Читать книгу A Death in Bali - Nancy Tingley - Страница 17

9

Sightseeing had been fun, the motorbikes challenging in the uncertain traffic. Now I needed to use my muscles, to wear myself out, so that exhaustion would vanquish the bloody scenes of last night’s dreams and today’s imaginings. I said good-bye to Seth and Randall and traded in motorbike for bicycle. I wasn’t due for dinner for another hour, so I took a roundabout route to Wayan Tyo’s mother’s house. I pedaled hard. The setting sun vanished as I flew down one hill, then reappeared, playing peek-a-boo, as I topped the next.

The Balinese orient themselves mountain to sea, with the mountains the more auspicious direction. No island of sailors, the Balinese. Whether their antipathy to the sea is because their shoreline has few natural harbors or out of fear of the water is difficult to say. On the other hand, I thought as I tried to catch my breath, the mountains may be the reason few people in Bali ride bicycles.

Wayan Tyo had left Ani’s address and directions at my hotel. He’d also left his mobile number in case I wanted a ride. Once in her neighborhood, I had to ask a couple of people directions, as the Balinese seem disinclined to number their homes.

Arriving, I was surprised to discover I didn’t recognize the house. I thought that I had remembered it, but maybe I was recalling the bungalow where my family had stayed that summer years before. I zigzagged through the entrance into the compound, as there was the usual wall blocking direct access, a deterrent to malevolent forces. Demons only walk in straight lines.

As I came through the gate, children ran up to greet me yelling, Mimpi, Mimpi. Puzzled, I wondered if they mistook me for someone else, maybe another guest who was supposed to come to dinner tonight. The children waited for me to lock the bike by the central gate, and as soon as I took off my helmet, a small boy grabbed it and put it on his head. They screamed with glee.

A girl about seven grasped my right hand, and when her younger sister, a tiny clone of the older girl, saw her hand in mine, she clung to my left. When she looked up, her perfect face shimmered, the mouth slightly parted, the eyes wide and eager. I picked her up and planted her on my hip. My one-year-old nephew weighed more than this three-year-old girl.

A woman grasping a large handful of green leafy vegetables came around the side of the house toward me. “They are very excited to meet you,” she said.

“Bu,” I said.

“Ani, you always called me Ani,” said Wayan Tyo’s mother, grasping both my upper arms in greeting, the greens resting on my shoulder. She looked at my auburn hair with its lock of pink and gazed into my eyes for an instant before she smiled. “Come over here to the kitchen, then we will join the others.”

“You look different than I remember.”

“You look different too.”

I laughed. “Twenty years will do that.” The summer we’d stayed in Ubud, she had probably been about my age. Very beautiful, her long hair draped around her shoulders, her attention on young children, full of pleasure at their exuberance. Now, standing before me, the vague, idealized person of my imaginings slipped away. She had thickened and her hair was bound. Her slight limp when she walked and her gesture a moment before, grasping my arms, gave rise to a little burst of memory. No, not memory, a feeling of contentment difficult to correlate with the gesture, a contentment I’d felt when she’d looked into my eyes.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“The same. I believe you are the same.”

“And what is that?” I laughed.

“Mischievous, quick in your mind and your actions, hurrying from this to that. Impulsive.”

“That’s how you remember me?” I smiled at the pleasure of being known.

She laughed. “That’s how you were.”

The kitchen was just to the right of the doorway, just as bade, pavilions for preparing offerings, stood just inside the entrance to temples. I assumed there was a correlation. It was a small kitchen, with a grill outside, and I waited while she put the greens on a table and said something in Balinese to a woman working at a burner. Then she led me to the main house, which lay at the back of the compound. Smaller buildings had blocked my view of it, and I wondered what each of them held as we walked across the tamped earth to a large, sheltering tree and the family who sat chatting or running around, depending on their ages. “I remember the tree,” I blurted out.

“Why didn’t you come to us as soon as you arrived? You and your family were our first guests in our bungalow. Our longest and happiest guests. You are welcome with us.”

“My mother lost your address about ten years ago, along with some other important papers, when my parents moved. She tried writing to you using just your names, but never received a response, which I suppose means you never received the letters. All I had was your name. My plan was to try to find you, though I hadn’t figured out how.”

