The Bread and the Knife

by Dawn Drzal

  Our destination the next day was the Cameron Highlands, a favorite resort choice of British colonists beginning in the late nineteenth century because its cool, rainy climate reminded them of dear old England. Why, I asked my husband in a new spirit of open rebellion, would you travel all the way to Borneo so you could go to Britain? But the plans were already made, so we boarded a bus to Tanah Rata. Three and a half hours later, we checked into the rain-drenched Merlin Inn, a twin of the Econo-Lodge I’d often passed on the Mass Pike. After dropping our bags in a room that smelled troublingly of mold, we set off under a mean drizzle to Ye Olde Smokehouse—neither old nor a smokehouse—where we consumed a dispiriting meal of fish and chips and steak pie. How had I never realized what a meat and potatoes guy he was? During the entire trip, I don’t think he ate one Malaysian dish. Our considerable traveling during the previous decade had been restricted to Europe, mostly to England, France, and Italy. Even Greece had been too threateningly “foreign” for him, although he was far too politically correct to come out and say so. He panicked if he couldn’t get a copy of the International Herald Tribune (or the New York Times if traveling in the United States), as if he needed proof that the world continued to exist in his absence.

  On the soggy walk back to the inn, it occurred to me that there are two types of travelers: turtles and hermit crabs. The turtle carries his identity with him wherever he goes, whether in the form of too much luggage or simply the desire to seek out the familiar. The hermit crab, on the other hand, travels precisely so he can discard his familiar persona and inhabit a fresh one in each new location. Nathan was a turtle, and I was experiencing for the first time the freedom of being a hermit crab. I felt resentful at being yanked forcibly back into my homely shell whenever I saw him. Sometimes I felt I was on two separate Malaysian trips, yo-yoing between them many times during a single day.

  The next morning after breakfast we walked into Tanah Rata in the incessant drizzle. Every few minutes, a juggernaut thundering along Route 59 would force us onto the verge as it carted the rain forest away in triangular stacks of perfectly straight logs hundreds of feet long. There was nothing to buy and nothing to eat on the town’s single commercial street, so Nathan decided to get a haircut in an ancient establishment Grant dubbed “The Barbershop that Time Forgot.” As we awaited Nathan’s turn in the mirrored room, Jeremy pulled out his camera and took a photograph of the four of us in the opposite mirror. When he snapped again, the flash went off, blindingly bouncing off all four walls, and we howled in protest. We were still blinking as Nathan burst from his chair into the street as if he’d been burned. The three of us stared after him in shock.

  After a long moment, Grant said, “Someone should go after him.”

  When neither of us responded, he shook his head in polite disgust and went trotting off after Nathan, just visible at the bend of the Brinchang road.

  I have held on to those photographs. The first shows Jeremy pointing his camera at the mirror, with me to his right, Nathan and Grant in profile seated along the adjoining wall. In the second, the flash obliterates Jeremy and me, and Nathan’s face is turned toward the mirror, an unreadable expression on his face. Perhaps he had a flash of illumination, or maybe the reflection revealed something he could not face head on. In any case, those are the last images of our marriage.

  Jeremy was uncharacteristically snappish on the walk back, and I could not distinguish between the gloom I felt inside and the weather without, but we found Nathan and Grant finishing a beer in the hotel’s dark little bar as if nothing had happened. Dinner that night was an almost silent affair in a nearly empty dining room. Afterwards, Grant and Nathan went off to play billiards, and I escaped to bed. When I woke up the next morning, my husband had packed and gone. I descended to the dining room as if in a dream I could not shake off. Grant, sitting among the ruins of a protracted English breakfast, told me that Nathan had left him a note saying he’d flown home a day early. He asked for an explanation, but I just shook my head. What was there to say? It was pretty obvious what was happening, or was about to happen.

  Jeremy and I left for the airport a few hours later, leaving Grant looking baffled and a little lonely, sheltering under the hotel portico from the perpetual rain.

