by Carl Hoffman
PART THREE
ASIA
A ferry carrying around 850 passengers sank in a storm off Indonesia’s main island of Java and hours later only 12 survivors had been found, a military commander said Saturday. The cause of the accident was not known. Sea accidents are common in Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago nation, where boats are the main way to reach many islands. Safety measures are often poorly enforced and many craft lack sufficient safety equipment.
—New York Times, December 30, 2006
SIX
Jalan! Jalan!
THE HEAT FELT THICK enough to touch. Sweat dripped from my temples and I couldn’t keep the flies off. Smoke from hundreds of cigarettes hung in the air like faded, yellowed lace curtains. I was three decks down, in ekonomi—steerage—on the Bukit Siguntang, a 479-foot-long steel ferry operated by Pelni, the Indonesian government-owned shipping line. The Siguntang officially carried 2,003 souls, all but 300 in third class, but it seemed as if every man, woman, and child in Jakarta were swarming into her belly. There were no beds or bunks—just two open decks full of knee-high, linoleum-covered platforms on which we were supposed to lie like hot dogs lined up on a grill. The bulkheads were brown, the ceiling brown, the deck white linoleum covered in ocher cigarette burns. It was an industrial holding pen with the occasional basketball-sized porthole that didn’t open.
“Nasi, nasi, nasi!” vendors yelled. Babies cried. Water and chips, noisemakers and rice wrapped in brown paper cones, balloons—it might have been the circus.
“Air, air, air,” water in Bahasa Indonesian.
We hadn’t left the dock; I wanted to go on deck but feared leaving my bags. I was the only foreigner, hungry and nervous to be so totally submerged in otherness. Indonesia was a world of islands, some 17,000 stretching across 3,100 miles, and without ferries the nation would never hang together; they were its lifeblood, carrying not just people, but cars and refrigerators and anything and everything too big or too expensive to fly. The Siguntang’s route was epic: nine days from Jakarta to Sorong, in Indonesian Papua, via Surabaya, Makassar, Bau Bau, Ambon, Bandaneira, and Fak Fak. I was booked through to Ambon in the Molucca Islands, five solid days in steerage with no breaks, no bed, no door to keep acquisitive hands off my stuff, and, it was immediately clear, no way to get out quickly if we hit rough seas. And chances were good that I might have to: In 2002 and 2003 two ferries sunk, each killing more than 500. In 2006 the Senopati Nusantara went down in heavy seas off Java en route to the island of Borneo, and more than 800 died. Like the Joola, these weren’t ancient rust buckets; the Nusantara was built in 1990 and was government-owned, just like the Siguntang. And those were just the big ships; thousands of small, decrepit wooden ferries plied shorter routes, and they foundered with the frequency of kids’ bathtub toys. Two months after my journey on the Siguntang, another ferry sank and the online magazine Slate ran a story postulating that so many Indonesians died in ferry disasters because they didn’t know how to swim. One look at the Siguntang reveals that claim as ridiculous. It was just crowded, and the ocean distances across which it sailed were wide and wild. Safety took a back seat; no one said it, would ever say it, but risk was just one more economic calculation in a country of islands with 240 million people, great masses of whom earned only a few hundred dollars a year and lived in villages or urban slums. Everybody was just trying to make a little more; politicians skimmed big, and ship captains and lowly seamen skimmed little.
“Why aren’t you flying?” asked a man who was seeing his large extended family get settled on the plank across from me. The question was rhetorical; he wasn’t really expecting an answer. But flying in Indonesia wasn’t much better. After a string of aviation disasters, including Adam Air Flight KI-574, which simply disappeared off the radar in January 2007 en route from Java to Manado with 102 passengers, every one of its airlines were banned from flying to the U.S. and Europe, including its national carrier Garuda. I shrugged, said I liked ships better.
“You must be careful,” he said. “Sometimes the people … they take things. And pirates …”
Porters in yellow shirts humped boxes wrapped in twine—more and more boxes that they piled in the aisles, against the walls. This was no casual, quick hop to Chicago for the weekend. Whole families were on the move, armed with goods and prepared with bedding and enough plastic bins of rice to survive on a desert island for weeks. “Hello,” a high-pitched voice said. I turned, and next to me knelt a teenage girl wearing skinny jeans and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt that said PIRATE GIRL in sequins. “I am Mrs. Nova,” she said. “What is your religion?”
