Chapter One - Richard Lewis

Chapter 15
On Saturday, Nol lounged in bed, waiting for Suti to leave for the shop, but she
sat at her desk, crunching numbers on her calculator and frowning at the answers.
"You're going to be late for work," she told him.
He still hadn't told her he'd been fired, so he grudgingly dressed in his uniform
with the embroidered golf ball. "I'm thinking of quitting," he said, planting the seed.
"Give me more time on my new project."
She looked at him over her reading glasses. "What project is that?"
"I'm still working on the concept," he said, not willing to get into the details of
Product Ziro, which already had a prototype website, thanks to Yanto's hard work.
Returning her attention to the calculator, she said, "Don't quit just yet. They've
raised the rent on me. Asking double."
"What? Double? That's got to be a mistake."
"No mistake."
"They can't do that! I'll go down to the village office and have a talk with them."
"It's no longer a village business. The palace has bought controlling shares. Gdé
Raka. I'm negotiating with his manager."
This was news, but Nol wasn't all that surprised. In fact, he wasn't surprised at all.
Raka. Of course. "Then I'll go have a talk with him."
"Stay out of it. Raka doesn't like you. You'd make it worse."
All dressed up for work and with no work to go to, Nol went for an aimless drive.
He parked on the edge of the rice fields and watched the kites flying in the wind. Hungry,
he had a sudden craving for some of Men Djawa's kue lapis, but her market stall was
shuttered. She hadn't been seen since the morning those bones were found.
She'd first appeared in Batu Gede about the same time that Putu had played his
blue soap trick on Mantera's granddaughter. Suti had came home from the market with a
banana leaf package of cakes.
"Try these," she said. Nol suspiciously nibbled and then devoured the lot, the
moist chocolate layers of kue lapis, the coconut richness of kue pukis, the perfect jackfruit
topping on the round serabi solo.
"This woman's opened up a stall," Suti said. "The market ladies call her Men
Djawa. I hear she was Gerwani and her husband was PKI and he got killed and she got
rounded up. She was released from one of those detention centers in Java. She's not right
in the head." Tsking her sympathy, Suti added that Men Djawa asked all her customers if
they knew where her daughters are. Apparently in 1965 she'd escaped with her daughters
to Singaradja on the north coast to try to hide but the army sniffed her out. "They took her
away from her girls," Suti said, "and nobody knows what happened to them. Poor
woman."
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