Chapter One - Richard Lewis

Chapter 6
When Nol returned home, he changed into his favorite sarong, the frayed one with
the tattered hem he refused to let Suti mend, or wash for that matter, for part of its
comfort was its familiar odor of sweat and spices and farts. In the screen kitchen cabinet,
his mother had put spiced fish and vegetables to go with the rice. Nol wasn't hungry, but
he dished up a plate and squatted on the front steps to eat with his fingers. Dharma had
ordered Nol to pick him up at seven for a meeting at the Empress Gardens, a tour group
restaurant on the main road. Dharma hadn't said what the meeting was about, but Nol
had no trouble guessing that the main topic would the discovery of the bones. He thought
about them and he thought of his father and he thought of his mother, who was seated on
her porch, reading a book while a radio on the porch banister played Javanese flute
music. She was the most prodigious reader Nol knew. Every few weeks he drove her to
the public library, a deserted, dusty, almost spooky place, where she perused the scanty
shelves for something she hadn't yet read.
Suti wanted a fridge and a microwave for the kitchen but Arini did not, and what
Nol's mother did not want, Nol did not get. Why does she insist on living in the old days,.
Suti complained, referring to the time when only lanterns lit the village homes, when
stoves were fueled by wood, when the markets were held every three days, when after
dark the roads were abandoned to the low lords of the night, with only an idiot daring to
go out alone upon his bicycle. Nol had to admit Suti was right, for his mother's life
seemed to have stopped on December 9, 1965. She always wore those old-style dresses.
On the rare occasions she went to a salon she came back looking as if her hair had been
styled by a bicycle pump, all high and fluffy, how women wore their hair forty years ago.
Nol's mother refused to talk about his father. Her sorrow weighed down all her
words. Nol's older sister Wayan once whispered there had been photographs of their
parents on their wedding day, dressed up in fancy Western gown and suit, but their
mother had burned them. "She was angry," Wayan said. "She was furious at him. Called
him a fool."
Madé Catra's stupidity had been writing a letter to the Communist newspaper, the
Harian Rakyat, which the paper had printed. That was enough to have branded him a
Communist. That's what had gotten him killed, his bones never to be found.
On a hot dusty day when Nol was ten, he was fishing for ant lions by the kitchen
wall, twirling a bit of string in their holes and yanking them out as their pinchers seized
the thread. He became aware of somebody watching him, or perhaps a something, Luhde
Srikandi herself, and he whirled around, ready to scream, but it was only his mother, her
arms crossed on the bodice of her dress and looking at him with an expression that Nol
later decided was puzzlement. As if she wasn't quite sure who he was, as if the Red Beret
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