The Lunatic Express (11 page)

We reached Surabaya that afternoon, and Mrs. Nova announced that we were going to
jalan, jalan
—the Indonesian expression for strolling around. She brushed her hair, placed a cap on her head and a pair of oversized sunglasses, and led the way, holding the hand of her five-year-old plank neighbor, while a young man who couldn’t speak English brought up the rear. “My family is in Jakarta and my family is in Makassar and my family is HUGE!” she said as we wound through the heat and up the stairs and down the gangplank onto the trash-littered wharf. I had never encountered someone so bursting with enthusiasm, so trusting. “Surabaya! Wow!” she squealed, as we threaded through crowds and piles of trash and smashed concrete. “Wow! So beautiful!
Jalan jalan!
I’m hungry! Are you hungry, Mr. Carl? A photo! Bakso!”

We turned down a narrow alley lined with identical wooden carts, each with a two-by-four bench and jars of what looked like bright green and white worms. We walked up the alley and down the alley, Mrs. Nova peering at each cart, shaking her head, spitting out questions to the chefs. “This one!” she said, and we straddled the bench and in seconds four bowls appeared full of noodles and meatballs and hot peppers. “Bakso! You like bakso?” she said. I plunged in. Whatever it was, it was good, and we sucked our bakso down like it was candy. On some unspoken signal, the silent man paid, even though I whipped out a pile of bills. That, too, would happen over and over again—people far poorer than I insisting that they pay for everything.

When we got back to the ship, it looked like it was being attacked by ants. Another thousand people were fighting their way on board. I watched men shinnying up the mooring lines, human rats, a dangling, frenetic whirl of limbs up five stories to disappear in the throngs. If the
Siguntang
seemed crowded before, now it was packed. Every passageway and stairway was staked out with blankets and towels and scraps of newsprint. The decks inside, the decks outside—humanity covered every square inch of space. Children. Old men and women lying on the hard floor. The people outside had it best as long as the weather held. To descend the stairs into
ekonomi
was to get hit with a wall of heat and humidity and cigarette smoke. You could touch it, feel it on your face and hands. It almost knocked me backwards; made me want to flee. Massed human beings in tight quarters are not a pretty sight. They sweat, cough and hack. They snore and belch. They produce untold quantities of garbage and trash, from cigarette butts to eggshells to fish tails, which can’t go anywhere, can’t be hidden, and which slowly piled up and spread across the decks as the days passed. And we were lucky. The skies stayed blue, the seas calm. I could only imagine what it had been like on the
Nusantara
, which battled fifteen-foot seas for ten hours before it sank. Sickness. Panic. The garbage, shit, piss, and people rolling and pitching on an overloaded rollercoaster of death.

I escaped to the snack bar, but even that space was now jammed, Indonesians screeching on a way-too-loud karaoke machine. The
Siguntang
, I understood as the days passed, was a world in between worlds. Straddling worlds just like Arthur and Daud, connecting them; we were 3,000 Muslims and Christians and animists; some of us were from enormous cities like Jakarta, some from villages without power. One minute Lena would be in low-hipped jeans, applying eye shadow, the next she’d be wrapped in her shroud on her knees clutching her Koran, bowing up and down. I had traveled to Indonesia twice before, had been to Java and Bali, Kalimantan and Irian Jaya, but I’d never seen it before, not as it really was: this long, strung-out world of ocean and islands, of ancient kingdoms and cultures improbably united into a modern state, connected together by ship. To stand at the rail during port stops was to be swallowed up in watercraft, from tramp freighters to wooden Makassar schooners, thousands of boats weaving across blue sea.

We settled into a rhythm, every day heading east, east into the rising sun, after long, hot nights of pain and coughing and smoke, days of wandering and sleeping and talking as the conditions worsened. Once I was known, grown used to, an endless stream of strangers approached me, waved me over, bought me coffee and tea, called out to me. In my space on my plank, I was an old family member. Florinda fed me slices of fishy tempeh. Mrs. Nova made sure I was hydrated. Lena, I suspect, prayed for my soul. To change my shirt, well, I had to do it in front of everyone. “Sexy!” cooed the middle-aged Florinda, conservatively wrapped in her robes and headscarf even in the sweltering heat. The bathrooms were so horrendous, I resisted the idea of taking a shower. But the irony hit me: the Indonesians were plunging into the malodorous room every morning to emerge shimmering and shiny and smelling like shampoo and toothpaste. While I was getting rank. So I plunged in, too, standing in line in the steam, showering, washing my hair in the cool water, brushing my teeth in the tepid tap water, pissing down the drain in the corner. The men in the bathroom nodded, made way for me, beckoned me into the stalls before themselves.

