldn’t see the dead, the wounds in the heart, the gaps in the record.

Maybe two hundred thousand people had died in this place in the last twenty-five years. It was an incontrovertible reality. The cemeteries were full with fresh graves and more dead were buried outside the sanctified walls. Violently killed or disappeared. Dumped at sea. Many were taken across the border, dead or alive.

On all sides of the struggle bodies were hacked to pieces and burned. Burial pits surfaced from time to time, bringing forensic archaeologists to work alongside the investigators whose job it was to document the human cost. Hidden in these hills and fields out of sight of the road were more mass graves, as yet undisclosed. Someone knew where they were, those deep, wide trenches filled with human bones. Someone was haunted by them, knowing one day the remains would be revealed.

Jake knew that if he blamed Australia he would demand of himself that he take responsibility. Yet he must accuse his own country for giving the Indonesian invasion the go-ahead back in 1975 and for sticking to a line ever since in which a convenient self-interest became ideology. Which meant exonerating the more powerful ally, America, that relied on Australian proximity for an accurate, informed call that never came. Jake worried about that too.

Gavan’s anger and partisanship, on the other hand, were unmissable. The reports that the Australian Embassy in Jakarta asked him to write went well beyond his remit as an aid worker on the government payroll. His language was emotive and hyperbolic and those on the receiving end laughed. The bucket of salt dumped on the reports made it easy for the analysts in Jakarta and in Canberra to dismiss Gavan with witty comments in the margin. Gone native. Gone troppo. His impassioned reporting never got far up the line. It certainly did not reach the Americans who might have sat up and taken notice.

For Indonesia, Suharto’s removal was a revolution in itself and a cause for hope. His successor, Habibie, wished to extend that hope to the problem of East Timor. Yet the real power lay with the military and its vested interests, which made foreign powers inclined to appease rather than confront, since no one could guess how the beast would behave when its claws were unsheathed.

Gavan expounded endlessly as he and Jake drove around the country. The truck was his preferred venue for sharing his views and Jake’s presence didn’t hinder him from venting.

Meanwhile the government in Portugal continued to insist on a true act of self-determination for the people of its former colony before sovereignty could be ceded. When a trio of European Union ambassadors arrived in Dili on an inspection visit, hopes ran high. The diplomats were alarmed by the furious Indonesian reaction to the pro-independence demonstrations put on for their benefit. They concluded that it would not yet be possible to reach an accurate assessment of the situation on the ground and headed for the airport.

‘They got it wrong,’ swore Gavan. ‘They didn’t allow the people their hope.’

‘Is hope a human right?’ questioned Jake.

‘Hope is everything.’ Then Gavan started to sing a song without words as was his recourse when he exhausted the power of speech.

Australia was quietly satisfied with the EU ambassadors’ response. Canberra had primed the diplomats. No upsetting of the apple cart please. The people of East Timor were not ready for independence precisely because they wanted it so passionately. Autonomy within Indonesia was the more prudent option, a gradualist approach, phased in over time. Only the more impulsive Americans expressed doubt about the hair-splitting pusillanimity of the delegation’s report.

‘The so-called international community,’ Gavan huffed. ‘All they’ve done is give the Indonesians time to stage-manage integration.’ As more and more plain clothes militia were moved into place with each passing day, the covert military presence became a palpable threat. ‘Semblance breeds distrust,’ Gavan added. ‘Sooner or later action will provoke the real game.’

‘I think you mean dissembling,’ said Jake. ‘Dissembling breeds mistrust.’

—

The old waiter at the Mahkota knocked softly on Jake’s door one evening, having got to know his habits. Jake had a visitor – a young Timorese. Jake trusted Alonso, understanding that his primary loyalty was to the hotel where he had worked since boyhood. He let Alonso send the visitor up and left the door slightly ajar. Hearing footsteps, he watched it open to admit a youth with cropped hair and a fluffy moustache, glasses and the standard outfit of faded jeans on his slim hips, torn runners and white t-shirt – this one with Caspar the Friendly Ghost on it.

The young man introduced himself as Elisa’s cousin. She told her cousin to come. His name was Jacinto. He wanted to learn the plumbing business. He wanted to start his own plumbing business in fact, once he finished his training. He hoped to get work on some of the Australian aid projects, he said. That was how he would learn.

‘You know Elisa?’ Jacinto confirmed, a little nervously.

Jake remembered her of course. She had asked him where he was staying. She had talked of a cousin, all very casually, as they headed down the mountain trail. ‘Maybe you can help?’ she had asked Jake with an earnest smile and he said yes, wondering what she meant.

‘Was it difficult for you to come here?’ Jake asked, gesturing to the youth to sit in the armchair while he closed the door and rotated the straight-backed desk chair so they could sit face to face.

‘No difficult.’ Jacinto grinned widely. ‘It’s okay. I know Alonso.’

‘How are you related to Elisa?’ Jake asked.

Jacinto looked to heaven, hoping to get it right. ‘My mother is her aunt.’

‘Do you live here? In Dili?’ Jake felt the awkwardness of his questions but he needed to start somewhere.

‘We come from Same, in the south. I come to Dili for school, for work.’

‘Are you involved with the students?’

‘I study computing,’ he said. ‘Computer programming. And English. I help the students sometimes.’

Jacinto was almost too open, Jake thought, talking to a stranger on his cousin’s recommendation. He didn’t know what to make of the visit, except to take it on face value. It seemed there was no time to lose.

‘Where’s your mother now?’ Jake asked. ‘Is she with Elisa?’

‘She’s gone,’ Jacinto said matter-of-factly.

‘I’m sorry,’ responded Jake, understanding him to mean that his mother was dead.

