Drive-by Saviours (42 page)

She agreed with these things because they seemed rational, and Bumi was nothing if not rational (most of the time), but she couldn't shake the feeling that he was just a few miles away from where they stayed and worried in Makassar, while the police did their work with the precision of sledgehammers on a thumbtack. She knew Bumi better than anyone, knew that despite his rational mind, his genius for survival was in his intuition. He knew almost instinctively that it was better to hide a needle in a pile of needles than in a haystack, wiser to do the unexpected. Besides that he had changed. The mental mis-wiring had aligned itself, and she doubted there was much he couldn't do. So while Bunga worried and Mathias fretted, she had a feeling that Baharuddin was having the time of his life with his father. Her main concern was what would happen if the cops found him before she did.

That is why she went with relief in her heart to the harbour and its boats on a wet day when Mathias was back to work in Tana Toraja, Bunga and Beti were back in school there and Robadise was at work. Only her senile father was at home, and once placed in front of the
TV
with a big plate of
nasi goreng
, a thermos of tea and a stuffed Hello Kitty knockoff, this formerly mountainous presence of a man was content for the day.

She took a crowded boat full of tourists, making small talk with the curmudgeonly pilot to pass the two-hour boat ride under a tarpaulin. There was a wet, stinky heat over everything when they approached the shore. She mentally prepared herself to see that ghost of her first husband again, but instead she saw a handsome, rugged man with a three-day beard knee-deep in the water. He smiled and waved at the boat. Bumi.

This was no ghost. This was the real man, flesh, blood and sweat. His smile was full and took up half his face. She'd never seen such a smile on him, even when they first met, even when he spoke of academic political theories, even when the children were born. Whatever smile he cracked had always been creased with worry.

His face looked older now, but these new lines were different than worry, they added laughter to his face. He was darker, weather-beaten and fully alive. He wore a white tank top and baggy, light blue shorts covered in dirt. He was beautiful. Older yes, yet more youthful. He was as dirty as he had been in the backyard in Tana Toraja, yet cleaner than he'd ever been at the height of his washing rituals. It was like all those ghosts that haunted him had been chased away or tamed.

When finally he noticed the one brown face, aside from the usual pilot, amidst the sea of white, his smile fell away. His eyes still shone. He rubbed his chin and then his eyes, as if unable to accept what he saw. Who he saw.

She smiled at him and waved, against her will. She was there to claim her child and thus save them a whole lot of trouble. She was not there to reconcile or even to be nice. But he was beautiful, more beautiful than ever. What kind of weakness was this to love a man only at his best?

He dropped his hand from its wave to the boat, raised it again and made a half wave, just at her.

Her smile grew and it was like a re-creation of their first conspiracy, making out under everyone's noses.

When the water became shallow enough that she could see the sand under the aqua blue, she stood up and jumped in, up to her waist as it turned out, soaking her long batik skirt as the rain soaked her blouse. She tried to run to Bumi, but a forced wade was all she could manage until a few feet from him she found herself knee deep and she surged upward toward him, into his arms. A great sadness took her. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry about all of this.”

“You've come for Baharuddin,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry too,” he said. “You can't have him.”

THE SHOUTING WAS SO INTENSE THAT A GROUP OF OLD MEN
intervened, perturbed that their game of
gaple
had been interrupted and fascinated by the sounds of real conflict, something they hadn't experienced in many years.

Technically these were village elders, but none of the toothless old men commanded the respect of an Ibu Win. Nothing much was expected of them except a little wisdom and leadership, and even in that respect they were mostly useless. On this day they played an important role.

The men found Bumi and Yaty screaming at one another as loud as they could, in the Indonesian language, as a gaggle of slack-jawed tourists gawked on in fear and horror. Such incidents were not in the brochure. Mislam, the most energetic of the men, intervened with the tourists. He ushered them away.

Mikki came by to see what all the fuss was about, and told the tourists in English that it was a family squabble, nothing to concern themselves with. “The locals will handle it,” she said. “Let's go drink.”

The other three old men stepped between Bumi and Yaty and begged them in Buginese to calm down. “You're scaring the tourists,” Guntur said.

It was a phrase Bumi had uttered to Guntur several times in the two months he'd been back home.

The three old men had no idea what the argument was about, or who this strange and well-dressed woman was. They spoke no Indonesian at all. But the young boy's name kept coming up, Baharuddin. And another name they knew: Bunga. Bumi had talked a great deal about his brilliant daughter.

Bumi and Yaty still shouted at each other over the reasonable voices of their elders until Win arrived at the beach. “Bumi!” she shouted. Everyone went silent. “That is no way to talk to your wife,” she said to him in quiet Indonesian.

“I'm sorry, Mother,” he said, head bowed.

Win invited them both to her house.

“IT IS A DIFFICULT SITUATION,” SHE SAID TO THEM ACROSS THE
table, and the four old men standing around the kitchen nodded. “I sympathize with Yaty because as a mother I lost both of my children, on top of the tragedy that I only had two to begin with. Nowadays that is the standard on the mainland, but in my day, eight was enough, ten or twelve better. Now two is normal thanks to the government, and thanks to the government our island population is dwindling away.

“Anyway, as for me I loved my two like they were ten, and they were both taken from me. Only one came back as a man, but that is a different story.

“I forgive Yaty for re-marrying, and Bumi should too. I never thought he was coming back either.

“You did what you had to do,” she said to Yaty. “But, he
is
back. And he is still their father. And technically, those children are children of this island.”

“They are also children of Makassar, and Beti is a child of Toraja,” Yaty said.

“I'm getting to Beti,” Win said through gritted teeth. Her son had chosen a lippy one. “Like I said, it is a difficult situation. Take Beti from his father, or Bunga and Baharuddin from their father?”