As the days passed, the conditions worsened. More garbage. More cigarette butts. Empty Styrofoam ramen containers and cans of soda, all flying off the stern, fluttering overhead—a wake of pure trash steamed off the
Siguntang
. Endless heat and humidity. There was no place to escape, no place for solitude, no place for silence; you could barely sit anywhere, stand anywhere, lie anywhere without another body touching you. One evening I trudged back from up on deck, stepping gingerly past people’s sarongs on the floor and hands and heads, and came upon nine ebony-colored men with muscular arms gathered around each other a few planks down from mine. Three of them held crude, homemade ukuleles constructed of Masonite, thinly painted in whitewash. Clouds of cigarette smoke rose around them. Perspiration flew from their heads—it was 100 degrees at least, with not a wisp of fresh air. And for two hours they sang in rough, deep, mad harmony, songs of Papua and work and Indonesian folk songs, other men keeping beat with empty water bottles, roaches crawling on the ceilings, crawling on the walls, skittering by underfoot. They were coming off five months on a gas well in Brunei, heading home to Sorong, a journey from start to finish of almost twelve days. “Sit! Sit!” cried Jacobus. “We want whiskey! Where are you going?” Ambon, I said, and they broke into song, with a refrain of “Ambon Man” in English. Their singing was organic. Spontaneous. The raw energy of lions roaring on the plain, the best of human beauty in the midst of the worst shithole. After two hours they wore themselves out; Jacobus’s fingers were bloody, he’d played so long and so hard. I lay down to sleep, the lights bright, my body a series of bruised points on the hard plank. And a few minutes later the inevitable happened: a roach dropped onto my face. I hardly moved; I reached up, grabbed it, and tossed it away. It was surprisingly soft and silky.

I
N THE MORNING
I found Daud gazing out to sea. A pod of porpoises sliced through the royal blue waves, leapt over the ship’s wake, sped toward the ship, and cut abruptly away. Flying fish erupted from the sea, sailing across the surface to plunk back in fifty yards later. “Last night a woman in my area was hypnotized by a bad man,” he said. “He talked to her for a long time and exchanged envelopes with her and when he left she was holding an envelope that was empty. She lost ten million rupiah”—about $1,000. I nodded, shook my head, sighed, and we silently watched the waves.

That evening, in the quickly falling twilight of the tropics, we approached Makassar, a long line of green hills rising out of the blue sea. The PA system crackled and boomed and I returned to my plank to find Mrs. Nova and Florinda and her family packing, and eight young men, tough guys, sitting on my bed. I climbed up, muscled my way in, and they barely moved over, and I realized again how protected I’d been the past three days. At about seven-thirty we docked and the crowds shifted, rose, hoisted, and dispersed. Mrs. Nova grabbed my pad and wrote her address and phone number under the header “Bio-data,” and urged me to come visit her family. Florinda and her family trooped off, replaced by the gang of tough guys, who stared at me, elbowed each other, and laughed. The ship’s crew attacked the refuse, piled and strewn like the aftermath of Woodstock. They mopped and swept and carted, and most of it went right over the side. Thankfully, Lena was still to my right and she grabbed the hand of the little girl who seemed to belong to everyone, beckoned me to follow, and soon we were on shore eating a rich, brown-brothed soup made from intestines—a local Makassar specialty.