My mother had pressed their names on me and tried to describe the relationship of their house to the center of town. But I didn’t know whether I would have followed through on the search. Even while talking to my parents about the trip, I had already been making mental excuses as to why I hadn’t been able to track down Ani’s family. My memories of them were dim, and after all these years I had no idea how they would greet me.

One of the young men seated on the far side of the courtyard rose at my entry. “Sister,” he said. Thus began my introductions to the entire extended family. The group seemed to expand and shrink before my eyes, and consisted of at least fifteen people—children and grandchildren, a great-uncle. They greeted me, went in and out of the house, the children ran amok, all was lively. Ani’s husband, Wayan Tyo’s father, was nowhere to be seen, but his brothers and their wives and children had all congregated to meet me and to dine.

One young man hung back until Ani called him over. “This is Esa, Wayan Tyo’s close friend.”

I stretched out my hand, but he didn’t take it, ducking his head slightly instead and taking an almost imperceptible step back.

“He is wary of foreigners. Don’t worry, he will warm to you,” said Ani, laughing.

“Why are you wary?” I asked him.

He seemed to consider the question. Finally he said, “Memory. History. The past.”

Before I could think of how to respond, Ani bundled me over to the cluster of wives who had shyly moved in my direction. One asked, “Where is your husband?”

“I don’t have a husband.”

She and her sister-in-law exchanged glances.

“You have met my family,” said Wayan Tyo as he came out of the largest of the buildings. He laughed as he saw the two young girls clinging to me. “And my daughters.”

The older girl still grasped my hand. The younger had laid her head on my shoulder; a tiny hand caressed my neck. The electrical surge I had felt when Wayan Tyo touched me the previous day now jolted me through his children’s hands. I tried to let go, but the older girl was permanently attached and the younger fitted me like a scarf. He came down the few steps, shooed the one away, and tried to take the other, but gave up.

“Oh, these are your children,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me that he had children. Of course he had children. “I don’t think I met your wife.”

He hesitated, then said, “She is not here. Do you remember this place?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe what I remember is the bungalow we rented from you rather than this house. But this courtyard—I remember the courtyard and this tree. It all seems smaller, maybe because I’m bigger.”

“Not much.”

I scowled at him. “You don’t have a lot of room to talk.”

He grinned, and again tried unsuccessfully to disengage his daughter.

Ani reached past him, took her granddaughter, and set her on the ground. Then she led me across the courtyard and away from the others. “And here. What do you remember? About Bali, not just about our home or your bungalow. If we had known that you were coming, you could have stayed in the bungalow, but now a couple from Chile is there. We’ll take you over after we eat so that you can see it.”

“I told Wayan Tyo, I remember this courtyard. In the early morning, I think. It’s not my most vivid memory. That took place at the bungalow where we stayed.”

She nodded encouragement, and I saw that she was leading me away from the others back to her world, her kitchen, as if she wanted a private conversation with me. No one followed us or interrupted. The kids continued chasing each other around the tree. Wayan Tyo joined his friend, brothers, and uncle. The young women tended to a crying baby.

Just to be talking, I said, “I remember peddlers coming around in the evening to sell textiles and paintings, sculptures. And I remember one evening in particular. We came back from dinner or a walk to find a young man squatting at the bottom of the steps, smoking. He had the longest, straightest pinky fingernail that I’d ever seen, longer than the cigarette. Not curved as they usually are. He held that little finger arched in such a way that I thought he was smoking two cigarettes.”

Ani handed me a bowl of beans to snap.

“He preceded us up to the porch, opened his bag, and began to spread out paintings on the deck. All this without a word. My parents took chairs and my brother and I stood around looking down on the sheets of paper at our feet, those paintings with their masses of tiny people, the foliage arranged like wallpaper. I’d never seen anything like them. It must have been early in our time here, because we certainly saw many more young men with paintings. Didn’t we?”

She was silent, peering into a pot on the stove that sent up a scent I couldn’t identify. The rice cooker clicked to warm and I lifted the lid, letting out a cloud of steam and the comfort of the smell of rice.