“But Mathias is also their father,” Yaty said.

“Please,” Mislam said, “let Ibu Win finish.” The other three old men and Bumi nodded.

“Mathias has become like a father to them in some ways, so they now have two fathers,” Win said. “And I'm told maybe two fathers is better than one. Maybe two fathers is as good as a mother.”

The men tittered and Yaty nodded.

“Imagine if Bumi had not been there to help Baharuddin with his illness up there in Toraja. No one there seemed to know how to treat him.”

“And here in Rilaka you know how to treat
OCD
?” Yaty said.

Win looked to Bumi and spread her hands in a helpless gesture.

“She means the dancing sickness,” Bumi said.

She nodded and looked up at her ceiling. “We know it well,” she said. “Bumi's grandfather and uncle both had it. Always dancing in circles, twitching so much with nervous spirits on the mind. Always paranoid about visitors, demanding to know their business.” She brought her gaze back down to Yaty. “We had to do some rituals and magic, and teach them how to ward off those kinds of spirits. They tried all kinds of medicines and eventually it was a sea plant that did it, from the corals. The uncle never lost his twitches but the medicine kept him calm, especially once we convinced him to stop fishing, stay home and be a storyteller. The grandfather mellowed with age too. I just hope the tourists don't destroy that plant.

“Just like in Toraja, we take care of our people here. No one goes hungry and no one suffers illness for long if we can help it. We welcome family, even mainlanders who become family. That's how I got here. It'd be a shame to have to separate a family.”

“Please,” Yaty said. “It is a shame, but somehow, some way, our family is going to have to be split. And if I can't take Baharuddin, I know that his stepfather will come get him, and it will be terrible if that happens.”

“We won't allow you to take him,” Bumi said. He made a fist and tapped it on the kitchen table, gently, several times.

“Don't you want him to be with his sister and his mother?” Yaty shouted. “And his stepfather and stepbrother, they're his family too!”

Baharuddin chose that moment to make his presence in the doorway known. “We should all be together,” he said. “Daddy, Mommy, Sister, Brother Beti and Mr. Mathias.”

HOW SHE WISHED THIS STRONG VERSION OF BUMI, THIS NATURAL
leader, had existed before. A Bumi like that would never have had to face down the Indonesian Navy. A Bumi that strong would never have gotten himself into such trouble.

And so she found that even she had underestimated the man, had assumed that he was strong but not quite strong enough, and that he could never get any stronger. And here he had survived the White Wilds of Canada and come back stronger, a white teacher in tow, on top of nine months in the shivering backyard of the mountains. He had faced down enemies everywhere, and come home safely.

The worst thing about it was that his strength was backed by a mother-in-law she'd never known as a friend or ally, a mother-in-law who was rooted in an island and a people. They were all too much like Bumi, shattered and strong. They had all come through the worst storm in history and swum to a calm surface. The ordeal had made them fitter. These sixty hardy islanders wouldn't let Baharuddin go without a fight.

She had underestimated her love and her enemy. She had thought she was going to Rilaka on a mission of mercy, to prevent a slaughter committed by Mathias and his boys. Instead she had walked into a seductive trap. Surely island life was not as idyllic as the hype. Surely this version of Bumi was an illusion. Surely her son had not really fallen in love with his grandmother. All that cuddling and teasing and tickling had to be all for show.

What started as a private meeting and closed-door negotiation became an all-day vigil. For six hours the islanders gathered to coax her there with cruel kindness. They smiled and shook her hand, said welcome home sister. But she had a home in the mountains, and it too was idyllic, coolness warmed by community, shelter from Makassar's ideological tempest. If her two homes clashed it would be no unilateral slaughter. It would be a two-way bloodbath. She stood and told them she had to go back to Makassar. Robadise couldn't know she'd been gone.

A BOAT WAS OFFERED AND SHE PROMISED CASH, WHICH WAS
accepted reluctantly. The Rilakans gathered on the beach to see her and Baharuddin go, waving them off and begging her to come again. Tears came to her eyes unbidden and unwanted. She pleaded to Bumi with her eyes.

Bumi cried too, and gazed down at his son, who hugged his waist and also cried. Bumi kissed his boy on the hairline and said, “Please do come back and visit.”

“I promise,” Baharuddin said.

As the boat crossed the seaward horizon Bumi squinted through his tears to see the blurred silhouette of a small boy on a boat with his mother. Together they waved a sombre goodbye.

BUMI DOESN'T HAVE A COMPUTER, SO HE WRITES ME REAL LETTERS.
He gives me updates on Win and the old men and Michelle. He tells me she says ‘hi,' but she never writes. He tells funny stories about wacky drunken tourists.

The letters are gifts from another world, another time, another way of being. His stories are quaint and charming like James Herriot, exotic like Tolkien yet home-grown like Thomas King, and they make me wonder how so much of interest can happen within a few hundred square metres of sand and palm trees. His imagery depicts abstract notions of culture-clash, resistance, resilience, survival and renewal, and it inspires me to create such spaces in my own little world.

He writes about Rilaka, the place of his birth and re-birth, while I work for Mexico, a place I've never been, but that somehow feels so familiar to me. He reveals a society sophisticated and humane, one that is recognizable even for those who have never been there. The moving picture he places in my mind is simple. There are no gunmen, no explosions and no miracle surgeons reconstructing celebrity faces between naked sessions with nurses, yet every word grips me, leaves me wanting for more good news. It's hard to believe that there can be such good in the same world they show on
TV
— I'm always afraid that there must be a Shakespearean twist to come, in which all the characters die horribly. It hasn't happened yet.