by John Greet
The hotel was doing well from the Bali Blue tour spin-offs and room rates. But I came to realise that with only twelve rooms, I was never going to be in a position to make me the kind of money I needed to sort out my debts in New Zealand, and also pay back Geno and Paolo. I needed to do something urgently.
Mahmood Bas came to mind. I hadn’t seen him for some time. Wayan had told me that the cockfighting season had started, so I suspected that’s where Anak and Mahmood would be.
* * *
In the cool of the evening, I walked over freshly cut lawns, past a deserted heart-shaped swimming pool to the main building of the Bali Haj Hotel. I heard the hum of voices and the clatter of cutlery. The hotel’s dinner service was in full swing. On a white upholstered deck chair at the far end of the pool lay Mahmood Bas, asleep in his swimming trunks. There were no other guests. A cocktail glass stood on a table beside him, with an ashtray and a half-smoked cheroot. As I came closer, he heard my footsteps and awoke blurry-eyed.
‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ he said, smoothing his moustache between thumb and forefinger. His sarcasm put me on guard.
‘I came to thank you for helping us rescue Jimmy.’
‘The Koran states that as a Muslim I cannot refuse the request of a dying man, if it is a reasonable one of course … A notion that would be beyond Anak’s comprehension.’
I saw his black eyes assessing me. An awkward silence followed.
‘The Sandika is doing very well off your guests,’ I said.
‘The Bali Haj also is doing well from the arrangement. I have incorporated beach access into my promotions, and my hotel is full on account of that.’
‘You took a huge risk with that cockfight.’
Bas looked away. ‘Not so huge, really. I’m not completely naïve. I’ve been around cockfights all my life. Tell me, what was he doing to that bird? He was up to something. I knew that if we could get his bird in the cockpit before he could continue doing whatever he was doing, we’d win. Come now, you can tell me, what was it? Adrenalin injections, a drug of some kind?’ Bas’s voice mocked. I remained silent. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, dismissing the question with a wave of his hand, ‘We both won. We are both making money off that wager.’
‘Would there be any chance of reconciliation between you and Anak?’ My question hung in the air for a few seconds.
‘This is a question you should be asking Anak.’
* * *
Wayan had probably noticed that some of her best cuts of meat were missing. I was spoiling the leopard cat. It snatched the meat from my hand as I offered it, and ate it in great gulps, then took up its position with its head on paws. Wayan found me and informed me that Anak wanted to see me.
When I reached his compound, Anak pointed to the main house. Dewi was at the door, looking worried. ‘I’ve locked the door because she tries to wander off,’ she said. As she opened the door, Janna ran at me, screaming, beating her fists against my chest. I wrapped my arms around her and held her in a bear hug.
‘I am a prisoner here. Let me go … Let me out. You have no …’ She stopped and rested her head on my chest. She didn’t resist. Her body trembled and convulsed. We stood like that for a moment. ‘What are you doing? Why did you bring me here?’ Eyes wide and confused, she looked up at me. Her convulsing stopped but she still shivered like a trapped bird.
‘You were sick. I didn’t know what to do.’
‘Well, I’m not sick now, and I want to go home! Now!’ She started to heave. She rushed to a bucket by her bed and retched. Holding her head, she collapsed on the floor and curled into a foetal position, weeping quietly.
Dewi stood beside me, ‘It’s been like this all night. I hardly slept. She wants to leave, but she is so weak and so sick.’
Anak was waiting for me on the dais. He had the bloodstone out, and the water in the glass was dark red. ‘If you can bring her to me … I think this will help.’
Back in the room, I gently gathered Janna into my arms and carried her to the dais. She opened her eyes, looked at me then at Anak, and saw the glass of red water before her. She snatched it up and drank it in one gulp. She looked at the empty glass with disgust and let it fall from her hand, then turned to me and beat her fists against my chest. ‘Take me home!’
I pulled her to me as her chest heaved and her tears fell. Her struggling weakened, and she slumped against me, her breathing growing steadier, her eyes closing.
