I THINK THAT I should take a minute or two to catch up with my life, Ford, my writerly life whose quiet and stasis contrast so wildly with the adventures I’ve been recounting. In this regard, I can’t help citing something you wrote in your dedicatory letter to Stella Ford that prefaces The Good Soldier: “I was astounded at the work I must have put into the construction of the book, at the intricate tangle of references and cross-references. Nor is that to be wondered at, for though I wrote it with comparative rapidity, I had it hatching within myself for fully another decade. That was because the story is a true story . . .”

That happens to be exactly how I feel about the work I’ve done during the last two months I have spent aboard the junk. When I went down to the Old Port for a break from the pressures of writing this memoir, I had no idea that I would stay on her so long, but I wrote the whole of the last section aboard, having discovered that she offered an excellent vantage point for looking back over all those years. Events I had forgotten came back, lay about in profusion, rather like the drifting prayers that had dotted the bay. I suppose I need to be on the water rather than looking down on it.

In any case, I sealed the junk this morning and decamped for the bungalow, reasonably satisfied with the work I’d accomplished. I hired a betjak at the foot of the Old Port and on the way home asked the driver to stop at an open-air market. I wandered through narrow lanes between stalls overflowing with fruit and vegetables, spice stands displaying baskets of cumin, oregano, paprika, turmeric, red and yellow and green chilies, fresh fish, live chickens, a bewildering array of food various enough to satisfy any taste. Scattered here and there were stalls offering handicrafts, jewelry, dinnerware, Wayang puppets new and old, clothing, the detritus of Batavian lives forever separated from their original owners, some of which will journey with tourists and sailors and diplomats to the ends of the earth, where they will be enshrined on mantels and tabletops, occasions for memories and the odd story or two, while others will be stuffed into drawers, stored in attics and cellars, seeing the light again only when their owners die and they are sold again or given away.

At one stall a pair of old Wayang puppets caught my eye. Some of their paint had flaked off and they had no provenance as far as the woman knew—from the look of them I thought they might be traceable to a renowned dalang—but I bargained for them anyway, settling on a price that was probably higher than I should have paid. After I returned to the bungalow and put away the food, I drove two nails into the south wall and put them up facing each other, the white wall doing service as a screen. Even though they are motionless they remain wonderfully intense, Ford, like clouds charged with lightning awaiting the conditions that will free their energy.

Soon after I sat down opposite them with the pages I had written on the junk, I saw the puppets as a reflection of you and me in the parlor of the Pent, the firelight throwing our shadows on the walls. We are like them, I think, inhabiting our own white space, our story perhaps less potent than the clash of gods and the creation myths of the Wayang but secularly powerful, as compelling for us as the tales a dalang tells to the hundreds gathered around him, hanging on every word he utters.

On the whole, I think that I have filled you in on everything you need to know, Ford. Now I want to return to the Nellie, picking up the story during the last few days of that fortnight.