Jacinto clenched his fist. ‘Only another auntie is in Alas now.’ He clasped his other hand around the fist and might have raised his arm in a defiant salute. But he restrained himself.

Jake wanted to ask about Elisa and find out more about her family. Why was she with the women in Sister Mina’s refuge?

‘She was in the convent,’ said Jacinto. ‘She was accepted to become a nun. Then she changed her mind and married her boyfriend.’ He laughed. ‘The man went into the mountains with Falintil. He’s a big fighter, a guerrilla. They cannot see each other. Not now. They have one child, a boy. He’s here in Dili with his father’s older sister’s family. He’s safer here.’

Jake nodded. ‘How old is he? What’s his name?’

‘He’s six now. His name is Leto. He’s a real monkey. He’s in school.’

This was a slice of a larger story, Jake guessed. A panorama, glimpsed in the transaction of information. ‘How about you? Are you working now?’ asked Jake.

‘I want to work,’ Jacinto said.

Jake undertook to talk to Gavan. When there was news he would send the young man a message via Alonso.

‘I can help you,’ Jacinto promised.

‘We can help each other,’ agreed Jake, turning the deal to a lighter kind of exchange. ‘Thank you for coming. I appreciate it. I’m happy to meet you.’

‘Thank you, mister.’

They shook hands and the brief interview was over. It got Jake thinking about Elisa again. She had fixed herself in his mind.

—

He heard a piano playing as he arrived at Gavan’s on foot. The music was louder and more reverberative than the radio or a recording. He called out to be let in, which set the dogs barking. They had been quiet for the music, ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. The familiar melody broke off and Gavan emerged looking sheepish.

‘Caught in the act of tickling the ivories,’ he said.

‘You’re good,’ declared Jake, who knew nothing about music.

‘I always have the goanna with me wherever I go,’ Gavan said. ‘It’s battered and out of tune but it makes me feel at home. I studied for years when I was a kid. The piano was the outer limit of what my strict Christian parents would allow by way of a hobby. It keeps me sane, not that you’d notice. Bach mainly. The household seems to get on all right with old JS. The dogs like him. He’s a universal. Poor Teresa. She’s very kind about my playing.’

‘Don’t let me interrupt you,’ said Jake. It was the twilight hour. He was just passing on his walk.

‘No worries, mate. It will soon be too dark to see the keys. Night drops in Dili like a curtain. The electric light is unreliable. I have an invitation for you anyhow,’ Gavan said. ‘We’re invited to tea at Senhor Vasco’s house. He’s the patriarch of one of the old Portuguese families. I thought you might like a taste of remnant seignoria.’

‘Is he a politician?’

‘Always.’

‘What side is he on?’

‘He probably wants some plumbing done. Wants to see if we’re available. He doesn’t really have a position.’ Gavan looked at Jake with a twinkle in his eye in the way of a supervisor giving a less than casual warning. ‘It doesn’t necessarily help to think in terms of sides. That can be a trap.’

Jake got the message. He could see that to set up the idea of two sides in an internal conflict, like a domestic dispute, could be a tactical mistake. It could be used to justify an intervention that promised peace, when neither side had the means or the maturity for that. The imposition of an impartial order, however harsh, was a job that the Indonesian army had the means and the will to carry out, regardless of any sides.

‘I wish you were still playing the piano,’ Jake replied. ‘It was nice. You do it well.’

—

First there was the stone wall rendered with mortar painted flaky pink and topped with broken green glass. Then there were the elaborate iron gates and the locks and the rusty chains which a grizzled gatekeeper grappled with in a comic routine. They parked in a yard where sheds of sticks and rusty iron sheeting stood lopsided among the weeds. There was another wall of brick and another gate through to a low wide house that was plastered yellow, with the doors, window frames and shutters painted black, under an undulating roof of red tiles, all picturesquely surrounded by flowering and fruiting trees – date palms and fan palms and jacaranda – above which the clouds roiled in a blue sky.

The visitors were ushered to a black-and-white tiled reception area where muffled figures came and went like museum attendants. On display were cabinets of porcelain, framed portraits and old photographs, stuffed birds of paradise in glass bells, carved mahogany saints and the faded leather escutcheons of a family crest. In a further inner courtyard people were camping out among glazed pots of shapely shrubs and in an even grander reception room, standing on a ruby-red rug, Senhor Vasco awaited them.

‘Gavan! And our new friend from Australia?’ He came forward and took Jake’s hands in his. ‘Mister – benvindu! Obrigadu!’ He gestured at a choice of armchairs and couches, rattan, upholstered, scattered with brocade cushions. Some of the seats around the walls of the capacious room were occupied by people sleeping, heads in hands, or scratching in notebooks, or just sitting straight-backed and staring, showing no more concern for the new arrivals than did the life-size Madonna on her pedestal in a corner niche.

‘More than one hundred people have come to us,’ said Senhor Vasco as he settled in the central rosewood chair. He wore a cream linen jacket with gold buttons and ballooning black pants tied with a drawstring at the waist. Around his neck was a crimson silk scarf. ‘They are staying in our house. We have created dormitories in our warehouses out the back. Why is this happening? You do not like to ask. They have lost their homes. They cannot feed themselves. They depend on us. We have been here so long. Now, please.’

Coffee, pastries and iced lemonade were brought by two girls wearing finely embroidered white shirts and woven sarongs. It was impossible not to be charmed.

‘Pasteis de nata,’ the host said. ‘The famous Portuguese tarts which are really Chinese. Here Timorese. The nutmeg is ours, and the coffee, of course. Our family has been in the trade since it began.’