‘The water is working,’ Anak said as held his hand on her forehead, ‘Her heart is sound, her spirit is healthy, but her addiction is strong. Take her back to her room. Let the bloodstone do its work, and when she wakes, Dewi will make her eat.’
When I placed her on the bed, she pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them. She looked at me for a brief second before she let her head fall forward limply. I sat with her for a long time, my hand resting on the side of her head. She mumbled and spoke in several languages. A few times, she sat bolt upright, then fell back asleep. If I tried to remove my hand, she’d pull it back and hold it against her head like it were a pillow. Dewi looked in on us occasionally, and after a while she came and stayed. ‘I’ll take care of her. Go home, Adam.’
The courtyard was quiet. The last candle flickered before an altar in a recess of the banyan tree. There were a few sticks of unlit incense before the image of a god. I took one, lit it with a candle flame and placed it before the deity while a family of rat monkeys watched me pray.
* * *
The following morning, I returned to Anak’s compound. In her room, Janna was sitting up on a rattan chair, staring at the wall. Her face had some colour, a slight flush in her cheeks. Her hair had been washed, and there was an empty soup bowl beside her. She looked at me with a wan smile as I entered. It was some time before she spoke. ‘Are my boys alright?’ she whispered.
Damn! I’d completely forgotten about the apes. ‘They are fine. I’ll feed them shortly.’
‘I drank more of that red water. What is it?’
‘Anak’s a traditional healer. It’s something he uses.’
‘Like an herb?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Adam, how sick am I?’
‘Very.’
She turned to the wall. I held out my hand, and she took it. She put her arms around my neck. I smelled the lemon scent of her hair. She was almost asleep when we reached the bed. Her body fit perfectly against mine. She raised her head and looked into my eyes. She squeezed her arms tighter around me and said, ‘Don’t let go.’
I held her while she slept. I wasn’t aware of the time but soon I was becoming concerned about the apes. They hadn’t had their arrack, and they would be wild and crazed. I hoped they were still in the compound. I left as soon as Dewi came and took responsibility of Janna.
I drove to her compound, picking up two bottles of arrack and a bunch of bananas on the way. They clawed and pounded at the door. I recognised their desperate noises from the night they had escaped. I wasn’t going to open the door. I wrapped the bottles in palm fronds and hurled them over the wall. I heard their scuffling, and then it was quiet. I waited for twenty minutes, opened the door a crack and peeked through. Both the apes lay comatose on the veranda. I placed the bananas beside them and left.
18
Anak sat reading. On hearing the sound of my motorbike, he looked up, and he indicated that I should sit with him. He pushed a cup of green tea towards me when I joined him. I took a sip.
‘I’m using a combination of the blood water and what you would call hypnosis. In Bali we call it trancing. It will allow her dreams to travel back in time and help me find the cause of her sickness. I let her stay awake only to eat and drink – which she is doing. Then more blood water and sleep. This process will take some time. We must be patient.’
I had faith in Anak’s healing methods. I sipped my tea and watched a flock of peacocks wander freely around the compound. Fighting cocks cooed, and Gusti passed us on his way to the coop. I
t all reminded me of Mahmood Bas. I’d almost forgotten about our conversation from days before.
‘Would there be any possibility of a reconciliation between you and Bas?’ I tried to sound as casual as possible. It caught Anak unaware, and I saw the distaste on his face.
‘Go on …’
I told him how I’d met with Bas earlier, and that I had initiated discussions regarding a possible truce, and that Bas had indicated some willingness.
Anak grunted and sipped his tea. ‘You’re becoming quite the diplomat.’
‘From a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense. Both hotels could benefit.’
‘I’m sure that is true,’ said Anak, ‘but there is a lot more to it. It goes much deeper and a long way back.’
‘Bas said something similar.’