  I certainly can’t condone my behavior, but after thinking about it for two and a half decades, I have come to understand it. I desperately wanted out of a prison partly of my own construction, and as a friend quipped when I returned home, “You took the express train.” The same shortcomings that caused the problems in my marriage in the first place—fear of confrontation, inability to communicate, lack of self-knowledge—were those that prevented me from being able to end it with any sort of grace. If I had been capable of saying, “This relationship is strangling me. I am tired of being told what to do,” I might not have had to leave. Jeremy’s behavior, on the other hand, was harder to explain. Why didn’t he take me aside when things got really ugly and say, “I can’t stand torturing the poor bastard like this. I’ll see you back in New York when you’ve figured this out”? Because Jeremy did not feel sorry for Nathan, nor did he see himself as a supporting player in my divorce. Everyone plays the lead in his own drama, and Jeremy’s was a production of Oedipus Rex that had originated thirty years before in London, moved on to New York, and gone on tour briefly in Southeast Asia. I should have known he enjoyed the triangle from observing him in a similar configuration twice before. I should have realized he was a hermit crab who crawled into the shells of other people’s marriages.

  On our arrival at the terminal in Kuching, we were abruptly reminded again that we were foreigners, and far from home. The evening darkness seemed to press against the glass of the small waiting room, and throngs of people stared, transfixed and unabashed, at our light hair and eyes. One little girl, in her mother’s arms, quickly reached out and touched my head as I walked by, withdrawing her fingers as if she’d brushed against something hot.

  Our lodgings at the Anglican Hostel were so Spartan we quickly dubbed it the Anglican Hostile. The disapproving clerk at the reception desk, a dead ringer for Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca, somehow intuited we weren’t married to each other despite my wedding ring. She almost refused to rent us even the separate rooms we requested but finally relented. The cavernous chambers had bare floorboards and were almost empty of furniture save a narrow bed covered with a white sheet pulled tight as a wimple. I brought the Scotch bottle and my toothbrush glass down to Jeremy’s room. It was far too hot for sightseeing, so we stripped almost to our underwear and sank onto a couple of low wooden chairs. The lazy ceiling fan failed to disturb even the flame of the match I struck to light my cigarette. Eventually, we learned that if you stayed perfectly still, your skin cooled a little envelope a few inches around you. We drank and talked desultorily until the sun went down and the heat grew a bit less punishing. After years of marriage in which the topics to avoid had spread like a stain, the freedom of saying whatever came into my head was more intoxicating than the whisky. Retiring to our separate rooms after a simple dinner in town, I realized I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life. It was the happiness of the right-before, when everything is potential and no branch on the tree of possibility has yet been closed off by action.

  The taxi driver assured us that the shadowy door thronged with scavenging, feral dogs was indeed the entrance to our hotel in Denpasar. The macabre light shed by the few sad Christmas bulbs drooping over the lintel made it look like a murder scene about to happen. Jeremy went to check if the inside was miraculously better but emerged looking pale. The driver motioned him over to the window, and Jeremy hopped back in looking cheerful. Apparently, there was a cousin with a hotel in Kuta. With the pessimism bred of a decade living in New York, I descended into sulky silence in which I imagined being pressured to stay at a hole in the wall worse than the one we just left but three times more expensive. Pulling up to an illuminated fountain at the end of a lushly planted drive ten minutes later, I saw—even in the
dark—that I had been terribly wrong. The Kuta Puri Bungalows were way out of our league. We didn’t even bother to get out of the taxi, which the driver kept running. He began a lengthy conversation with a man who appeared to be the owner, voices were raised, glances thrown in our direction. The driver returned, grinning. If we stayed for two nights, he said, the rate would be 36,000 Indonesian rupiah. We did some quick calculations—sixteen dollars. Only marginally higher than the fleabag in Denpasar. The sole catch was that only one bungalow was available. And so the final die was cast.

