Sometimes Baharuddin missed the city, and just as often he missed his bossy big sister, whiny kid brother, gentle mother and gruff but loving stepfather. He was able to find inspiration for and consolation in his art wherever he went. On Rilaka he experimented with sculpture. He shaped old fishing nets and buoys into a community of fishers, a monument to the old-life that many Rilakans longed for.
Baharuddin’s second sculpture commemorated the hustle and flow of the marketplace. Unlike his drawings, the sculptures were crude and simplistic, but the subject of their abstractions was clear enough, and in these choices Baharuddin demonstrated that he had the same sensitivity for people’s needs as his grandmother.
BAHARUDDIN WAS THE FIRST STUDENT TO STUDY AT THE ALFI School of English (ASE) under my and Mikki’s tutelage. My role was to break the ice. In the presence of two gangly fat whites, the likes of which he’d never seen, Baharuddin’s instinct was to hide behind an adult Rilakan’s leg.
I knew that he loved to draw, so I suggested that he and I draw each other. As it turned out he had already seen my work, and was now the owner of the portrait I drew of his father. He kept it folded up in his Batman wallet. He was willing to give me a try, and seemed quite pleased with the result, perhaps because it showed the superiority of his talent to that of this foreign white man who wanted to teach him more of the strange tongue he’d been made to study at school. I drew him with sand and sky in the background, a realistic if uninspired replica. He drew me standing on a three-mast sailing vessel, wearing pantaloons that billowed in an apparent hurricane around my paunch and a wispy moustache, one end of which I chewed wistfully.
“Holy shit,” I said. “That is awesome. Can I keep it?”
Bumi translated and Baharuddin nodded his head without enthusiasm.
“Here,” I said. I handed him my less-inspired creation. “Sorry it’s not more exciting.”
He smiled and stuffed the picture into the pocket of his jeans.
Bumi said something in Indonesian that ended with an English, “Thank you.”
“Thank you, Pak McCloud,” Baharuddin said.
“You’re welcome.”
TEACHING ADULTS IS DIFFERENT FROM TEACHING KIDS, PARTIALLY because kids learn faster and more naturally. They have less acquired knowledge stuck in their heads and are more willing to change or make room for newcomers.
Baharuddin wasn’t a perfect replica of our future adult students, but he served as an accelerated model student who would let us know if Mikki’s methods were suited to Rilakans. Those methods included games, songs, images and reciprocity. She would show an object or picture of an object, say its name in English, and have Baharuddin translate to Buginese. Then she would say the Buginese word and Baharuddin the English equivalent.
Accelerated, gifted or neither, Baharuddin learned more quickly than anticipated with six hours of intensive study a day. Bumi, the best Rilakan speaker of English, was impressed by my sister’s gift. The two became friends more quickly and easily than even Bumi and I had.
If they ever discussed the disease they had in common neither of them mentioned it to me. But they had many other things in common: ingenuity, strength, intensity, stubbornness. During my brief time on Rilaka I watched them work together with Baharuddin, and later with Rilakan women and men, to give them a new language. It was a beautiful sight that I hated to see. Mikki was supposed to be bonding with me, not Bumi. I felt like a middle child whose younger and elder siblings had become best friends.
Within two idyllic weeks of our arrival, the ASE was officially opened with an inaugural class of twenty students — one-third of the island’s population.
ONCE THE MORE INTENSIVE TRAINING STARTED, I TREATED MY time on Rilaka like a forced vacation. I spent too much time alone with my thoughts. I wondered if I could live the life of a true activist committed to a cause, like Lily did. I wondered what had possessed me to let Sarah slip away. I didn’t question our decision to break up. I questioned the hundreds of smaller decisions over the years I was with her. I questioned every time I chose to do something other than spend time with her, at the expense of the bliss of our early days.
I was immersed in such thoughts and in the rays of a mid-afternoon sun when Mikki kicked my sunburnt knees. I opened my eyes to see her scornful gaze.
“I thought we were doing this thing together,” she said.
“Me too,” I said.
“Bumi, Baharuddin and I are up in the schoolyard working. What are you doing here?” The schoolyard was a skimpy patch of grass with a few palm trees in the middle of the island that provided students and teachers with shade.
“You really don’t need me there,” I said. “I’m not a teacher.”
“Then why the hell did you come here? I could have come alone.”
I couldn’t contradict her aloud, but I was certain she had to realize the truth, that without me she wouldn’t have come. That was what my saviour complex told me. If I hadn’t saved Bumi surely I’d saved my sister. “I came for Bumi,” I said. “He asked me to come so I came. I thought you and I would work together but you seem to have it all under control, so…” She had it under control because she was a natural-born teacher. All I knew was how to spin language for other bureaucrats.
Mikki shook her head and power-walked back to Baharuddin and Bumi.
My first goal in coming to Rilaka, to receive my thanks from Bumi, was thwarted by Bumi’s unwillingness to thank me despite the numerous hints I dropped. But it was satisfying to see him thriving among his people, even the few who had rejected him at the mainland school. He was back to poring through books like his former childhood self, learning for the sake of learning and teaching others through stories.
