by Carl Hoffman
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.
IN 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.
TWICE 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.
OUTSIDE 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 a
ny 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.”
But why had it happened? How had it happened? What made people start burning and stoning their neighbors? “It was provocateurs,” Aristotle said. “From Jakarta. They paid people to attack, to burn churches and mosques. We don’t know who they were; only God knows their names.” That was partly true; the Moluccans had long agitated for independence, and it was a fact that in 2000 the leaders of the radical movement known as the RMS—Republic of the South Moluccas—had hoped to take advantage of political instability in Indonesia, drive the Muslims out of Ambon, and declare an independent state. Yet that still didn’t explain it to me. Someone could offer me all the money in the world and I still wouldn’t start burning my neighbors’ houses. Would I do it even if I was poor? I wondered. The hate and animosity had to be there in the first place; before the fire could be lit, it had to have fuel. I said that to Aristotle; I wanted him to articulate that hate, that anger, explain it. But he either dodged the question or just couldn’t understand it. “We don’t want to make a riot,” he said. “It was just people giving money and guns.”
We walked on. This church had been burned. That mosque burned. Those houses burned. “Before the war we stayed together,” he said. “We weren’t separate. Now we are separate; they stay in their community and we stay in ours.”
I was trying to fathom it all, those feelings of hate so easily ignited between neighbors, as we wandered by the docks. I noticed something I hadn’t seen when the Siguntang had docked: dozens of aged wooden ferries, far smaller than the Siguntang. “Where do they go?” I asked. He shrugged.
“Let’s find out,” I said.
We walked down a concrete pier, and I was mesmerized. They were forty, sixty, eighty feet long, clapboard and wood and corroded steel, and Aristotle asked for their captains. The Amboina Star was wood and steel, and beside her on the dock stood, it turned out, her chief engineer, dressed in oil-stained shorts and a ragged gray T-shirt. I questioned Aristotle in English and he translated for the engineer, who gave me an odd look every time I spoke. It was headed to Buru Island the next afternoon, to two villages, Lambrule and Leksula, a trip that would take eighteen hours. I was welcome to come; I should be at the ship by five tomorrow. Buru? I looked in my guide. There was one paragraph that said little: Buru had been the site of a famous Indonesian political prison. It mentioned neither Leksula nor Lambrule. Hotels? Facilities? English speakers? They were a total mystery. I packed my bags, jumped on the back of a motorcycle taxi the next afternoon, and headed to the ship.
It was damp, the air cloying and thick with the smell of smoke and fishy sea, the sky covered with low clouds, rays of sun shooting through onto pewter-gray water. Cocks crowed from the deck of a ship on the other side of the dock. A parade of men dragging two-wheeled handcarts loaded the vessel. Rebar. Angle iron. Pipes. Sheets of plywood and sacks of concrete and rice, boxes of cooking oil. A line of men, fire-brigade style, passed the goods inside, down a steep wooden gangplank, where they were lowered into the hold, below two long shelves that served as sleeping platforms that ran the length of the Star. Joppy, the engineer we’d spoken to the day before, led me to the top deck, along which a series of Hobbit-sized doors opened onto tiny wooden cabins. I shook my head and pointed to the main space of shelves below. Joppy looked at me and said, “There will be many people down there, and a lot of cigarette smoke.”
I was startled; his English was perfect. No wonder he’d been looking at me so oddly as we’d talked through Aristotle.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t mind.”
Joppy grabbed one of my bags, carried it down a ladder, found me a spot, and wrote out a ticket: thirteen dollars. “We won’t be leaving until eight or nine,” he said.