  We didn’t leave the room for two days. Platters of fruit with bottles of mineral water or pots of tea materialized by the door several times a day, conveyed by silent-footed bearers who later bore them away empty. Never again have I seen such beautiful fruit—vermilion papaya and scarlet watermelon. Slices of tiny pineapple and slivers of slippery jackfruit. Creamy miniature white and red bananas. Starfruit and mangosteens. Bizarre pear-shaped fruits covered in what looked like snakeskin. These were not meals so much as offerings. Instead of feeling the usual pressure from the cleaning staff to leave the room, we were distantly aware of a delicate respect for the privacy of what was going on behind our heavy wooden door. My thirty-first birthday passed in that hotel room, unnoticed.

  Eventually, our bodies insisted on an actual meal. It was dark by the time we emerged into the mass of humanity thronging through Poppies Lane I, a narrow street lined with shops and restaurants only a few hundred yards from the hotel. It was shocking that such a bustle of life teemed just outside the sanctuary of the bungalow. We ducked into the nearest decent-looking warung and ordered nasi goreng and the special mushroom omelette from the menu chalked on the wall, along with a couple of Bintangs. I thought I was just being paranoid after not having seen a soul for two days, but I felt uneasy about how the waiters watched us as we began to eat. The nasi goreng was delicious, as always, but the omelette was surprisingly vile. Whatever varieties of wild mushroom they had in Bali bore no resemblance to those I’d had in the US or Europe, and I pushed the plate away after a couple of bites. Jeremy poked the omelette open and tried a bit of the filling, which he agreed tasted like dirt. We were discussing whether to send it back when I realized I felt odd. Someone kept adjusting the dial, making the light brighter and dimmer, sounds fainter and louder. Objects were too near and suddenly far away. We paid the check, and Jeremy half carried, half walked me back to the hotel. By the time we arrived, we had figured out that the “special” mushrooms had been psilocybin. We were idiots. By the time I started to feel normal again a few hours later, he had begun sweating and hallucinating, and because he had eaten more than I had, the rest of the night was spent putting wet washcloths on his head and reassuring him that the walls were not melting.

  It would be hard to imagine two people who felt more ragged than those the shuttle bus deposited in Ubud the next morning, yet as soon as we turned off the Monkey Forest Road onto the verdant pathway to the Kubuku Bungalows, we began to feel restored. Ubud is preternaturally green, and therein lies its magic: it can restore you to greenness no matter how depleted you are. Within minutes, we were seated on a shaded platform overlooking rice fields stretching to a line of palm trees at the horizon. A cooling breeze intermittently set off the delicate tinkling of wind chimes carved to look like tiny farmers plowing the fields, their spinning blades designed to frighten away the birds. The brief intervals of silence were quiet in a way we had forgotten existed. When our server appeared and told us that the chimes were built by Wayan, the owner and chef, we were so distracted by his extraordinary appearance that we could hardly focus on what he said. A beautiful Balinese of indeterminate age, his bare chest smooth and coffee-colored above his sarong, his long nails filed into perfect almonds, he was androgynous not in an epicene way, like David Bowie or Patti Smith, but in a manner that seemed fully to embody both sexes. He was entirely charming and flirted with both of us, and soon we found we were speaking French with him, just for the fun of it. Then he brought us each a beer and left us alone. For once in my life, I felt completely content sitting there, neither wishing nor wanting for anything.

  A few months before making this trip, Jeremy and I had seen a Japanese movie called After Life where each person, in the three days after death, had to choose a memory with which to enter eternity. They would reconstruct the scene, and when they truly remembered, with all their senses, their entire being, they would be launched into actual death. I guess in a way that meant that they could die happy. It had bothered me at the time that I could not choose a memory worth dying with or for, but in that moment in Ubud, I knew I had found it.