Senhor Vasco’s modest stature contrasted with his wide girth. He had a jowly, smooth-shaven face and a mass of iron-grey curls. His dark eyes, lost like raisins among his wrinkles, glowed. The fingers of his small white hands twitched as he talked. He had been party to most of the arrangements in the country for the last half-century – the colony, the territory, the province – the parties, the organisations, the alliances, the schemes. He had been on every side, in every formation. His family owned land, ran coffee plantations on a grand scale, had investments and partnerships that extended beyond the island shores and across the Lusophone world to Macao, Goa, Mozambique and Brazil. The family had ramified, dispersed, dissipated. Seminarians, papal knights, Lisbon politicians, lawyers, merchants, artists, mestizos, changing their spots over and over, old colonisers who knew how to adapt without the least taint of betrayal – for how could they betray themselves who knew nothing else?

Three men in a hushed room being served delicacies by finely clad young women whose eyes glanced imploringly about. They were not the eyes of slaves because they had other roles to play in this obscurely unfolding present, Jake reckoned. Not merely acting but active in the forging of alternatives, even as they bent their knees and inclined their heads, offering sugar to the white men.

Jake thought he heard Gavan humming Bach under his breath as old Vasco talked.

It turned out that the girls were granddaughters of some kind in Vasco’s extended family. Most people in the house belonged to the clan, which gave them a claim on hospitality and an obligation to serve. There were blood relationships and other degrees of fealty. Vasco did not quite know how many children or children’s children or in-laws or prospective members made up the family and its dependents and followers. Certainly it was hard to identify relations by the appearance of people.

After the coffee Gavan and Jake were taken on a tour of the rest of the house including the areas at the back where people were sheltering. The mix was evident, and no less so the hierarchy, with distinctions based on blood, colour, hair and other characteristics preserved and enforced within the most generous, sustained mixing. That was the work of colonisation, its legacy, its mode, making the one on top an aristocrat according to the old feudal structures of rule. That was the manifestation of domination. Even as every individual human component pushed actively against it, the arrangement survived. Those who benefitted most were the least likely to believe in any real change. They could not even imagine it, knowing how the old colonial structures could mutate and survive. It made Senhor Vasco complacent. That was his form of resistance as well as his conservatism. Except where pride was concerned. When his pride was provoked, outrage followed. That had happened now in the refusal of the Indonesian authorities to appoint him to a position of honour and reward in their administration. They had pushed the Senhor and his clan into the independence camp, which he thereby naturally saw as being on the winning side of history, those who would eventually recognise his worth and bestow on him the benefits he deserved.

Jake found it disgustingly corrupt. This rotten perpetuation of personal advantage without even bothering with conviction, except for the vanity that swelled like an inflatable balloon intended to carry the whole family aloft in its basket.

At the back of the house was a decommissioned swimming pool, empty except for the slime of leaves at the bottom. Gavan noted it as a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The sides were cracked and the steps down into it were black with mould. It was something out of Hollywood.

Beyond the perimeter wall there was another encampment of people who had tried and failed to get into the compound and just settled down where they were. They called on the resources of the house, its electricity, its water, its help. Gavan and Jake were shown the old underground cistern where the water quality was getting worse as the level went down. It leaked, even as water sluicing from the mountain replenished it when it rained. Too many people were drawing on it. Pipes and hoses were rigged up and strung along the ground to taps and basins inside the compound and out. Their two young guides made faces to show how bad the situation was. They pinched their noses to indicate the smell.

Then a coconut dropped at their feet. The monkey man was at work. He had trained his pet monkey to climb the tallest coconut trees and pick the ready coconuts. They fell to the ground as the monkey did his work until there were no more coconuts in reach and the monkey shimmied down to his owner for the reward of a banana. The children ran about excitedly trying to beat each other to the harvest of falling coconuts. Gavan and Jake enjoyed the show just as much. They applauded the monkey man and gave him a tip.

The patriarch was waiting on the couch in the room with the choice of comfortable chairs to farewell the visitors after the tour and the entertainment. With a flurry of urgent Portuguese Senhor Vasco ended a telephone call and, switching to an affecting English, beckoned his guests to settle themselves for the parting audience. He asked if they had seen the dirty water and understood how many human souls he was servicing. Was this not a cause deserving of aid and Australian know-how and the equipment to transform the old-style plumbing of a modest house into a proper, adequate, hygienic modern system for several hundred refugees? Now they grasped the situation, smelled it with their own noses, Senhor Vasco knew that these gracious gentlemen would provide his humble house with what was needed.

Jake observed the man’s fleshy, undefined face, his highly responsive eyes, his mobile mouth, his ironic, disclaiming smile. He saw the vacuity in the man for all his personal bulk and paraphernalia, the people seated around him, the generations, and he was offended. He saw the colonial failure of care, the negligence, the indifference, in this figure proffering his sweet, sickly, flaky culture and took umbrage.

When they were back in the truck Jake exploded.

‘Vasco doesn’t want anything to happen,’ Gavan said, pushing back a little. ‘It’s human nature. He wants new plumbing for his private use. And he’ll get it. Flush toilets. Running hot and cold.’

Jake was always casting around for someone else to share the blame with Australia. ‘So Senhor Vasco likes to take a bath. Portugal has something to answer for still.’

‘You can’t blame Portugal. They were pulling themselves out of decades of fascist clerical stagnation back home and here they were cheated by the invasion, when Indonesia let the colonial masters know what they would have to accept.’ Gavan went on. ‘Those here with the closest ties to Portugal are both the best and the worst. The coloniser colonised. It’s the condition of their souls. They imagine they can escape but they have nowhere else to go. This is the world that created them.’

Jake disliked determinism but he understood the force of place and the formative values it inscribed. He stiffened his back against the lumpy seat of the truck and sighed.

