A Singular Woman (21 page)

By January 1976, Ann had moved to Yogyakarta, a short distance from the villages she intended to study. She settled temporarily in her mother-in-law's house in the heart of the city. The house stood inside the compound that encompassed the sultan's palace, or
kraton,
and its surrounding neighborhood, traditionally reserved for royal relatives and retainers. If Yogyakarta was the soul of Java, the compound within the crumbling, cream-colored walls was the soul of the city—the center of classical dance and drama, gamelan, batik, and puppet theater. There was a school for
dalang
s, the master puppeteers of
wayang kulit,
the shadow-puppet theater. Dancing masters instructed students in classical court dancing. Batik workshops produced by hand the classic brown-and-cream designs originally conceived for the sultan's family. Because foreigners were barred traditionally from living inside the compound, Ann told Dewey, she received special dispensation from the palace on the grounds that she was taking care of Lolo's mother. “She is 76 and strong as a horse but manages to look nice and frail,” Ann wrote to Dewey. Her mother-in-law's house stood on a corner of Taman Sari, the ruins of the sultan's “water castle,” a network of pools and waterways, like an early and more exclusive version of the water parks of today. The house was also adjacent to the bird market, where stalls stacked high with tubs of cracked corn and boxes of crickets lined narrow alleys; cages of roosters, parakeets, mynah birds, golden orioles, and turtledoves dangled from above. (In addition to a wife and a house, the markers of a man's success in Java include a singing bird.) “I am very happy to be staying now in Jogja,” Ann wrote to Dewey, using the nickname and older spelling for Yogyakarta. “What an enjoyable city it is, especially as compared with Jakarta. I am getting a little tired of people saying ‘Hello Mister' to me everywhere I go, but otherwise love it.”

Like any anthropologist contemplating fieldwork in Java, Ann found her way to the Population Studies Center at Gadjah Mada University, a research institute established several years earlier by an Indonesian anthropologist named Masri Singarimbun, whose pioneering research on rural poverty had challenged official claims about the progress of poverty eradication. The center, which has now trained generations of Indonesian social scientists, was a lively gathering place for scholars. It also contained a mother lode of data of interest to international development institutions. There were ongoing research projects on everything from marriage, fertility, and family planning to infant mortality, poverty, and divorce. There were workshops on how to conduct village research. International visitors, such as Ivan Illich and E. F. Schumacher, would drop by. “Ann and hundreds of others came to Masri for advice,” said Terence Hull, who, with his wife, Valerie, had done a village study under Singarimbun's supervision in the early 1970s and worked with him from 1975 to 1979. During the hot, dry season, he told me, development consultants descended like locusts, ravening information and data. They would drink tea and eat snacks on the porch, skimming off the impressions of scholars who had been immersed for months or years in village life.

“When you're in that crowd, there are a lot of discussions about what people are doing in development—the World Bank, et cetera,” Hull said. “There's a lot of cynical humor. Ann was not a cynical person, but she did appreciate the ironies that you would encounter all the time. The fact that the World Bank teams would always come between June and September with their vacuum cleaners, taking up reports every which way in any Indonesian institution, sometimes sitting down, taking their tea, telling people to go and photocopy hundreds of documents. Ann would appreciate the total inappropriateness of that sort of behavior, the irony of these people blowing in from Johns Hopkins or Michigan State or Iowa State or wherever, on what must be really, really high salaries or consultants' fees, and coming into a research institute where people are being paid a pittance to do really hard work with 24/7 kind of responsibilities. They just showed no sensitivity to the vast gaps. Ann was totally attuned to the enormous gaps between Westerners' lives and people who were really living tough lives in Indonesia.”

Ann found other kindred spirits in Yogyakarta. Nancy Peluso, the daughter of a Fuller Brush salesman from Bridgeport, Connecticut, had arrived in the city in 1975 as an undergraduate from Friends World College in the United States, doing independent research. She learned Indonesian, moved to a village, and decided to study the economic roles of women. “This was a big topic at that time,” she told me thirty-three years later in her office at the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a professor in the department of environmental science, policy, and management, specializing in forest politics and agrarian change in Southeast Asia. Women were breaking into academic fields in which they had once been scarce; research on women and development was in vogue. When Peluso applied to the Ford Foundation for a grant, she landed $2,000, which seemed to her an extravagant sum. “They asked me what I wanted to live on and I said, ‘Fifty dollars a month,'” she remembered. “They said, ‘How about a hundred?'” She began studying market traders—women who bought household items, such as ceramic pots, from craftspeople and sold them in markets. At two or three in the morning, Peluso would set off with a trader on a four-hour hike into the mountains, the woman maneuvering a cart piled high with pots up the slopes of a volcano in darkness, to arrive at the market as dawn was breaking. “These people had nothing,” she recalled. “It was often women—women in a family where there wasn't a lot of agricultural land would go into these other kinds of businesses. They would either do small-scale trade or they would do crafts, like in the villages that Ann worked in.”

