The Lunatic Express (12 page)

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 apartments 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.

“You have villages like this in America?” asked a man wearing a Pertamina oil company baseball cap on his head and a blue one-piece jumpsuit. He had thick, jet black eyebrows and a gray mustache over a pair of crooked white teeth, and he spoke formally, with what I thought was a Dutch accent, like many elderly English-speaking Indonesians who had been educated when Indonesia was a Dutch colony. His name was Santoso.

I looked at the village on the beach. Shook my head. “No,” I said, “definitely not.”

“A landscape like this?”

That was a harder question to answer; there were tropics in America, after all. But no, not really. Not like this, which I told him.

Santoso looked puzzled. Together we gazed at the sea and the shacks and the children. “But America is big and great, no?” It was an odd thought—that a great and big nation would not have a little village nestled on a beach in a vast jungle.

He wore a heavy gold ring with an orange stone as big as a quail’s egg. I said I liked it. “You have no stones like this in America?”

The next village was called Wayalikut. “Have you written in your exercise book about the nice panorama of Wayalikut village?” he asked.

The day passed. Mile after mile of deserted green coast, thickly overgrown with palm trees and black sand beaches that became white in places, villages of fifty houses of rust and thatch. The crew cooked meals and fed me: rice and cabbage and bony dried sardines with a fresh, fiery paste of hot peppers ground out in a stone mortar. I’d told Joppy I was going to Lambrule, which was the first of our two official destinations. Over and over again people had asked me why, which I finally understood when we got there. Lambrule was no different from any other of the villages, except that it had a long concrete dock and some streets with half-finished concrete houses and a half-finished church. But no restaurants, no hotels; no stores or shops; just a pressing damp heat and a tangle of green vines and a single potholed street.
“Panas!”
everyone said to me—hot!

“I think I’ll continue on to Leksula,” I told Joppy, who introduced me to a policeman in shorts named Deddy. “He will show you around,” Joppy said. “Don’t be gone long, though.” Deddy escorted me in the searing sun. He didn’t speak English, so we walked in silence and almost nothing moved in the whole place.

Late in the afternoon we hit Leksula, and it was little different from Lambrule—just a minuscule village on an island in the middle of the ocean. Within minutes of our docking, Hendro showed up. He was twenty-one, wearing shorts, a camouflage-colored sleeveless T-shirt, flip-flops, and, as the village’s known English speaker, he had been quickly summoned. “Let me show you Leksula!” he said, beaming, excited. As we walked down the long concrete pier, crumbling in places, a beached and ancient wooden ferry on its side in the shallows, the skies opened and warm rain came pouring down. Hendro didn’t seem to notice, as the pier ended and mud and puddles began. The main street paralleled the shore, and we walked between corrugated and concrete houses, people huddling under porches and staring at me under the downpour. Nothing about the place really registered to me, at first. Just a heavy stillness. Hendro tapped my shoulder and pointed to a man in a doorway. “There is someone trying to say hello to you,” he said. I waved. The man waved back. “Why don’t you sleep in the village?” Hendro said. “You can enjoy village life. It is much better and you will not go up and down like you will on the boat.”

“Is there a restaurant or somewhere I can get a cup of coffee?” I asked.

“Closed,” he said, “but we can go to my aunt’s house.” We stopped at a one-story concrete house surrounded by mud and chickens, with an open door. Removed our flip-flops and went in; the front room had a wooden and floral print sofa and two matching chairs, their backs covered with antimacassars, and a wooden coffee table. Portraits of stern-looking army officers gazed down from the walls. Hendro went into a back room, and a few minutes later a middle-aged woman came out bearing cookies and two cups of instant coffee. We were both soaked. Slowly a gang of children gathered at the door, peering in. Laughing. Calling out, “Hello, mister!”

“When I finished elementary school,” Hendro said, “I decided I wanted to go to music school. I like music very much. I want to go to Jakarta, but I can’t do it, I have no money. Now I just practice my music in the church; it is a symbol of God.” He paused a moment and said, “New York is the biggest city in the world, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said, “not even close. Jakarta is bigger than New York!”

“Well, it’s the most beautiful city in the world!”

“No,” I said again, “there are many other cities that are much more beautiful. Paris. Rome. New York is very crowded.”

He sipped his coffee. Thought. “Mister Carl, why aren’t you an actor in Hollywood?”

“I never wanted to be an actor,” I said, and asked if he had a girlfriend.

“No, but I would like one. I have no job, so I can’t have a girlfriend.”

When we finished the coffee the rain had stopped. Out we went again, and this time people flooded into the streets. Staring at me, waving, calling out hello. They were all in groups. Men held hands with each other, walked with their arms around each other. They squatted on the ground together, sat on walls together. A soccer game broke out on a muddy field. Always, everywhere, people were together; that’s why my being alone was so hard to fathom. By now, everyone in town knew I was there, and suddenly I felt like one of the Inuit brought back to New York by Admiral Robert Peary after his polar expedition. I was seized with an urgent need for privacy. I wanted to be alone. Hendro took me back to the ship, where at the dock children were bombing off the pier, throwing each other into the ocean in their shorts and T-shirts, tumbling on the sand on the beach, playing with a joy and abandon long absent from the organized soccer fields and playgrounds of American cities. A crowd had followed us. Young. Old. Children. Men. There must have been twenty or thirty of them. They climbed on board following me, literally stood around me, surrounding me, watching me. I waved. They waved.