He thought of the man in Canberra who had given him his rudimentary training – a plumbing contractor who ran an air-conditioning repair business on the side. He was Portuguese too. Vince was his name. He had done his time in the Portuguese navy, conscripted in the last months of the Salazar dictatorship and sent to East Timor. He was a small-town lad from Evora in the middle of Portugal. His father was a builder and he worked with his father before he went to sea as Portuguese young men always dreamed of doing. They were navigators, even if it meant joining the navy to be so. When Vince got to Dili, he saw that it wasn’t working. Nothing was possible, even by the slow, sleepy standards of his motherland. The place was already long abandoned, sunk in disregard and corruption. Nothing was ever fixed or replaced when it wore out. Nothing worked. That’s what Vince told Jake. With the change back in Portugal the slide into anarchy and destitution only worsened, since this unwanted appendage of a remote colonial island on the other side of the world, a suppurating paradisal relic of an empire too many centuries past, was the last thing on anyone’s agenda. For the sailors stationed there supplies ran out, rations deteriorated, work became intermittent, pay was reduced. Vince saw the writing on the wall. He saw the end before it happened, afraid of being stuck there forever.

One night Vince went AWOL, jumped on a ship to Darwin and made a claim to become Australian, to migrate, once he was on shore. In those days it happened like that. In no time at all he got his qualifications as a plumber and went into business. He got government work in Darwin first of all, as a contractor. Then wife number two and a couple of kids to support took him to Canberra, where he was now training people to become plumbers, people like Jake who would never be any competition.

‘You wouldn’t read about it,’ Vince joshed with Jake about his story.

When Jake asked him about East Timor, Vince had his stock reply. ‘Bloody mess.’

‘Back then,’ Jake pressed. ‘Or now?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Vince holding up his hands in innocence. ‘Bloody mess. Bloody Portugal. Bloody mess.’

That was Vince’s line, even though he kept his Portuguese passport after he got Australian citizenship, just in case. He had never been back to Dili.

‘You can’t only blame the Portuguese,’ repeated Gavan.

‘There’s a Portuguese fellow back in Canberra who wouldn’t agree with you,’ teased Jake.

—

TGIF was a relief after Senhor Vasco. Every second Friday afternoon Gavan opened up the aid project compound to any Australians left in Dili and their friends – business people, scouts, travellers, health workers. They congregated under the trees in the backyard sharing survival tips. Gavan had someone at the gate checking passports. The phone and fax machine in the office worked and he let people use the photocopier or the computers that were part of his government-funded kit. They paid for their own drinks with Aussie dollars – beer and wine, Bundy rum, coke or sprite in disposable cups with chips and peanuts, all flown in. Teresa ran the bar.

The hubbub sounded just like Thank God Its Friday in Canberra. Most of the crowd were short-termers and on their own – medical staff, construction workers, company people, anthropologists, the religious. A hippie couple had just arrived by bus from Kupang in West Timor, the other part of the island, a music journalist, apparently, and his photographer girlfriend. There was a lad from Melbourne who had reached Dili after backpacking his way through the Indonesian archipelago for three months and a curator collecting archaeological objects for her museum in Sydney. There was Herb, a retired butcher who provided buffalo-meat sausages for the barbecue from the abattoir he was setting up in town; and Billy, a fresh-faced Canadian who stayed behind when his boyfriend retreated to Sydney, leaving him with their bitzer dog; and the ex-Queensland police couple who had paid employment in East Timor’s non-existent tourism sector, a chubby bikie and his wife with a lazy eye. A hardcore expat crowd leavened by some venturesome locals including the young Indonesian boss of the power station, a smoothie in a crisp company shirt who let Gavan siphon off diesel for his truck at mates’ rates from the government supply.

Sister Mary-Jo had called in to pay her respects to Gavan too. The nun was an East Timor veteran and one of the fixtures of the place. Her charity could no more be ignored than she could personally.

Jake knew he could strike up a conversation with any of them. They were strangers but close. Like foreigners, all in it together.

He was on his second VB already, wanting to unwind. The talk was mostly of discomforts and irritations. Whatever people were doing, it wasn’t going well. Some were there simply for the experience and wanted to make the most of it. They traded notes about beaches that were worth checking out and tips on where to eat the best Chinese. There was gossip from home – plenty from Canberra among those from the national capital. Some had been on other overseas postings which they could compare and contrast. Some of the women were working their way around the world from PNG to NYC and had seen a lot for their tender years. They could hold their own.

Jake talked to Kelly who said she was a liaison officer from the Department of Industry in Canberra, seconded to an oil and gas exploration outfit. Her husky laugh went with her punk hair and piercings. She was there with Tania, her best friend.

When he asked what they were doing there, Kelly said it was better than being stuck in Canberra. But when he asked again what she was there for she didn’t skip a beat. ‘For the natural resources,’ she said. ‘That’s why. There’s a shitload of oil and gas under the sea between Australia and Timor. If not more.’

‘Right,’ said Jake.

‘Energy,’ she said. ‘Securing what we need. Where have you been?’

‘I was sent up at short notice,’ Jake explained, defending himself. ‘To help out with some plumbing. I never expected to be here.’ He laughed. ‘I’m a total newbie.’

Kelly looked at him a little sceptically. Someone else came near and she made room. ‘Hello darls,’ she said, attempting an introduction. ‘This is…’

‘Jimmy Chin,’ the man said, putting out his hand for Jake to shake.

‘Jimmy’s on keyboard,’ Kelly said.

Jimmy grinned at that. He had worked in Comms in the Sydney office of Foreign Affairs. His bald patch was surrounded by cropped black hair and he wore the same neat-casual shirt and trousers as when he worked in William Street. He was in his thirties, Jake guessed. Comms. Communications. A signaller.