“The peddler spread out sheet after sheet of paper, and we kids squatted down to look. The detail created patterns. People cooking, bathing, swimming, washing their clothes, all within a jungle that formed the ground, the backdrop of the everyday scenes. Trees consisted of identical leaves, flattened and pressed one against the other. Now I know that these paintings were in the style developed in the 1920s and ’30s, the style of painting I’m here to research. Then I knew that they were paintings like I dreamed.” Ani stirred whatever was in the pot.

“After looking for some time, my parents began speaking with the peddler, but he didn’t have much English. He just nodded and smiled. Finally my mother said, ‘Jenna, which one do you like the best?’ My brother had jumped off the porch and was running around with a bunch of kids.” Finished with the beans, I fanned the greens on the table into a pattern.

“My mother’s question broke my reverie, so I began walking around the paintings, looking carefully at each one. This part might not be my memory. My parents still tell this story about me, so they may have filled in what I’ve lost. I looked and looked. It began growing dark and harder to see, and finally I pointed at one painting.

“The young man looked at me more closely and turned to someone who was standing on the ground below the deck. By then a group of people had gathered. He said something in Balinese. A woman translated for him.” I snapped the stem off a bean I’d missed and pictured the arrangement of patterns on the bamboo deck. Most of the paintings were dark, but there was one that had a light background.

“Yes,” she said.

“The woman was you? Ah. Well, you remember then, you translated for him and said that it was the one painting by his teacher. The best painting of all.” I laughed. “It’s the story that my family uses to illustrate why I became an art historian.”

“Do you think it is the reason?”

“In part. My love of art, and the books, the words, the ideas that describe the art. The research.”

She looked at me expectantly.

“They ground me. It’s the place I go to slow my racing mind. And this story, well, I suppose it’s the story that explains why I’m here. Researching the art.”

“It is one reason you are here.” Ani turned back to her cooking.

I looked at her. Was the other reason to discover the killer of the dead man? No, I thought. “Fate, is that what you mean?”

She sidestepped my question. “How does it make you feel being here?”

I thought for a moment. “I feel comfortable. I feel at home.”

“How are you?”

“Very well, it’s wonderful to be here.”

“No, I mean how are you?”

“You mean the murder, finding the body?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m . . .” I faltered. “I think I’m fine.”

Ani looked at me steadily, and I took a breath and said, “I don’t know. I don’t know how I am. I feel confused. You know I came here to talk with Flip, to look at art and to talk with him. And now there’s no Flip. So I guess I need to regroup and try to figure out a way to meet someone to help with my research.” To my surprise, tears welled up in my eyes. Embarrassed, I turned away.

She waited.

“Then, also, violent death. It’s not the first time.” I saw her start at this bit of news. “Last year, I . . . But that was someone I knew, and my response was very different. I felt very sad. This time I felt physically ill.”

“That seems normal.”

“Yes. I began analyzing the room, the scene of the crime, to keep myself from getting sick. I wanted to know who killed him, more than, more than . . .”

She nodded and took my hand in hers, which only brought more tears. “Tyo has told me that when he has seen someone die badly, cruelly, he finds himself floating above them, a distance away, even if he is right there with the body. I think this is natural.”

“Really? I know I didn’t want to be there, but at the same time I did. I didn’t make any attempt to leave. I rationalized that I shouldn’t move my feet, that they might think my footprints were the killer’s footprints. I tried to think of other things. I closed my eyes. I listened to the monkeys.”

“You tried to find safety in your mind.”

“Yes, but in retrospect my response was more disturbing than if I’d become hysterical or run screaming from the room. Do you understand?”

I took her silence as a judgment.

“What I felt. Well, actually that’s it. It was not so much about emotions. It was about intellect, knowing. I want to know who killed him. I want to know what happened. As I stood there with the body, I felt as if I’d been there in that room when it happened. I could see the killer’s anger, not just the way the spear was thrust through the dead man, but in the way things were pulled off the wall. The cushions on the floor.”

“Tyo said you stayed. This is why you stayed. To try to solve the mystery.”

“Someone needed to stay with him.” I looked at my hand in hers and felt the comfort in it. “You’re smiling.”

