Chapter One - Richard Lewis

"At the Batu Gede rally I asked people who you were," he said smoothly. "Oh,
she's Yuyun, somebody said." The lie cut into him. But how could he tell her about
Mother Agnes, that he'd been sneaking around Djakarta asking questions about her?
To Reed's enormous relief, her frown eased and her legs started swinging again.
"From my middle name. My brother gave it to me when I was a little girl."
Her older brother Bambang worked in Singapore for Permina, the national oil
company whose product powered a lot of engines and greased a lot of palms. Naniek She
was a graduate of Gadjah Mada University, where she'd studied economics as an under
classmate to Catra, the Batu Gede schoolmaster. As a girl growing up in an affluence and
power, she'd seen poor people struggling to survive and often dying, which was why she
became a student activist and then a member of Gerwani. It wasn't politics, she said, it
was a simple desire for justice.
She said, tell me something about yourself.
He told her about his father the Wasp lawyer, his mother the Irish Catholic
beauty. She married him for love and was disowned by her family, Reed said, and when
she lost her love for my father, she'd lost everything except her pride. That's the only
reason she and my father are still together, he said, her pride, she's incapable of admitting
a single mistake.
He said in college a girl broke his heart and so he'd become a vagabond and ended
up in Bali.
"My parents have received a dozen offers of marriage for me," Naniek said. "I
told my father I would only marry for love and he laughed. He said I was a very serious
girl, and that I would never marry if I waited for love. I told him one day it would
happen, I would fall in love, and until then I wasn't going to worry about a minute about
it."
Across the courtyard, Mak Jangkrik watched the moon.
Reed nodded at the temple's split gate. "You want to go in and see the spring?"
Naniek shook her head. "I can't. It would be disrespectful."
Reed understood. It was that time of the month for her.
"But we can see the bathing pools," she said. Reed took her hand. Her fingers
relaxed and curled into his. The warmth of her hand burned all the way to his heart.
The public bath was a narrow pool of sandstone brick. With her bare feet
swishing under that sophisticated dress, Naniek seemed to be a nymph, returned from the
world of men. Water flowed from the mouths of carved dragons, water so pure that the
shimmering moonlight fell clear to the bottom of the pool.
From the courtyard rose Mak Jangrik's loud complaining voice. "Now we have to
climb those stairs. By the gods, whose stupid idea was this?"
"I have to go," Naniek said.
"When can I see you again?"
"Arini will let you know." From a flower offering placed in a wall niche, she
plucked a hibiscus blossom. Bending to the pool, she dipped the blossom into the water,
With it held between her fingers, she solemnly flicked sweet cool drops onto his face,
once, twice, three times.
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