‘I’m a glorified typist,’ Jimmy replied. His lips barely moved.

‘Jimmy keeps the wheels on,’ Kelly elaborated. ‘He’s numero uno if you really want to get a message out. A telex for your mother’s birthday. Your wedding anniversary. That sort of thing. What do you reckon?’

Jimmy raised his eyebrows. ‘What can you do? At least I’m good for something.’

‘Useless for anything else,’ Kelly quipped.

‘Time for another one,’ said Jake, detaching himself and leaving them to it. His reading of the situation was fuzzy and opaque – a mood as much as anything. He got a third beer from Teresa who asked how he was finding things. Was he missing home? Her question touched him.

‘I miss my wife and daughter,’ he answered.

‘Of course you do,’ Teresa laughed warmly. ‘But it’s good for us they let you go. Enjoy!’

Feeling a little tipsy as he wandered away he acknowledged that he did miss Anne and Nicole and became sentimental. He was tied to his wife and daughter. He assumed that not all of the people at the happy hour were like that. Single and unattached. He nursed his beer on the wall of the front porch and gazed up in reverie at the full moon.

‘Bewdyful, eh?’ said Jimmy, coming up beside him. ‘It’s a blood moon.’

‘Is it? Looks more like strawberry ice cream to me.’ Jake chuckled.

‘You’re new here.’

‘I certainly am.’

‘On your own?

‘Working with Gavan,’ Jake said.

‘Well, hope to see you around. If I can be of help. Here’s my card. I’m starting an internet café in town.’

Jimmy was making contact. Jake wondered why. ‘Right. You’re not doing Comms anymore?’

‘Gavan lets me use his stuff when he needs to be in touch. There’s Telkom, the main exchange, but that’s not always reliable. I decided to have a go on my own. I love the place. Can’t seem to get away.’

Jake looked at Jimmy and gave him a nod, acknowledging the offer of help. ‘Have a good night then,’ he said, turning to go. ‘I better be heading off. I’ll come and find you.’

Jimmy was surprised. ‘You’re not on foot? Do you know the way? Will you be okay in the dark? It’s a blood moon like I said.’ His eyes were shining. ‘And it’s not just the moon. There can be blood on the ground too.’

‘Thanks,’ said Jake.

‘I can’t go to bed until this crowd moves on,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’d give you a lift otherwise. I’m on duty tonight. Gavan lets me sleep over in the office when I’m doing an all-nighter.’

The man was keeping the communications lines open to the world, Jake realised, without back-up, in one of Gavan’s DIY arrangements. And setting up a line of communication to him. The unofficial consul.

‘Twenty-four seven,’ groaned Jimmy. ‘See ya.’

—

Jake recognised the danger of his mild euphoria as he walked back to the hotel by himself. He quickly lost his bearings. After a few drinks on an empty stomach and nothing else but the encounters with strangers his apprehension was subdued. He was careful as he stepped through the dark, certain of being watched, not necessarily with evil intent, but just to see where he might be going.

He stopped at a noodle shop and had a plate of chowmein. The clatter of mahjong came from an inside room, the clicking of tiles, the happy oohs and moaning aahs of the players as they greeted their luck. The fast percussive sounds and pulsing tones of the game prickled him as he slurped the spicy noodles.

When he got back to his room he tried to call his family, but it was impossible to get through on the phone in the lobby.

He lay on his bed in his clothes, sweaty and tired, and let the piled-up impressions of the evening play through his mind. The people he had met, who had come up to him randomly or for purposes unknown. Like Jimmy Chin. What was he after? He was amusing at least.

Jake liked simplicity and clarity. Confusion was an excuse for bad things to happen. Gavan was certain in his moral outrage, afloat on it as each new wave of atrocity broke. Kelly had been just as clear. There were economic interests in the Timor Gap. But neither the compassionate embrace nor the cool calculation took into account the emotion Jake experienced from the local people. They seemed able to absorb suffering and transform it. He had felt it walking with Elisa to her special place of power on the mountain. A lulik place, she called it. He saw it equally in the trust and speed with which she sent her cousin Jacinto to him, seizing the opportunity, forging a link.

It was impossible to ignore the force field of East Timorese commitment.

As he lay there half dozing he wondered if his ability to analyse was compromised by fatigue. What he feared most was becoming unmoored. He relied on self-discipline when it came to the intellectual frameworks within which he operated. He needed to gather data, filter information and form it into a diagram that pointed clearly to a desired and possible future. He could sense a picture but he seemed to have lost the means to depict it. His mind was drifting. He was purblind, like an animal sniffing its way through the dark, through tunnels in the earth.

The room was stuffy. He slathered himself with insect repellent and opened the shutters wide to the night, trusting the wire screen to keep most of the mosquitos out. He lay on the bed in his boxer shorts, closed his eyes and tried to still his restlessness. He willed himself to submit to any elucidation of his haze that sleep might bring.

—

Gavan, at the wheel of his Toyota, arrived on Sunday morning to take Jake to church. He had a fresh shirt on and his hair was slicked down. Sister Mary-Jo had collared Gavan to play the organ for her in church on this special day and wanted him there early to warm up the portable organ they had wheeled into place so he could be playing sweetly in the background as her flock drifted in. It was the feast day of St Dominic, São Domingos de Gusmão, the founder of the Portuguese order that protected the people of the island.

A crowd was already gathering outside the church for the occasion, women, children, young people, milling about in their best clothes, smiling and demure in the warm breeze that rattled the leaves in the morning light, palms, poincianas and cassia. The cross shone white above the white church, causing Gavan to shake his head as he parked the truck across the road.

‘I can’t help feeling I’m doing something wrong.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Jake. He had come along for the ride on Gavan’s orders.