Late at night, after the tourists went off to drink more or sleep it off, we talked about the system of systems that is humanity, how our systems collectively fail us despite their ingenuity. We poured our knowledge out on the table between us, sifting through it, trading ideas when mutually profitable. Yet in the face of all our doomsday philosophy was this thriving village led by a woman with a healing touch, assisted by her resurrected son.
“Don’t you worry that English will change things here?”
“Yes,” he said. “But better English than Indonesian. I hope English will keep us independent, protect us from Indonesian culture.”
“Is English culture any better?”
“No,” he said. “But it is far away. It is also stronger. We can make it our weapon, like Portuguese in Timor. Only there it’s just an upper caste who speak it. Here is small enough we can all learn English equally. It is risky. I worry Rilaka will lose Buginese. The Buginese we have here is not like anywhere else.
“I’m afraid if we wait for the fish to return we’ll die. Or be forced to leave. Tourism is okay, but it’s not known forever. I won’t live forever. There need to be young storytellers to teach the white men about us.” He spoke as if these words were the last will and testament of his people.
I saw for the first time the real purpose of our journey to Rilaka. In an indirect way we ensured an afterlife for the island, that its story would be known when the Rilakans were gone. But this understanding did not take easily to my system. I challenged Bumi. “Why must we know your story?”
“Without our story you are doomed,” he said. “You will destroy your own selves.”
It was an uncomfortable conversation. I realized that I was not Bumi’s teacher and never had been. All I did was connect him to a man with a little blue tool. Bumi took that tool and he did the work with it, just as Mikki had. Like Mikki, I knew he would discard the tool once it had served its purpose, and once again depend on his own mind. Baharuddin would do the same.
When I summoned the courage to mention Bumi’s sudden departure, he said, “I thought my family needed me. In fact, I needed them.” He made no mention of the money h
e owed Sarah’s mom, and no apologies for not saying goodbye. He was all squared up with the Western world.
THE DAY I LEFT RILAKA BUMI GAVE ME A GIFT, NOT FOR MYSELF but for Lady Juanita, and not from him but from Baharuddin. It was a set of chess pieces the boy had carved out of driftwood. The sea gods continued to give gifts to the Rilakans, even though the fish had mostly been taken.
I hugged Bumi and Win and Baharuddin and every Rilakan in sight. I thanked them for giving me the chance to be among them. They smiled bewilderedly.
I promised to return. I wished I hadn’t allowed myself to become bitter over Mikki and Bumi’s connection, wasting my days on the beach when I could have learned from people who knew important things. They told me through Bumi that I was welcome any time.
Mikki didn’t come to the shore to see me off, so I begged the pilot of my boat to wait while I went to look for her. I found her on the far sloping side of the island. She sat and stared out at the sea.
I pushed her into the water. She spun as she fell and grabbed onto my t-shirt. She pulled me with her into the warm salty Flores Sea, putting me in a headlock and forcing me underwater.
I broke free and emerged to see her laughing face. I raised my hands in surrender. “You win,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said.
We hugged. We didn’t say goodbye and I didn’t wish her good luck. We just hugged a few beautiful seconds away. I pushed her head into the water for a second, stood and walked away. Over my shoulder I shouted, “Sampai jumpa!”
It was the only Indonesian Bumi had taught me. Until next time.
ONLY YATY THOUGHT BUMI MIGHT RETURN TO RILAKA. EVERYONE else underestimated him, his audacity and his commitment to home and family.
Robadise conducted a missing persons investigation for one Moktar Mohammad, who had a passport but no other record of existence besides landing at Soekarno-Hatta Jakarta International Airport, and again at Makassar Airport later the same day.
Mathias had done the same in Tana Toraja, and an All-Points-Bulletin (APB) had been released in Jakarta. Fears were aroused that the man who had a potentially suspicious past, and may have even been involved with some of the crimes of the Suharto regime, had kidnapped a young boy named Baharuddin, and was possibly fleeing with him to a far-off land such as Canada.
Everyone but Yaty believed that the mental block, the one that had kept him away from home for the first chunk of his adult life, still existed. Everyone but Yaty felt certain that he would return to that foreign utopia at his first opportunity.
“All he wants is to be back home with his family,” she said to Mathias and Robadise. She implored them to go to Rilaka with her.
“If all he wants is his family, why has he abandoned you and Bunga—again?” Mathias said. “If he wanted to go to Rilaka he had plenty of opportunities before now; no one was stopping him.”
With Robadise’s help, Mathias convinced her she was wrong for two months. “He’s too smart to go hide somewhere so close and so obvious,” Robadise said with that same smirk of confidence peculiar to those in authority.
She doubted their logic and frequently raised the issue. “How hard is it to go there and look for them? It’s a day trip and if I’m wrong then it’s done with.”
They would counter with some reason why he couldn’t possibly be in Rilaka. “He needs to be in a city to get his meds, so he must be here or Jakarta. God willing he hasn’t left Indonesia yet. Canada must be tempting for him, the land of milk and honey you know.” Later, when the unusually late rainy season began, poor weather conditions on the Sea of Flores became their reason to avoid Rilaka.