‘Have you ever wondered why we own the front piece of that block of land while Mahmood has the back?’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘At one time, my family owned it all … All the land the Bali Haj sits on.’ Anak gave me a minute to think about this before continuing. ‘In order to understand what happened, we need to go back to 1963. I was ten years old then. Being the oldest son, I was forever by my father’s side.’ Anak poured us more tea. When he looked up, his dark eyes were distant. ‘We were not rich. My father was a cousin to the king, but he married a woman of lower caste. This put him out of favour with the royal family. This was the reason he was given a parcel of land by the ocean. At the time, the land was worthless. Nothing could be grown on it except coconuts. Fortunately, my mother’s family gave us this land we are now sitting on, and we were able to grow food and live off it. The beach land brought in an income from the coconut harvest, but it wasn’t much. In the early sixties, however, tourists began to arrive, and my father had a vision of building a hotel. In order to finance the building, he mortgaged the bulk of the land to a Chinese money lender – Li Cheun was his name. He only kept the beachfront land we now have.’
‘We had just finished building the hotel in 1963 when Mt. Agung erupted. Fifteen-hundred people died in the lava flow, and many more died in the famine that followed. As we lived by the sea, we were unaffected, but my family took in refugees, and we helped where we could. On account of this disaster, many families had to mortgage their land to the Chinese money lenders in order to survive. It was a terrible time, and it took a couple of years for recovery to begin, only for it to get worse again. At the time, many Balinese were P.K.I., Communist Party members. My father wasn’t one, but he was a sympathiser. I don’t think we were real communists like the Chinese or Russians. It’s just that with our traditional banjar system in Bali, where everyone worked for the community, communism made sense to us, but we didn’t bother with all the rhetoric that went with it.’
‘Anyway, at that time the country was in political turmoil. Sukarno, the president at the time, had a Balinese wife so he was sympathetic towards Bali. The island, being Hindu, was always isolated from the rest of the archipelago, economically and politically. But the new military command, under the leadership of General Suharto, wasn’t sympathetic at all. On the contrary, he saw Bali as a hotbed of communism and ordered his Javanese troops into the island to quell it. And as they had all over Indonesia, mass killings followed. Anyone who was a member of the P.K.I. was taken from their village and shot. Eighty thousand innocent Balinese died in the massacre, and some say over a million Indonesians were murdered in total throughout the republic. It was one of the bloodiest genocides of this century, but the rest of the world sat back and watched. They were aware of the atrocities but did nothing to help.’
Anak’s tone changed as he remembered. He still raised his cup to his lips although there was no tea left in it. He re-crossed his legs, straightened his back and continued.
‘Suharto was a military man. His troops worshipped him. He was also a power-hungry political animal. According to Suharto, the Chinese were all communists. This was untrue. Our Chinese had lived in Bali for hundreds of years, and they were no more communist than Suharto himself. The General had his death squads round up all members of the P.K.I. and ordered his men to execute them. I look back at that time as a time of shame. To this day, I am ashamed of my countrymen’s actions. I will tell you why … As most Balinese owed money to the Chinese, their debts would have been cancelled by the death of the money-lenders. And so, many Balinese helped the Javanese troops in this massacre of innocent Chinese. As the Balinese had no guns, they used their curved rice harvesting machetes to carry out these killings …’ Anak stammered. ‘And this of course worked in Suharto’s favour. He freed people from their debt. Although he was a mass murderer, he gained in popularity. Yes, my friend, we Balinese have blood on our hands. Underneath our smiles and our ceremonies, behind our peaceful beliefs and continual striving for balance and harmony, we have a history as violent and bloody as any nation has ever known.’
Anak stopped to gather himself.