I asked him how he’d learned English. “I was an engineer on a factory trawler in Alaska,” he said. “For two years.” He had gone to sea at twenty-seven and spent a decade in the global economy, like Daud and Arthur on the Siguntang. He’d been to China, Panama, throughout the Caribbean, the United States, and Korea. “Sixteen countries,” he said. But, it turned out, his English had been courtesy of the U.S. government. “I was arrested in a bar in Alaska. I spent six months in jail. I drank too much whiskey and there were girls there and I grabbed one,” he said. “I don’t really remember. There were no witnesses. It was a bad move; she was sixteen and the police came. I spent one month in jail in Palmer, Alaska, and then five in Seward and then, boom! They didn’t charge me with anything and just put me on a plane and I was in Jakarta. I’ll tell you a funny thing, though: in Indonesia you go to jail big and come out small, but in America you go to jail small and you come out big! There’s a lot of food and nothing to do but sport and volleyball!
“Listen,” he said. “If you need anything, you come to me.”
On the top deck toward the stern the ship was open, piled with wooden pallets and a few old vinyl mattresses, and cracked plastic chairs. I plunked down and felt elated at the little ship and an unknown destination, and gazed across the bay, crowded with freighters and sailing schooners under the green mountains, as the hours passed and passengers slowly filed aboard. I smelled diesel fuel on the light breeze, listened to the roosters, the sound of foreign voices carrying across the water in the gathering twilight.
“Where are you going?” asked Dempe, a young law student from Ambon.
“To Buru,” I said.
“But what town?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said; at that moment I couldn’t even remember the names of our two destinations, or which one I’d told Joppy I was going to. Like when I had jumped in the car across the Amazon from Puerto Maldonado, I’d had no idea where I was going or what I would find when I got there, or how or when I’d be able to get back to Ambon. I was leaving the map, leaving it all up to fate. I carried no food. No bottled water. It was strange how good that always felt; it was freeing in some profound way, and made me feel strong. One thing I wasn’t was afraid. Joppy was as fine a twist of fate as they came: I was in good hands.
“Are you going alone?” asked Dempe, furrowing his brow.
“Yes. Alone.”
He looked at me; people were always fascinated that I was traveling alone, without family; it was inconceivable to them. They lived with multiple generations, slept crowded into beds and on floors in tiny ap
artments or houses, and they would do so their entire lives. For them, every night was like those nights on the Siguntang or the Star, crowded together, entangled in multiple legs and arms, always the heat of another human body next to them. I envied that, even as it repelled me—the idea was a central conflict in my life. I had a family, after all, and five of us had lived in a one-bathroom, three-bedroom house—but somehow I’d ended up in my own little apartment. I’d always found crowds compelling, I always liked feeling part of something, so why was I always running?
At nine-thirty the Star’s horn blasted, the mooring lines were cast off, and we slipped out onto the dark water. The ship was crammed—every space on the platforms taken. But big, open windows ran its length, and an eight-foot-wide doorway lay open in the waist, just two feet over the sea, and a warm breeze swept through. I sat perched at the doorway for an hour or so watching the sea pass, and then crawled up onto my platform, squeezed between two men, put my arm over my eyes, and fell asleep to the thrum of the engines and the roll of the sea.
Movement. Touching. Voices. A baby crying. Wind sweeping across me. It was 4:30 a.m., still dark, but I crawled off my shelf and Joppy offered me a burning-hot, syrupy-sweet coffee in a plastic cup so thin it was like paper. As dawn came over the ocean I realized we were motoring just offshore of a hilly green jungle, coconut palms and mountains rising behind. I had thought we were bound for two cities, but the Star was threading its way to every village along the coast, and for the next four hours we stopped every ten or fifteen minutes, bobbing a few hundred yards off the beach, as goods and people came and went on the Star’s beat-up outboard launch.
They were places far off the beaten track, almost out of this world. Just a tightly packed collection of corrugated shacks on a white sand beach, the shimmering onion dome of a mosque or the steeple of a church—never both—poking through the shacks. Blue ocean, cloudless sky stretching far to the horizon; uninterrupted green beyond. Groups of ten or twenty children played on the beaches, chased balls, jumped up and down, and shouted at the Star. Dogs barked.