She agreed with these things because they seemed rational, and Bumi was nothing if not rational (most of the time), but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was just a few miles away from where they stayed and worried in Makassar, while the police did their work with the precision of sledgehammers on a thumbtack. She knew Bumi better than anyone, knew that despite his rational mind, his genius for survival was in his intuition. He knew almost instinctively that it was better to hide a needle in a pile of needles than in a haystack, wiser to do the unexpected. Besides that he had changed. The mental mis-wiring had aligned itself, and she doubted there was much he couldn’t do. So while Bunga worried and Mathias fretted, she had a feeling that Baharuddin was having the time of his life with his father. Her main concern was what would happen if the cops found him before she did.
That is why she went with relief in her heart to the harbour and its boats on a wet day when Mathias was back to work in Tana Toraja, Bunga and Beti were back in school there and Robadise was at work. Only her senile father was at home, and once placed in front of the TV with a big plate of nasi goreng, a thermos of tea and a stuffed Hello Kitty knockoff, this formerly mountainous presence of a man was content for the day.
She took a crowded boat full of tourists, making small talk with the curmudgeonly pilot to pass the two-hour boat ride under a tarpaulin. There was a wet, stinky heat over everything when they approached the shore. She mentally prepared herself to see that ghost of her first husband again, but instead she saw a handsome, rugged man with a three-day beard knee-deep in the water. He smiled and waved at the boat. Bumi.
This was no ghost. This was the real man, flesh, blood and sweat. His smile was full and took up half his face. She’d never seen such a smile on him, even when they first met, even when he spoke of academic political theories, even when the children were born. Whatever smile he cracked had always been creased with worry.
His face looked older now, but these new lines were different than worry, they added laughter to his face. He was darker, weather-beaten and fully alive. He wore a white tank top and baggy, light blue shorts covered in dirt. He was beautiful. Older yes, yet more youthful. He was as dirty as he had been in the backyard in Tana Toraja, yet cleaner than he’d ever been at the height of his washing rituals. It was like all those ghosts that haunted him had been chased away or tamed.
When finally he noticed the one brown face, aside from the usual pilot, amidst the sea of white, his smile fell away. His eyes still shone. He rubbed his chin and then his eyes, as if unable to accept what he saw. Who he saw.
She smiled at him and waved, against her will. She was there to claim her child and thus save them a whole lot of trouble. She was not there to reconcile or even to be nice. But he was beautiful, more beautiful than ever. What kind of weakness was this to love a man only at his best?
He dropped his hand from its wave to the boat, raised it again and made a half wave, just at her.
Her smile grew and it was like a re-creation of their first conspiracy, making out under everyone’s noses.
When the water became shallow enough that she could see the sand under the aqua blue, she stood up and jumped in, up to her waist as it turned out, soaking her long batik skirt as the rain soaked her blouse. She tried to run to Bumi, but a forced wade was all she could manage until a few feet from him she found herself knee deep and she surged upward toward him, into his arms. A great sadness took her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry about all of this.”
“You’ve come for Baharuddin,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too,” he said. “You can’t have him.”
THE SHOUTING WAS SO INTENSE THAT A GROUP OF OLD MEN intervened, perturbed that their game of gaple had been interrupted and fascinated by the sounds of real conflict, something they hadn’t experienced in many years.
Technically these were village elders, but none of the toothless old men commanded the respect of an Ibu Win. Nothing much was expected of them except a little wisdom and leadership, and even in that respect they were mostly useless. On this day they played an important role.
The men found Bumi and Yaty screaming at one another as loud as they could, in the Indonesian langu
age, as a gaggle of slack-jawed tourists gawked on in fear and horror. Such incidents were not in the brochure. Mislam, the most energetic of the men, intervened with the tourists. He ushered them away.
Mikki came by to see what all the fuss was about, and told the tourists in English that it was a family squabble, nothing to concern themselves with. “The locals will handle it,” she said. “Let’s go drink.”
The other three old men stepped between Bumi and Yaty and begged them in Buginese to calm down. “You’re scaring the tourists,” Guntur said.
It was a phrase Bumi had uttered to Guntur several times in the two months he’d been back home.
The three old men had no idea what the argument was about, or who this strange and well-dressed woman was. They spoke no Indonesian at all. But the young boy’s name kept coming up, Baharuddin. And another name they knew: Bunga. Bumi had talked a great deal about his brilliant daughter.
Bumi and Yaty still shouted at each other over the reasonable voices of their elders until Win arrived at the beach. “Bumi!” she shouted. Everyone went silent. “That is no way to talk to your wife,” she said to him in quiet Indonesian.
“I’m sorry, Mother,” he said, head bowed.
Win invited them both to her house.
“IT IS A DIFFICULT SITUATION,” SHE SAID TO THEM ACROSS THE table, and the four old men standing around the kitchen nodded. “I sympathize with Yaty because as a mother I lost both of my children, on top of the tragedy that I only had two to begin with. Nowadays that is the standard on the mainland, but in my day, eight was enough, ten or twelve better. Now two is normal thanks to the government, and thanks to the government our island population is dwindling away.
Drive-by Saviours Page 36