Ann and Peluso would meet in Yogyakarta and wander over to the marketplace for snacks, fried noodles, or durian in season. (The fruit of the durian tree is a local delicacy, but its smell disgusts many foreigners. At the Phoenix Hotel in Yogyakarta, it gets special mention in the directory of services. Coming after “duty manager” and before “extra bed,” the durian entry states, “By respect to others, it is strictly forbidden to bring durian into the hotel.”) At other times, Ann and Peluso would take Maya to dance performances at the palace or to shadow-puppet performances in the
alun-alun,
the grassy square with its two sacred banyan trees. “To this day, I nearly faint with pleasure when I smell hot wax, because I grew up roaming around the batik makers,” Maya told me. She remembered running in the ruins of the sultan's “water castle,” gazing at the animals in the marketplace, watching the court dancers performing stories from the Hindu epics. She and Ann lived on a budget, she remembered her mother telling her, of about seventy-five dollars a month. Ann would take her to a bakery on Jalan Malioboro, the main commercial street in Yogyakarta, and pretend to look around while the owners plied her captivating child with chocolate and coconut breads. On one occasion, Peluso recalled, the three of them spent a night on a mountain. A professor had told Peluso of the practice of spending the night on certain mountains in pursuit of good fortune. People would climb to the top, burn incense, eat, talk, sleep, or stay awake. There would be people selling food. “It's supposed to bring you good luck or you're supposed to get a wish or get money,” Peluso remembered. “Well, we didn't get money. We just did it to do it. Maya went with us. We took public transport to get out to this mountain. I remember getting there and starting to walk up the hill with Ann. You did things like this. You were single—and she was effectively single.”

Not long before moving to Yogyakarta, Ann had appeared in the office of a young assistant curator at the National Museum in Jakarta named Wahyono Martowikrido, an archaeologist specializing in material culture, particularly gold objects and textiles. A museum guard brought her to his office, Martowikrido told me, after Ann had asked to speak with an anthropologist, who turned out not to be in the building at the time. She seemed to be looking for someone to explain certain objects in the collection. According to Martowikrido, they talked and Ann invited him to join her for a meal. When he arrived later at the designated restaurant, he found her talking and laughing with a friend. They were celebrating Ann's birthday, it seemed. After that encounter, Martowikrido told me, he and Ann became friends. They would talk about Javanese culture and the meaning of certain handcrafted objects—how the design on a piece of fabric indicated that the wearer was a widow, or the significance of a certain crescent-shaped comb. After Martowikrido moved to Yogyakarta to study, and Ann moved there to begin her research, she would stop by the room he rented, where students often came by to study and talk. “She is very open-hearted,” he told me. “Nothing to hide.” She did not reveal, however, where she was living, Martowikrido said. He introduced her to
lurik,
the handwoven striped cotton from Yogyakarta, which he collected. He explained its history, the meaning of its design, and the varieties of stripes. Because Yogyakarta was famous for its silversmiths and goldsmiths, he took her to workshops in Kota Gede, a section of the city, so she could see how silver jewelry was made. “I told her that I am not interested in the objects but in the making of them,” he said. After a while, he said, “I think she is now looking at the object differently. At the beginning, she looks at the object as it's written by the scholars. But she saw objects made by Javanese in society, then you see it a little bit differently.”

Their friendship created talk, according to Renske Heringa, a close friend of Ann's in the early 1980s. “He exposed her to all kinds of things that, without him, she might not so easily have gotten access to,” said Heringa, known as Rens. “He knew all kinds of villages that would not have been easy for her to go to. And he liked to be with her in the field.” He knew where to buy fabric and objects for little money. “She went all over Yogyakarta, as far as I know, with him on this motorbike,” Heringa said. “Why not? She was free, and he was free. Most of all, it was just the fact that they went around so much. For Indonesians, that would immediately mean that there was an affair. For Westerners, not so. Ann was there by herself. Why wouldn't she be able to do what she wanted?”

Martowikrido told me, when I asked, that he did not know how Ann felt about him. Perhaps she liked him, he said, because she would come by to visit. When I asked him about his feelings for her, he turned away, as though embarrassed by the question, and said he could not answer.

Ann's return to Indonesia had done little to shrink the distances that had opened up in her marriage to Lolo. According to Maya, the day she and Ann arrived in Jakarta, they found a young woman, who was quite beautiful, in Lolo's house—the woman he would marry five years later, after he and Ann divorced. Maya, who was four at the time, told me she remembered little about the encounter. She did remember, however, her father's nervousness and a lingering impression that her parents had argued about the woman's presence.

Ann and Maya lived in Lolo's house in Menteng Dalam that year, but it seems that much of the time he did not. “I think he had another place that he lived,” Kay Ikranagara told me, but she said Lolo was often there when she and her son would visit. On the van ride to and from the business school, Samardal Manan, who had known Ann well during her first couple of years in Jakarta, said he was struck now by how free she seemed, as though “relieved from something.” After Ann and Maya moved to Yogyakarta in early 1976, Lolo would fly in to visit, staying in the house with his mother. Ikranagara recalled Ann telling her, on a visit to Yogyakarta, that Lolo was involved with another woman. “At that point, they were separated,” Ikranagara said. “I didn't feel that they were husband and wife anymore, whether or not they were divorced formally.” To Maya, Ann said Lolo's job with the oil company kept them apart. “They were still, though, supposedly trying to make the marriage work,” Maya recalled. Years later, Ann suggested to Maya that Lolo, whose health was poor, had been feeling mortal and contemplating the possibility that his name might not carry on. “He must have been lonely, though, on some level,” Maya told me. “I mean, there was a lot of back-and-forth: She was in Hawaii; he was in Indonesia. I'm not sure that you can really build a satisfying marriage with so much movement. So that's understandable—a pretty, lively thing who's present when your wife is not. I'm not saying that I forgive him, because I was upset that he hurt my mother. But I can't see that, even in advance of that, there was a marriage in the sense that I would expect a marriage to be—a sort of daily negotiation and conversation and affection and that sort of thing.”