He stood and wrapped the sarong round his waist, pulled on the T-shirt he had left at the end of the day bed. He hadn’t told Abang about the beating. He was planning on not mentioning that in his reports. Gregor’s first question would be, why didn’t you take better evasive action if there was a riot going on? Whatever happened to any operative in the field, Gregor always liked to let them, and everyone else, know that it was their own fault.
Abang was frying rice in a wok on the stone stove at the far end of the porch. As Harper wandered out, running both hands through his hair and scratching at his scalp, Abang saluted him with the wooden spatula, then scraped the rice onto two tin plates. He took the cloth from his shoulder and used it to pick up one of the plates and hand it to Harper.
‘Here, adik,’ he said with a smile. ‘Careful, it’s hot.’
‘Thank you.’
He sat down on the step, the plate balanced on his knees on top of the cloth, and began to eat, pinching the rice with his fingers. Abang took the skillet out into the garden and turned it upside down, banging it with the wooden spatula so that the scraps would fall in the yard for the two chickens pecking in the dirt. Then he brought his own plate over and sat down next to Harper. In the small scrubby garden beyond the yard, through some bushes, Harper could see a vast and muddy pig lying asleep on its side in a makeshift wooden corral, motionless but for the long hairy curve of its stomach inflating and deflating.
‘Your pig?’ he asked, nodding at it.
Abang shook his head. ‘Next door’s pig. Can’t believe it’s still alive, not much longer I don’t think. Want to know how much I had to pay, for that bag of rice, I mean?’ He tossed his head backwards to wherever the bag of rice was hidden. ‘A thousand rupiah, last me a couple of weeks maybe, just me, no family, although I’m a big eater, it’s true. I guess a local family would spin it out the month.’
Harper nodded, balling the rice neatly before lifting it to his mouth. Abang had thrown in some lime leaves and chopped chilli with seeds: all it needed was a bit of fried fish, an egg on top, perhaps. Didn’t Abang’s chickens lay eggs? Still, he wasn’t going to complain: in comparison with the claustrophobic Hotel Indonesia and the burnt-rubber smell of Jakarta, this was like being on holiday with an old friend.
‘Want to know what the schoolteachers here get paid a month?’
Harper nodded again.
‘Five hundred rupiah.’
Next to the stone oven, Abang’s bag lay, a large cloth bag with outside pockets. He was already packed.
They both shook their heads as they ate, sitting on the step next to each other looking out at the garden and the pig sleeping pantingly; dreaming, perhaps, of kitchen scraps and unaware of its impending fate. We are like that pig, Harper thought, tucking into our rice for breakfast. Isn’t that all anyone really thinks about, where the next meal is coming from? And if you know it’s coming, isn’t it easy to believe that it is all you need? But if you don’t know when or where your next meal is coming from, then it is the only thought to possess you. One thousand rupiah for a bag of rice, when a teacher earns half that much? How did anybody stay alive? No wonder the country is falling apart, he thought. When rice is that expensive, human beings are cheap.
Now it is clear who is friend and who is foe. He travelled up country on the back of a motorbike with a driver, Wayan. He had wanted to go on his own but Abang had persuaded him that Wayan was trustworthy and knew the countryside. ‘Once you are up there, you will see,’ Abang said, ‘the paths and lanes, it’s much easier with someone who knows it. Wayan grew up round there. After you’ve seen Komang, you can go off on your own, there’s no hurry then.’
Once outside Denpasar, Harper told Wayan, a thin young man his age, to take it slowly. He didn’t want to risk an accident on the potted road but, in addition, he wanted to get the feel of how things were in the countryside. Mostly, the villages seemed quiet. There were no charred corpses swinging from trees as there had been on Java, not yet. Occasionally, he would see groups of youths sitting on steps — once a group of four older men who looked like a more organised militia, but there was none of the humming tension of Jakarta. Who knew what was happening in the more remote villages, though, up in the hills? It might have started already but they just didn’t know.
They had set off from Denpasar in the morning but were less than halfway when the rain fell. They took shelter in the porch of a shop selling woven baskets in every size from tiny to bath-shaped. The owner of the shop brought them tea in small cups and sat down next to them and they made idle chat while they waited out the rain. Opposite, there was a terraced rice field rising up in swooping green curves, deep green now it was drenched, now the soil and the plants were sucking in the deluge — the earth seemed animate when the rain fell this heavily, as if it was breathing in the water: you could imagine the field’s gentle rise and fall, as if the whole island was a sleeping giant.
The rain was solid for more than two hours. After a while, he leant against a palm tree at the edge of the step and slept, the comforting patter of water around him lulling him, the low voices of Wayan and the shopkeeper nearby.
Eventually, the rain stopped; the sun came out. Wayan smiled at him as he wiped down the motorbike — they had pulled it under the porch of palm leaves but water had dripped through onto the seat. ‘You sleep a long time, boss. You tired.’
Harper grimaced back. He felt not so much tired as calm; a job to be done, the means to do it.
They were around half an hour from their destination, passing through another small village, when Harper leaned forward and tapped Wayan on the shoulder. Wayan braked, killed the engine so that conversation was possible. ‘Let’s get something to eat here,’ Harper said. He didn’t want to spend time looking around for supplies when they got to their destination — such a process would only advertise their presence before they had a chance to speak to Komang and if the farmer was in as much danger as Abang thought then that might not be a good idea. They dismounted from the bike and Harper gave Wayan some rupiah, telling him to be as quick as he could without raising suspicion. He withdrew to a tree trunk at the far end of the street that was close to the undergrowth, somewhat back from the passing trade. This time, he didn’t want to be sitting on a shop step right by the bike, where any villager would be bound to stop for a chat.
He could see the motorbike from where he was sitting and, beyond it, the small row of shops into which Wayan had disappeared. He heard a shout from the other end of the street and turned to see three men, two of them arguing with the third. He glanced back towards the shops and noticed that an elderly couple and two other women had come out onto their steps at the sound of the man’s shout. Then the man who was being confronted stopped and leaned in towards the two others. All at once, the three suddenly had their heads together in conference.
Harper looked round. The four people who had come out to watch the argument had disappeared: the street was now empty but for a scabby grey dog who was moving to and fro across it, nose to the ground.