‘Going to mass in a Catholic church. Even if I’m only playing the organ.’

‘Is that what’s the matter? You’ve done it before, haven’t you?’

Gavan’s square face was shiny and flushed. ‘I feel it every time. I was brought up on the other side. We were low church. Evangelical. Strictly Protestant. My father was fierce about stripping away ritual. He wanted a church with no walls and no hierarchy, though there were plenty of rules. As kids we used to joke about the Micks and their fish on Friday. Their incense and holy water and mumbo jumbo. My mum and dad liked things plain. I’m that way too, except for music maybe, and look where that has taken me. I know I should have got over all this at my age, got it out of my system, but when I drive up here and see the passion of it all I feel vulnerable. Isn’t that funny?’

‘My mum and dad were of different persuasions and weren’t allowed to get married in the church because of that,’ Jake began. He hadn’t talked much to Gavan about his family before this. ‘My mum was raised a Catholic. She was a bit of a rebel but she kept her faith. My dad was Methodist and he let it go. I don’t know what I am. I went to a Church of England high school where there was a fair bit of mumbo jumbo too, as you put it, and not a lot of love for thy neighbour. We never saw any Catholics. Not even for debating.’

‘You’re not a churchgoer?’

‘Not much of one.’

‘Well you are today.’ Gavan checked himself in the rear vision mirror. ‘We better get going.’

‘Don’t worry. You look like a rock star.’

They entered the gate to the forecourt of the church. It went back to the time of the first missionaries and was last rebuilt in the 1950s. Sister Mary-Jo spotted her countrymen and came forward with outstretched arms, taking Gavan’s hand and leading him in through the main doors of the church. Jake followed them down the aisle to the side chapel where the organ was in place.

Women were putting the finishing touches to vases of red oleander, yellow hibiscus and white frangipani. Seminarians moved about busily in their white robes, lighting candles, moving furniture, preparing banners and other treasures for the procession. Sunlight splashed in rainbow shafts from the high windows.

Gavan squeezed his backside into position on the organ stool and tested the keys and pedals with a squeak and a groan. It was all a bit creaky as the sounds emerged, single notes then great lingering chords. He bowed himself to the task and soon the runs of Bach’s contrapuntal harmonies were trickling mysteriously, unobtrusively into the spaces of the church, as if from the air.

Jake peeled away and joined the crowd outside. There was a shaded platform alongside the building where people could sit out of the sun. He would let the locals file in first and then find a seat at the back. He estimated the number of the congregation, the age range and, as far as he could, their different categories and affiliations. Did they have crucifixes round their necks? Were they wearing pro-integration or pro-independence t-shirts or other signs of any political faith, apart from their allegiance to their protector saint? The power of the church was evident. Its role was less clear. The church educated, fed, sheltered and consoled these people. Belief was strong, especially among the young. But did they worship the Virgin and her Son against the world or in the world? Was the church an expression of their identity as East Timorese? Was it an extension of other, deeper beliefs, traditional, animist, the spirits of their land? Every ridge, every stone, every brook and tree had witnessed tremendous suffering, Xanana Gusmão wrote. These were the questions Jake wrestled with.

Jacinto was there in the crowd and came over to shake Jake’s hand. He had spent the previous day working as Gavan and Jake’s interpreter and guide on a visit to a village on the east coast of the island. As the newest member of the team, Jacinto was expected to work on the weekend. Today he was in his best white shirt and pressed pants, welcoming Jake as if he were the host and this church was his place.

‘Beautiful!’ the young man said, pleased to see Jake there.

‘Gavan’s playing the organ.’

‘Yes, beautiful!’ Jacinto repeated. ‘We love to hear that music. Go in now!’ he urged. ‘Take a seat, please.’ Then he was gone into a gaggle of his friends.

Jake took up a position on the aisle near the back of the full church. Such prayers as he had were said by looking up at the rafters and vaulted ceiling and thinking of his mother, Lily, who would be amused to know where he was. He thought of his father too, long underground, and the dry conviction that had passed for faith with him. Who owes what? That was his father’s question, which Jake inherited. He turned the gold band on the fourth finger of his left hand. He thought of Anne and his commitment to her, vows made in church expressing something firmer than faith, and his love for their daughter, a reality, a given.

The scraping, the murmuring in anticipation, the rustling and the knocking dominated the musical counterpoint as people waited, before the summons came in organ sound to announce the procession that advanced from the front doors. A novice led the way with a banner held high. The congregation rose to its feet. Triumph pulsed from Gavan’s Prelude and Fugue and the priest appeared – solemn, benign, like the young father of a young family there to do a job. His thick green chasuble brushed the air as he passed, hands clasped, eyes aglow. Above him swayed the image of the saint, black-robed and haloed, braided with gold. In front the young banner-bearer stepped out the way. Jake thought he must be Chinese.

As the organ playing quietened, the priest turned to face the assembled flock, arms raised, his words breaking in waves over the people as they sank to their knees and bowed their heads in prayer, letting the language engulf them. This mass was in Tetun, for them. Jake sat in contemplation on the wooden pew, feeling those around him sink into the ritual. This was their feast day. They were at home. A choir of men and women sang out the old songs of the country that had been given new words, praising God, giving thanks, praying for mercy. The unaccompanied voices were loud and tuneful, filling the white interior to its arching roofline. The spiritual food was offered, the wafer and wine that were the body and blood of Christ given for them. The people came forward, filing in jostling order to the rail where they would be fed.

The seminarians in training, dressed in white, moved earnestly to assist the priest. They were theatrical in subduing their youthful high spirits as they ministered to the familiar faces of their community, their aunties and uncles, those they trusted and those they didn’t, friends and foes.

