‘It’s the land of Dewi Sri, remember.’
She said nothing, just stared, and he stared right back: and this was the best thing of all, staring at her, watching the progress of her thoughts play out on her face. He saw, first of all, her slow understanding of his seriousness; then he saw how she questioned that understanding, wondering if she had got it right. When she decided she had, a small amount of joy came into her features, a flattered look, manifest in a slight widening of her gaze, a minute lifting of her eyebrows. Then, briefly, a shadow of doubt, not at her understanding but at her own desires: the hint of a frown as the eyebrows lowered. He saw her think to herself that there were many things he had not told her and many she had not told him, two whole lives lived that needed explaining. The cloud of these omissions misted her pleasure for a moment: her gaze lost focus. Then, finally, a kind of light, a kind of recklessness in her smile: if she was younger she would not contemplate this; if he was younger, he would not have asked. Their separate tragedies had brought them both to this: a point where they had nothing much to lose by taking a chance on someone as damaged as they were.
All he was doing was watching her face. Its motions were minute. He had no way of knowing if he had interpreted the panorama of her thoughts correctly — but still, in that moment, it felt enough.
They went to the guesthouse on Jalan Bisma together and Rita asked to speak to the owner. The three of them sat around one of the small round tables in the bar while Rita and the owner chatted in Balinese and she negotiated a long-term rental for one of the rooms — a corner room on the first floor: Balinese people didn’t like sleeping upstairs, she told him, so the first-floor rooms were slightly cheaper. They went to see the room together but while Rita checked it out, opening the wardrobe, turning on the taps in the bathroom, tightening them efficiently, Harper just stood smiling at the bed, wondering if he could persuade her to stay with him there that night. Johan would be back in Denpasar by now, at the airport. Perhaps he would take a domestic flight to Jakarta to report back to Henrikson, or, more likely, go straight back to Amsterdam via Singapore. Job done.
The young man who had shown them the room handed Rita the key and left, closing the door behind him, and Harper advanced upon her. She backed towards the bed, smiling, mock-reluctant. ‘I should make you wait another three days,’ she said, ‘wait until you’ve moved out of your old place, you know, finished with all that.’
‘Should you?’ he said, placing one hand on her chest and shoving her, neatly and gently, back onto the bed, and she grabbed the pillow and placed it over her face and he had to pull the pillow away and clear her hair from her face in order to be able to kiss her. He took her wrists and went to pin her arms above her head but she shoved him off, pushed him onto his back, rolled on top. ‘Who has the upper hand now, John Harper?’ she said.
‘You,’ he conceded, and yielded to her kiss.
In the early evening, they went out to eat and even though she refused to spend the night with him, he could not bring himself to return to the hut — he slept at the guesthouse alone. In the morning, she came by for breakfast.
The fine sun continued and they sat at a corner table in the restaurant upstairs: a view of the street rather than a valley, but fresh juice and eggs. This is going to be my life now, he thought, watching Rita as she scans a menu. Here we are, opposite each other at a table, and our primary task, our main responsibility, is to decide what sort of juice we feel like, how we want our eggs.
Rita checked her watch — she had work that morning but there was plenty of time. After she had gone, he would go back up to the hut for his last two nights. Now, he would be able to enjoy that small and finite solitude, now all that paranoia was behind him.
How ridiculous his fears seemed now. In his head, he listed all the things he realised were nonsense: the young men in the jeep as he sat drinking coffee and eating a cinnamon bun: they were just young men in a jeep, passing through town, off-duty soldiers or police cadets, perhaps. So what? The boys he thought were following him from the breakfast shack — why, exactly? Because they were sitting on a tree trunk near where he had chosen to sit down? Because they rose when he did? There had been no gathering of men in a brick-walled office or, if there had, their discussions had revolved around the appropriate size of his pay-off, how to avoid any public embarrassment for the company. And Joosten, poor Joosten — maybe it was the stuff he smoked that made him paranoid. Wrong place at the wrong time. Could happen to anybody.
The world is different now. Rita was right. He had allowed the things that had happened to him to colour his perspective far too much, sad but true. He would go back to the hut, enjoy his last couple of days there, and after that, his new life could begin.
‘Will it take you long to pack?’ Rita asked, and he spluttered into his coffee.
After they had eaten, she took out a map of the town and showed him how it was actually a series of adjoining villages and districts. She pointed at the areas on the edges that were being developed, talked him through the labyrinthine processes of leasing land locally; where they would have to register. At one point, while they were still scanning the map, heads bent towards each other, she lifted hers and looked at him and said, ‘John. .’ thoughtfully. ‘You know, I know you will think this is strange of me, but it’s an odd name for you. It is a blank name, isn’t it? There is a form of John in every language, isn’t there? John for English, Jan or Hans in German, and Dutch, would it be Jan? Or Johan, is it Johan?’
In all the time he had been John Harper, hardly anyone had called him John. He was Harper at work. Francisca had known him as Nicolaas. He shrugged. ‘Call me something else if you like. Anything you like. Just don’t expect me to call you fluffy bunny or something in return.’ It would be appropriate, after all, to shed John Harper now.
‘Mmm,’ she said, ignoring the bunny comment, ‘I will have to give that some thought. What did your grandparents call you, the grandparents in California?’
‘Nicolaas,’ he said, ‘or Nic, sometimes, that was mostly Nina. My grandfather, I don’t know, most of the time he called me son.’ And it came to him then, Poppa’s deep tones, the ease with which he spoke the word, the same slow comfortableness with which he had called Nina baby or hon. Son. For a while, he had been a son. He thought then of Abang — call me Abang, he had said, big brother, as soon as Harper had arrived on the island, after taking just one look at him. Adik, he had called him in return: little brother. Abang had only called him that a handful of times, but it was enough: someone who cared enough to choose the right word for you, like Rita’s students calling her Ibu. How important it was, to be named. Once, on the streets of Amsterdam, he had seen an elderly Indian man bending painfully to pick up a paper bag that he had dropped, and the youth of the Netherlands rushing past, none of them pausing, and he wasn’t in a hurry that day himself so (uncharacteristically, he would concede) he had stopped and said, ‘Uncle, please,’ and bent and picked up the bag and handed it to the old man, who had given him a keen look and said, simply and without emotion, ‘There should be more people like you in the world.’ It was the only time anyone had ever said anything like that to him, and just because he had named the old man uncle.
Rita was looking at him. ‘You had a father, for a while, there, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are right.’
She gave him a wide-eyed look then and made a small whooping sound. ‘A miracle! Miracles will never cease!’