“Yes, you think that you did not feel anything, yet you felt compassion for him. You felt that someone had to stay with him.”

“You say compassion, and I did feel compassion. Then I would waver and worry about myself. I thought, I’ve just flown thousands of miles to speak to Flip and here he is, lying at my feet. I wondered, what am I doing here in Bali? And then it would come back to the biggest question.” She looked at me questioningly, which made me think she hadn’t heard all I’d said. “What I can do about his death.”

“That is for Tyo to figure out.” She spoke forcefully as she patted my hand. “This is not your job.”

I shrugged off her words, knowing I couldn’t argue with her about this. “I’m jet-lagged, too. When you’re jet-lagged you feel so out of it. I couldn’t anticipate this, a murder, an interrogation, my plans shot to hell.”

“Was the interrogation difficult?”

“You know, I hardly remember it. They just asked me a series of questions. I suppose it was pretty obvious that I had just arrived at the house. I mean, after all, the girl met me at the door. I don’t think they believe I did it.”

“No.”

I took that to mean that Tyo had told her I hadn’t killed him, but I went on. “I don’t know that a woman could have driven that spear through him. Someone needed a great deal of strength to kill him instantly, so that he didn’t cry out.” I pictured myself getting the spear halfway through him, unable to complete the thrust.

I said, “Maybe that was what Tyo thought when he saw the body. It didn’t even occur to me that a woman would be able to do it. So why would the police suspect me? I suppose that they probably just had to question me.”

“Probably,” said Ani. I looked around the kitchen and felt a bit like those policemen when Ulih had fallen to the ground in front of Flip’s house. Useless and not knowing where to put my hands. “They also wanted to make certain you had not disturbed the crime scene.”

I looked down, hoping she couldn’t spot a lie, my deflection, as easily as my father. “As I said, I didn’t move my feet.”

She looked at me closely. “You need to chop these beans. Small and thin, like this, and we will add coconut and sprouts. This is a side dish to the meat that we will grill. We will eat together tonight, though we usually each eat when we feel like eating. In the morning we cook a large amount of food, and whenever someone wants something, they come and get it. This is more common in Bali than the Western way of sitting down to a meal. Do you remember this?”

I shook my head and picked up a knife.

“Now tell me about your family. How are they?” She began to lead me away from death, back to normal.

“My mother and father are both fine. Still working. My father plans to retire from teaching; my mother continues with her job, though she could retire if she wanted. She’s a bit of a workaholic.” I didn’t say that she wouldn’t want to be around the house with my father day in and day out. His temper, the boredom that would surely paralyze and further anger him, his need.

“Do you see them often?”

“Pretty much every week. We live close enough to each other that either I drive over to the East Bay, where they live, or they come over to Marin for a hike or a visit to their favorite restaurant. They’re both healthy now, though my mother has had some back problems.”

“Yes, we are aging. And your brothers? Are they well, too?”

“Byron lives back east, in New York. We hardly see him—lucky if it’s once a year. He’s married, and his wife is pregnant with their second child. Sean lives very near my parents and sees a lot of them. I see quite a bit of him, too, even though he’s the youngest, and we’re nine years apart in age. We are very close.”

“I do not know Sean. He had not been born when you were here.”

“He’s a sweetheart. He lives on a boat—he’s crazy about boats and has been working for someone who designs them. It’s what he wants to do. Eric.” I hesitated. “Eric has some problems. He uses drugs, and we think that he deals drugs, though we aren’t certain.”

“He was only a baby, but he was a troubled baby.”

“He was?”

“He made a good deal of noise.”

I laughed. “He still does.”

“We are ready to eat now. You will tell me more later.”

I was happy that we were going to eat together. In the courtyard the men clustered under the tree, while the women chatted and ate around a table set a little apart. I sat with the women. Tyo’s sisters-in-law included me, cheerfully putting up with my attempt at Indonesian until I discovered their English was far better. It shouldn’t have surprised me, as everyone seemed to speak English. My attempts to communicate in Bahasa generally meant I said a word or two, then the conversation reverted to English. Still, I knew that the few words I spoke were appreciated.