Jake watched the Chinese novice as his lips moved with the words of blessing. His face was an oval and his skin was pale and smooth. Was his family always Christian, Jake wondered, from the era of Saint Dominic or the Jesuits who came after? Or did the change come later, when the family journeyed to a new country as traders, teachers and healers? Conversos. Had the church been their refuge and safeguard then? Was that how this young son of the family heard the call and decided to follow? Into surrender or a greater justice, Jake wanted to know. How did the conversion happen?

When the last of the communicants returned to their seats the priest and his train came down the aisle to minister to those who could not walk to the front because they were aged or infirm or had babes in arms. They received the sign of the cross, with water for healing and the sacrament of bread and wine. A little girl in a red party dress stepped out into the aisle for a special blessing, soon to be ready for first communion.

Jake didn’t know how to respond when they approached him. He kept his hands by his side. Recognising him as a foreigner the priest hesitated and moved on.

The service ended with the choir again, singing at full throttle, the sound surging as Gavan pulled out all stops on the organ, blasting out praise. Gloria! Gloria!

The family next to Jake turned to clasp his hand in the sign of peace, a young father, a younger wife, nodding with approval. A grey-haired man in the row in front twisted round to offer the visitor an enthusiastic hand. His face was scored and his front teeth were missing. Jake gripped the man’s hand in return. The old man was trembling as he placed his other hand over Jake’s and the pair of them nearly toppled.

The priest shared his smile loftily to left and right as the procession filed out through the double doors into the sunshine, swelled by the members of the choir. The people flowed out behind them like a school of fish, darting, dipping, swerving, as they pushed into the light and immediately sought shelter from the heat in whatever shade they could find.

Jake made room for his neighbours to climb over him, staying seated in the row as the church emptied. He wanted the fellow in front to leave first. Somehow he didn’t like the man’s look. He had the empty eyes of a sated predator. His skin barely concealed the death’s head skull. Jake bent his head, averting his gaze. Yet he felt jubilant to be there, however murky it all was.

Gavan was struggling from the organist’s stool in the side chapel when Jake came up and clapped him on the shoulder.

‘You nearly blew the roof off, mate. Nice work.’

The Chinese novice was tidying the altar and beamed at Gavan with an expression that was both blank and embracing, as if his sight was on two planes at once, earthly and heavenly.

‘Would you accept a blessing from Benedito?’ asked Sister Mary-Jo, moving in. ‘As an expression of our gratitude.’

Gavan stood there non-plussed.

The young Chinese man crossed himself then placed his hands together on Gavan’s head, speaking the benediction. It took less than a minute. There was silence, a pause, before he loosened his body and grinned.

‘Now how does that feel?’ asked Sister Mary-Jo with a chuckle.

‘Good!’ replied Gavan, shaking his head as if to free himself from a fly. ‘It feels good. Thank you.’

‘Thank you!’ the nun said. ‘You were wonderful. Today was just lovely. Such a gift. Well, God bless,’ she added in her business-like manner, superfluously as it might have been. ‘Work to do.’ And she was gone with Benedito in tow through a side door.

Gavan turned to Jake with a sigh. ‘I’m not sure who was blessing who.’

—

The crowd outside the church was noisy in a different way. People conferred in groups, calling to each other, laughing, being seen. The sun blazed and through the trees the blue water sparkled in the bay. Corralled by a slew of vehicles – bemos, bikes, jeeps, trucks – the throng formed a vibrant frieze in the sharp light. A few observers were evident across the road, police and military, and the usual plain clothes loiterers, the spies and casual informants.

Jake stood in the porch as people came to thank Gavan for his musical offering. Talk turned to conditions in this part of the country or that. Jake listened attentively. Then he looked across and saw Jacinto standing with a woman he recognised as Elisa. A boy was leaning into her at waist height who must be her son. Leto, he remembered. But for the intent way she looked at him he might not have identified her, with her hair braided up and wearing a blouse and long sarong with tais around her waist. She looked older. She had an air of authority. She was still, almost expressionless, yet her dark eyes kept a purposeful focus in his direction as her arms held the child close. Jacinto grinned and waved.

Jake hoped they would come over. He wanted to go to them. He wanted to talk to Elisa. But when she did not move, neither did he. It was enough that Jacinto waved and Jake waved back. A connection had been made. They did not need to be seen meeting. Elisa was already looking away, turning into a circle with her son and her cousin, turning her back. When Jake looked again, they were gone.

‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ Gavan asked when they were driving.

‘They love you,’ said Jake. He was envious.

‘It’s a special atmosphere,’ Gavan went on. ‘How do they do that, with all the ugliness around them?’

‘You’re blessed,’ said Jake. ‘I mean you were blessed, literally. How does that feel?’

Gavan laughed it off. ‘You can’t believe what you do sometimes. When you find yourself in the situation. I suppose I take a deep breath and cross my fingers behind my back metaphorically speaking. I can’t help feeling like an apostate, as if I’m rejecting everything that I swore to uphold.’

‘That’s a bit heavy,’ mused Jake. ‘You’re just going with the flow. It would be rude not to. You’re not renouncing anything.’

‘But I am. I’m letting those old divisions go. I’m trying to embrace across the divide.’

‘That’s not apostasy. It’s learning. Or unlearning.’

‘It doesn’t feel like that. Not if I take it seriously. Which you have to really, don’t you? It’s the movement of the spirit. No shilly-shallying.’

Gavan was home. He bumped his truck through the gate of the compound.

‘Anyway I owe them. Maybe I should just convert and forget all this soul-searching.’

Gavan was not the typical Australian aid contractor, Jake realised once again. Brainwashing. Apostasy. Searching for the truth. Changing your mind. These were professional concerns for Jake. He needed to assess Gavan’s reliability, Gavan’s equilibrium and sanity, before he could interpret the man’s views and report back to Canberra. He needed to know what Gavan was really up to.

