Chapter One - Richard Lewis

to report everything we found to the landowner, who let people keep the common stuff,
but nothing that good. But no, she wouldn't let us get away with it. She said if we didn't
tell, she would. We were so angry with her. She disappeared when she was twelve. I miss
her so much. I don't know if she would wised up, grown out of the black and white way
she viewed the world. I like to think not. We need people like her. So what would Nancy
do?"
Confused, Nol said, "I don't know what you're talking about."
"I'm going to play you a tape," Tina said. "You just listen." She stood, put the
recorder on the bench and pressed the play button. As the tape began to turn, she and
strolled to the other end of the garden to watch the first glow of the coming sunrise.
Puzzled and not at all alarmed, not after the heart-draining fright he'd already had
that night, Nol listened to Dharma's voice rumbling out of the recorder's tiny speakers. He
bent close to hear. It sounded as if his uncle was speaking from long ago and far away,
from those days when Madé Catra and Wayan Arini and Anak Agung Mantera were
school children. Nol listened with intense interest to a part of his mother's life he'd never
known. When Dharma related the account of her warung burning down, Nol had to force
his fingers to relax. He was digging his nails into his own palm.
Then came the events of Gestapu. Dharma's words acquired a different weight as
he spoke of Mantera visiting the house when Catra was teaching at school. Now alarms
begin to ring for Nol. Nol wanted to fling the recorder into the bushes, but it was too late.
Each of his uncle's words burned like a drop of acid, each sentence stripped away a little
of Nol's life as he'd always understood it, until he was stranded upon a bench in an upside
down world he did not know, the dew cold against his feet.
The city came awake with the sun, and the hospital stirred to full life, with nurses
bounding to their morning shift and doctors energetically making rounds. Nol and Suti
and Arini were allowed to see Putu, and when the nurse said Tina could not as she wasn't
family, Nol firmly said, oh yes she is. They let her in. Putu was surrounded by machines,
blinking and beeping and humming. Suti held his hand. She had on her brave face. Nol
didn't know what kind of face he had on.
He couldn't bring himself to look at his mother.
He was the child she didn't want.
He was not his father's son.
He concentrated instead on his own son, indisputably his son, on that swollen
bruised toothless bandaged head.
The fingers of his right hand curled around an imaginary knife handle.
The head nurse shooed them out after too short a time. Back in the visiting room,
Suti told Nol she wanted to go home and get some things. Arini said she would stay and
keep watch over her grandson.
Nol drove Suti home, lost to his twirling thoughts.
Mantera is my father. Raka my half-brother.
Many of his life's mysteries and peculiarities were suddenly explained.
At the house, Suti filled a small suitcase with an abundance of clothes and
toiletries and towels for a stay at the hospital She said she'd take a taxi, that Nol needed to
get ready for the ceremony.
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