Late in the afternoon of the fifth day, as whales spouted off the bow and their big flukes slapped the sea, we sighted the green hills of Ambon. I was starting to crack; physically this had been my hardest journey yet. I had a hacking cough from the incessant smoke of unfiltered cigarettes. My throat felt like sandpaper rubbing together every time I swallowed. I was constantly hungry, the rice and fish tails and ramen unfulfilling. I was dying for the great riches of life: a long, hot shower and a cold beer and silence. And for a cushion; in the total absence of padding of any kind, it felt like my bones were pressing through my skin no matter how I turned or sat. In the middle of the night I was always waking to find a leg or arm draped across me, and the man to my right, who’d replaced Mrs. Nova, and I were engaged in a silent war. His knee kept dropping onto my leg. His fist flopped on my chest. I picked it up and laid it on him. It was
my
space, I kept thinking; it was all I had, and he kept intruding on it. In the bathrooms in the morning, politeness had evaporated; someone was always trying to butt in front of me. The crowds were so thick on the wharves, police with bamboo staves had to keep order, poking and whacking people into line. Lena and Florinda, Mrs. Nova and Daud were all gone; I had lost my friends, and my new conversations with new people seemed repetitions of ones already held. And conversation was lessening, anyway; people were receding into themselves. Or maybe it was just me. Maybe I was the one withdrawing, straining at the effort of connecting with people I couldn’t really get to know.

As always toward the end of these journeys, I had the confused feeling of loss. As I watched the capital of the famous Spice Islands approach, grow larger, I felt desperate to get off and to be by myself. But the voyage was ending, and I still had more to know. I hadn’t pierced farther into the world of my shipmates. Kind as they’d been, as much time as I’d spent with them, I still hadn’t known them, and I knew I never really would be able to. As usual, though, a new place rose up to greet me.

T
WICE IN THE LAST DECADE
, in 2000 and 2004, Ambon had been racked with vicious sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims—thousands had died—and many of my shipmates kept saying I shouldn’t be going there. We sailed slowly up a long bay between a rugged carpet of hills dotted with red tile roofs, the water green and calm, as glistening, silver-gray porpoises leapt among great floating mats of ramen cups and plastic wrappers and water bottles, and the nets of wooden fishing praus with outrigger hulls working in concert. In searing heat and humidity we docked at Kota Ambon, a ramshackle jumble of one- and two-story buildings and rusty corrugated roofs clinging to the hillside, the docks lined with even rustier tramp freighters and wooden schooners. The end always came too quickly; there was never any transition. I shouldered my bags and plunged into the thick crowds down the gangplank, to be plucked off the foreign street by a taxi driver.

O
UTSIDE MY HOTEL
I ran into Aristotle Mosse, a wiry, longhaired Indonesian who offered to show me around. Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world, and the Molucca Islands, a former Portuguese colony of which Ambon was the capital, were among the few places in the country where the population was equally balanced between Muslim and Christian. I knew the basic facts of the story—riots had broken out one afternoon, and looting, killing, and burning had followed for months. But I wanted to hear what it was like, what someone like Aristotle—a Christian—had thought and felt as neighbors who’d lived side by side suddenly went berserk with rage, killing each other. To me, at first glance, Ambon didn’t look any different from any other small Third World city. It was bustling, dynamic, the streets and curbs crumbling, open sewers everywhere, but crowded with bicycle rickshaws and restaurants grilling chicken and pork and fish, and appliance shops stacked with stoves and refrigerators and street vendors hawking coffee and bakso. Aristotle saw it differently, as a city sharply divided. “This is the Muslim section,” he said, passing a barrier that would have been invisible to me, but at which a red flag flew, into a part of Ambon that looked no different. Every city in Indonesia is full of half-completed buildings, but Aristotle pointed and I realized I was seeing concrete blackened by fire and riddled with bullet holes, thousands of bullet holes. “I was just in my house,” he said, “and my neighbor came and told me people were rioting. I went out to the road and saw Muslim people take stones and throw them at Christians and Christians throw them back. There were hundreds of people. The police came and people ran. That building,” he said, pointing to a vacant four-story concrete shell, “that was a Christian house they burned. I was afraid.”

We came to another empty shell of a building, a former computer school on the first floor, with apartments above. “People ran into the building, upstairs to hide and get away. But the Muslims set it on fire and burned them.” The fighting escalated, went on for weeks. No ships would come to Ambon, Aristotle said. It was difficult to get rice, to get kerosene to cook with. He couldn’t work, no one could. “People were killing each other and I lived two hundred feet from the border,” he said. “They attacked and we shot back; we had to guard all the time. We needed kerosene, so I crossed the mountain one day to find some. People shot at us. Everyone had guns. Finally I escaped to my home island of Babar for six months.”