‘The first time I saw Mahmood Bas, I was twelve years old,’ Anak recalled. ‘It was in 1966. He was a young lieutenant in charge of a squad of soldiers. They arrived at the Sandika. Our Chinese money lender, Li Cheun, was beaten and bound. He couldn’t see out of one eye, and his mouth was a bloody hole with most of his teeth broken off. Bas was surrounded by a horde of machine-gun toting soldiers, thugs more like it, common murderers. Anyway, Bas held a few papers in his hand. They were the mortgage agreements for my father’s land … “I know you are a P.K.I. sympathiser and I should have you shot,” Bas said to my father. I was twelve years old then, and I stood by my father’s side. I couldn’t believe a man so young, for Bas couldn’t be more than twenty-two, could speak to my father, a member of the Balinese Royal family, so arrogantly and point rifles at him as well!’ Anak’s indignation rose at the memory. ‘Bas said, “I believe you owe this communist a considerable amount of money, for a parcel of three-hundred arrat of land.” My father didn’t answer. Bas continued, “I am prepared to let you and your family live if you sign the mortgage over to me.” My father knew he was beaten, that he had no choice. Many of our family members and friends had been shot on account of their connections to the P.K.I. So he agreed. But he had one request: he wanted Li Cheun’s life to be spared. My heart pounded. My father was on the verge of being executed, but was still bargaining for another man’s life. “Take this worthless piece of buffalo dung and do what you will with him,” Bas said and kicked Li Cheun from behind. My father then signed the papers. The land belonged to Mahmood Bas.’
Anak re-crossed his legs and refreshed his cup of tea. ‘We took Li Cheun in and tended to his wounds, but there was nothing we could do. His wife and children had been massacred in front of him with machetes, and all of his relations had met the same fate. He died one week later of a broken heart. We cremated him at the Sandika and scattered his ashes out at sea in the hope they might find their way back to his ancestors in China.’
My mind whirled in a confused mosaic of images and history as I tried to comprehend the enormity of the events Anak had survived as a child. I sat alone thinking long after Anak had left the dais and gone into his meditation temple.
* * *
It was early evening when a ruckus broke out by the pool. Guests had filed through from the Bali Haj to watch the sunset. On the pathway outside the office, a girl was screaming at Geno, pulling things from her handbag and hurling them at him. I’d seen her arrive with him several days earlier. A striking Brazilian beauty, lithe and tall with a deep tan, and green eyes like Geno’s. She had her bags packed and an airport taxi waiting in the carpark.
Without warning, she turned to Geno and raved, ‘You think you can pay me off with this cheap fucking jewellery, asshole? Give me my fucking money!’
‘You’ve had your money, bitch. You spent it on all this expensive shit you wearing. Look at you! You look like a fucking Christmas tree. So shut the fuck up!’ The violent look in Geno’s eyes worried me.
‘You, you promise me! You know how much
you promise me! I am not leaving until I get my money.’
‘Shut the fuck up! You fucking putana, you get a holiday, all these fucking clothes … What you doing before eh! Fucking old men from the beach in Rio.’
‘Geno,’ I cut in, ‘the guests are watching. Stop this.’
‘Stop this? Yes, I gonna fucking stop this right fucking now.’
He had the girl over his shoulder before I could stop him and was marching towards the swimming pool. He carried her kicking and screaming, and hurled her into the water. She came up for a moment, gasping, her wide-brimmed hat floating beside her. She grabbed a lungful of air and went under again. I saw her stilettoed feet pumping frantically, her dress billowing up to her face, her arms waving.
‘That stop you, bitch! Come on, tell me now, bitch, tell me what you want!’
‘She can’t swim!’ I screamed at Geno.
‘Fuck her, man. That bitch can drown.’ He turned to her and spoke, cupping his hands to his mouth, ‘You happy now, bitch? You see what you make me do? You make me shame myself in front of all these people!’
I was in the water. The woman had stopped struggling and was floating listlessly. I’d managed to get her to the pool’s edge but I couldn’t get her out.
‘Geno, help!’ I yelled. He reached down and pulled her out by the hair then slapped her face hard. She lay crumpled onto the tiles.
I was out of the pool, thumping her chest with both fists. Water gushed out of her lungs. She slowly sat up, coughing and pointing a finger at Geno, ‘You gonna pay for this …’ she spluttered and gasped. ‘You fucking dead, you asshole. You come back to Rio and the Marco crew … You fucking dead.’