  Later that day, we walked down the road to the Monkey Forest Sanctuary. True to its name, the Hindu temple complex was swarming with aggressively temperamental gray macaques, believed by the Balinese to protect against evil spirits. The Great Temple of Death, built of stone the color of sunset and carved with images of a demon goddess devouring children, made the hair on the back of my arms stand on end. Maybe the monkeys protected against evil spirits not by warding them off but by incarnating them, I suggested to Jeremy, like the Gadarene swine in the Bible. Walking back to the bungalows, I found myself thinking of “The Monkey’s Paw,” the short story in which the malevolent object of the title grants the owner anything he wishes for at a price he is not willing to pay. I wondered how far I would be willing to go to keep Jeremy.

  We ate an early dinner that night in Wayan’s restaurant, a platform suspended over the rice fields. Below, female farmers balanced huge baskets on their heads, walking with sinuous grace down paths that cut through the fields. The breeze blowing in smelled scrubbed, as if after rain. It was impossible to entertain dark thoughts in that place. I don’t remember many particulars from that meal, aside from the fact that it was delicious, vegetarian, and for some reason we ate a lot of it with our hands. The one dish that I can taste in my memory is urab sayur. I think I recall it so clearly because I had been craving fresh vegetables, raw things, salad, which we hadn’t eaten for almost two weeks because of a fear of getting sick. We had gotten by on cooked vegetables and peeled fruit, but they just weren’t the same. I could have kicked myself for not having had a salad in Kuala Lumpur instead of all that heavy English and American food. Originally Javanese, urab sayur is essentially a cooked salad, crunchy and fresh. Blanched bean sprouts, sometimes shredded cabbage, and long beans (which look like overgrown string beans but have a denser texture) are tossed with grated coconut that has been spiced with chiles, garlic, kaffir lime leaves, and camphor-tinged kencur, a ginger-like root. It not only satisfied the craving but also relieved me of a feeling of guilt that had been instilled by my grandmother, who insisted that it was practically immoral if you didn’t have at least one serving of “greens” daily.

  After dinner, we went up to our room, if you could call a rustic platform raised on stilts above the rice paddy a room. Woven thatch on four sides could be rolled down for privacy (from the birds?), but we used only the mosquito netting, which bellied in and out with the evening breeze. The floor was almost entirely covered by a huge mattress, and we settled ourselves to read as the women left the fields for the evening, calling out their good nights. Only when the twilight faded from salmon to a peculiar pinkish gray did we realize the room had no electricity. It grew too dark to read, and I had just drifted off when I was jarred awake by a wall of sound that had broken through sleep like gradually worsening pain. The pleasant chirping of frogs and crickets had increased in volume to become an unbearable cacophony that was still, unbelievably, growing louder.

  “My God, do you hear that?” I asked senselessly, since I could barely hear my own question.

  Jeremy shrugged and turned over. He was a much more resilient traveler than I was.

  I tried to imitate him by lying perfectly still, but the pandemonium hurt my ears. After a few minutes, I gave up and did my best imitation of the Nature Channel: “The impressive mating sounds generated by the amphibious denizens of the
sawah are a well-kept secret among the Balinese, who justly fear the negative impact on the tourist industry.” Jeremy rolled on top of me, laughing, and pinned my wrists above my head, saying he’d be forced to take extreme measures unless I promised to be quiet. Later, we sat up, passing a cigarette back and forth. The frogs had finally quieted down, and I blurted out, “You know, I’m leaving Nathan whether things work out between us or not.” It was the truth, but watching his face in the glowing ember of the cigarette, I realized it was precisely the wrong thing to say.

  There were all sorts of reasons why my happiness on that trip was illusory—but does that make it any less real? We don’t insist that pain be anchored in reality. Twenty-five years later, I can still summon the full force of the joy I felt during those weeks. Right before we broke up the following year, Jeremy said, “When I first met you, I thought you were the perfect woman.” I fretted over that comment endlessly, wondering what failing he had unearthed after getting to know me, or in what fateful way I had changed. But eventually I put two and two together. Jeremy unmistakably began to lose interest the moment I told him I was leaving Nathan: the perfect woman was clearly one who belonged to someone else. I had thought I would do anything to keep him in my life, but there was one thing I was not willing to do—stay married. Everyone has to draw the line somewhere.