‘That envelope I delivered you from Darwin,’ Jake asked. The truck’s engine was still running. ‘What was that about?’

Gavan turned to Jake and spoke softly. His face was a pink rectangle that would only utter the truth. ‘There’s always a message being passed. I’m only the postman. The activists in Australia raise money for those women. Sister Mina needs guns too. They trade with the enemy. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, eh?’

The militia visited Sister Mina’s compound secretly at night, Gavan explained, just as the resistance fighters did. But they didn’t come for food. They placed guns and ammunition in the storeroom and Sister Mina returned the empty ammunition box the next night with cash inside as payment. Dollars. Uncle Nuno negotiated it all. On Sunday Father Aurelio would hear Mina’s confession of these dealings and that made it all right. That’s how it worked.

‘The girls learn to handle guns with their other classes,’ Gavan said. ‘Some of them are pretty good. Come inside, son. Let Teresa give you breakfast.’ He pulled on the handbrake and turned off the engine. ‘And don’t tell me why you’re so interested.’

They sat outside under the trees and after breakfast Gavan went off to do his chores. A black hen with a brood of chicks was scratching among the fallen leaves. Jake pondered his coffee grounds until Teresa bent forward to refill his cup. ‘Thinking of home?’ she asked.

He replied indirectly, mentioning that he had seen Jacinto at mass, with his cousin Elisa and her little boy.

Teresa clapped her hands. ‘Leto! He’s adorable!’ The boy attended the primary school where Teresa volunteered. ‘He’s a love child.’ Then she told Jake the story of how Leto came to be.

There’s a kind of mullet fish with especially large scales that grows fat in season where the river water meets the sea. The young girls collect those mullet scales and dry them. When the full moon comes they make a pattern on their breasts by sticking those scales to their bare skin. Their mothers forbid it, but those girls creep out at night into the forest where the boys are waiting for them. When the scales shine in the moonlight, the boy can see the special pattern on the body of the girl he loves. Even when she was preparing to become a nun, Elisa followed this custom. Her lover was a resistance fighter, a young man who stole through the forest in the moonlight to be with her. The son they conceived under the moon at night would be a fighter too, their gift to the Maubere people.

‘That’s why we love him,’ Teresa concluded, clasping her hands in her lap with satisfaction after telling this romantic tale. ‘He’s ours.’ Her dark round eyes sparkled. She looked into Jake’s eyes. ‘Elisa is beautiful, isn’t she? Her skin is so golden.’ Then she laughed. She was teasing him.

—

So Jake’s six-week deployment as temporary plumbing inspector passed. His time was up. He had all the on-the-ground information he was going to get. He was flying out the next day which focused the mind. He did not relish ambivalence. There was much at stake, much to think through.

Elisa’s presence had burned into him and he used her to take his bearings. Her boy Leto, her cousin Jacinto, her absent guerrilla husband – their belief, their energy. He felt the same conviction of another kind in Benedito, the Chinese novice. And in Teresa too, who carried so much knowledge. Yet it was not enough, was it? His task was to advise truthfully and in a way that supported the future they all believed in, but as an achievable good founded on real possibility. His job was to identify a way that would be best for all of them.

As he brushed his teeth he stared at the man in the mirror. The jury was still out on Gavan Mills, he admitted. Was Gavan indeed a fantasist, the damaged kid who never grew up, like so many Australian men? Jake was wary of white saviour syndrome, wary of it in himself too. He peered at his reflection in the mirror, the toothpaste foam frothing from his mouth, and considered.

He lay wakeful in bed. It was his last night in the country for now. The resolve of the people of East Timor would not be defeated. That much was clear. Majority support for independence was certain, even if it could not be declared overtly. The Indonesians were moving their forces into place in greater numbers than was admitted too. There was less clarity about how the international players would react. The situation was as restless and uncertain as Jake was as he tossed and turned, the various parties as watchful.

Rafa drove him to the airport in the morning. Wearing the same yellow and black check shirt and the same jeans as on the first day, as if that was his uniform, he just happened to be there at the hotel ready with his car. That was how it worked at the Mahkota.

‘You have a good time?’ Rafa asked eagerly. ‘You going home now?’ As if his job was done in seeing off yet another short-term foreign visitor. Another well-meaning unwelcome Australian for whom East Timor would soon be out of sight and out of mind.

But that was not the case for Jake. In the bittersweet of this goodbye he felt an attachment that was more like the foreboding of an inevitable return.

He asked Rafa to stop at a market where there was a woman who sold textiles. Jacinto had told Jake about her. The textiles were woven in the mountains by Sister Mina’s community. He chose a cloth in a traditional red and black design that featured a pair of sea eagles in white against blue. He bought it as a present for Anne.

Kelly from the TGIF party was on his flight. They chatted while they waited to board. Kelly couldn’t wait to get out.

‘It just depresses me,’ she said. ‘What’s going to happen? There’s no good solution.’ She was transiting Bali for Singapore and a shopping holiday in a city that worked. Jake was going through to Canberra.

The Australian federal election was called a few days later. It proved to be a close-run thing which the government won with a reduced margin.

Jake briefed Henry Hunt in person as soon as it could be managed after his return.

The Foreign Minister’s plan was firming up. The Prime Minister was feeling more confident. He saw a way to write himself into the history books as a hero. Australia would push for East Timor’s independence, urging a referendum on the issue to be held as soon as possible, even if it was premature and wouldn’t succeed. The matter must be resolved now. Australia was ready to help.

Then in November Henry suddenly wanted Jake back in Dili to refresh the intelligence on which the plan depended before irreversible action was taken.