Two women wearing headscarves on the other plank eyed me. The woman to my left clutched a Koran. I was surrounded, captive. I hesitated. “Atheist” seemed too provocative. Thankfully Mrs. Nova, who was clearly not a Mrs., didn’t wait for an answer. “Christian?”
I bobbled my head noncommitally.
“My hobbies are singing and billiards,” she said in nearly perfect English, as if reading from a conversation book. “Mr. Carl,” she continued in the third person, “Mrs. Nova likes Linkin Park and Britney Spears. Mrs. Nova is seventeen and she lives in Makassar.”
That broke the ice; suddenly the family across from me cut in. Florinda spoke a little English and wore a pink headscarf, and she was with her sister and one of their sons, Kahar. They’d traveled three days from Makassar to Jakarta for a family wedding, stayed a week, and were now making the three-day hike back. Thirteen days, six of them traveling. A ramen seller came by, and I flagged him down. Mrs. Nova nearly attacked him, barking a string of Indonesian. She jumped up, fished around in her bag, and pulled out a case of ramen. “For two!” she said. “For Mrs. Nova and Mr. Carl!”
A vendor hawking thin cotton mattress pads muscled by. I waved him over; five days on linoleum wasn’t going to be easy. This time the woman with the Koran barked, looked at me, shook her head, waggled her finger no. Then pantomimed picking tiny things off her ankles, and held her nose. The message was clear. The vendor scowled and stomped off.
There was another message, too: once again, the more I gave myself to the world, the more I made myself vulnerable by putting myself completely at the disposal of people and situations in which I had no control, the more people took care of me, looked out for me. At first I had thought they were taking pity on me. But over the days and weeks ahead I started to understand something else, something that had been sinking in gradually over the months. Being a white American conferred on me an automatic status. I represented power. Affluence. Vast numbers of the world were poor, watched American television and films, listened to American music, but had no real contact with westerners, and if they did it was often as chambermaids, taxi drivers, waiters—none ever sat down in their slums or ate their food. Florinda’s brother’s question—why wasn’t I flying?—said much. It was a question I heard over and over again. Why wasn’t I in first class? Why wasn’t I on an express bus? Why wasn’t I anywhere but here? My fellow travelers were right: I could have been flying. I could have been traveling in first class, in an air-conditioned cabin with a soft mattress and stewards. In silence and stillness. That I wasn’t was like a gift to them, a mysterious one they couldn’t fully understand but that they appreciated in a way I would never have imagined. And the more I shed my American reserves, phobias, disgusts, the more they embraced me. In the weeks ahead I would accelerate what had started gradually over the miles. I would do whatever my fellow travelers and hosts did. If they drank the tap water of Mumbai and Kolkata and Bangladesh, so would I. If they bought tea from streetcorner vendors, so would I. If they ate with their fingers, even if I was given utensils, I ate with my fingers. Doing so prompted an outpouring of generosity and curiosity that never ceased to amaze me; it opened the door, made people take me in. That I shared their food, their discomfort, their danger, fascinated them and validated them in a powerful way. And as Lena waved away the cushion man and Mrs. Nova insisted I share her food, I realized I was in good ha
nds, surrounded by women with eagle eyes. I could relax; murder or robbery was the last thing I had to worry about.
Which was a good thing, since I was dying to find the head. I got off my plank, walked through the hot crowd. Hundreds of eyes watched. At the end of the long room that stretched the width of the ship stood the bathroom. The smell hit first, like gallons of piss had been simmering on the stove for weeks, boiling down to a concentrated essence. Where once three urinals had been attached to the wall were bare pipes. The sink’s drain had no pipe—it drained onto the floor, which was two inches deep in liquid. A man stood in the corner pissing into a floor drain. Behind two doors lay Asian-style toilets, rank with humanity’s excretions. I rolled up my pants, tiptoed through in my flip-flops, strained to aim in the darkness of the stalls, not that it mattered. And I noticed what appeared to be large black spots. Moving. I blinked, opened my cell phone to shine a little light: cockroaches the size of half-dollars scuttled across the floor.
Sometime, I don’t know when, we pulled away from the dock and headed to sea, and I lay down on my plank—Lena six inches to my left, Mrs. Nova six inches to my right—and tried to sleep. The fluorescent lights hummed brightly overhead. People coughed. Babies whined and screamed. A kid nearby twirled a noisemaker, the sound like stones grinding in a barrel. The air was still and humid and oppressive. Radios blared. And lying there, staring at the walls and ceilings, I noticed more roaches. Half an inch long, they scurried up the walls, across the ceiling straight over my head. What is the saying? For every roach you see there are a thousand you don’t? Or for every one you see there are ten thousand you don’t. Either way there must have been millions, hundreds of millions, of roaches on the Siguntang. They were everywhere, and I became convinced that one or two would eventually lose their grip and fall. But no one else took notice of them; roaches were a constant in their lives, not even worth noticing.
I pulled a T-shirt over my eyes, tried to get comfortable. It was midnight and already my hips, knees, and ankles hurt from the hard plank. I don’t know when I finally fell asleep, but at 4:30 a.m. the PA system blared to the chanting of the muezzin. Dawn: time to pray. I tried to wait it out, shut it out. But all around me people began to move. Lena slid a white dress over her clothing and enveloped her head in a lace headdress, knelt, and bowed up and down, murmuring.
I got up, stiff, and went up two flights of stairs and out on deck, first light just beginning to illuminate the eastern horizon. Ten-foot-wide decks ran the Siguntang’s length, and there was a snack bar on the stern under green corrugated fiberglass. The air felt balmy and fresh; nothing but dark blue calm sea and lightening sky, and at 6:00 a.m., when the snack bar opened, I got a sweet coffee in a thin plastic cup. My ass hurt; there was no place soft to sit anywhere on the ship. I wandered; I stared at the sea; I returned to my plank. “Mr. Carl,” said Mrs. Nova, “you must eat breakfast!” With my ticket, it turned out, I was entitled to three meals a day. I stood in a long line that wound past a window; each passenger was handed a Styrofoam box and a bottle of water. I opened my box: white rice and a fish tail, a packet of sambal—hot sauce. There were a lot of bones. Mrs. Nova sang softly to herself and then someone brought out a guitar. She took it, started singing. Lena joined her. It was melodious, beautiful, and I lay down in the heat and dozed off.
That afternoon, sitting on a rail overlooking one of the lifeboats, I met Daud Genti. He was tiny, five inches shorter than me, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt that read ILLINOIS STATE, and he spoke English well, part of the army of cheap, semi-skilled laborers dispersed throughout the world, keeping their parents and their ancestral villages afloat. He was returning home to the Celebes after five years, the last six months as a seaman in Dubai. The Siguntang, I soon discovered, was packed with people just like him. “I need a break,” he said. “I’ve been working twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for six months straight, and I quit because they weren’t paying us enough. We were supposed to have one day a week off, but we didn’t.” He’d been working on a dredging barge creating The World, a miniature land of islands in the shape of a Mercator projection of the world’s continents on which vacation villas for the rich would be built, with a crew of Iranians and Filipinos. “In Dubai I never saw an Arab,” he said. “Indians, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, Indonesians only.” Over the years he’d worked in Singapore, in Brunei, on oil rigs off the island of Kalimantan, and he straddled worlds. He was a Toraja, a once fierce race of seafarers who lived in stylized wooden houses with upturned roofs, carried out elaborate funeral rituals and interred their dead in family caves. “All of my family is in a cave,” he said, “but we’re running out of room. I haven’t seen my family in five years.” He fished out his cell phone, checked to see if it had a signal. “I’m worried,” he said. “Not so excited. My village is very traditional and it will take me eight hours by bus to get there from Makassar. There is no electricity. No television. No mobile phone service—I have to go to town an hour on a motorcycle to check my messages. What am I going to do? Maybe when I’m old, like you, I will want to go back there, but not now …” He was used to the world at large now, wanted to stay in it, and he had no idea how long he’d be home for.
A few hours later I met Arthur, another returning worker. He had a narrow face, alive, brimming with enthusiasm. “There is much work,” he said. “Too much to be free!” He was just twenty-four, returning to Ambon after seven years, his last job having been as an electrical mechanic for Shell/Petrobras in Brunei. And for seven years straight he had worked six days a week. “My boss loves me because I work, work, work!” His journey, too, was epic in its length, its passing between worlds. He had driven for two days from Brunei to Pontiniak, Indonesia, taken a ship to Jakarta, then five days to Ambon—nine days from start to finish, from a world of oil wells and technology and English to a village to see parents he hadn’t seen in seven years. It was hard to imagine; I had trouble coming and going and being away for two weeks. What would it be like to be away seven years? And not just away, but away in a different world, speaking a different language?
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. Chil
dren. 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.