"And the other effects of the drug?" Ina asked. "Do you feel different!"
That was an interesting question. I answered honestly: "I don't know. Not yet, anyway."
"Well. For the moment it hardly matters. As I say, the trick will be to get you out of the highlands and back to Padang. Fortunately, I think we can arrange it."
"When do we leave?"
"Three or four days' time," Ina said. "In the meantime, rest."
* * * * *
Ina was busy most of those three days. I saw very little of her. The days were hot and sunny but breezes came through the wooden house in soothing gusts, and I spent the time cautiously exercising, writing, and reading—there were English-language paperbacks on a rattan shelf in the bedroom, including a popular biography of Jason Lawton called A Life for the Stars. (I looked for my name in the index and found it: Dupree, Tyler, with five page references. But I couldn't bring myself to read the book. The swaybacked Somerset Maugham novels were more tempting.)
En dropped in periodically to see that I was all right and to bring me sandwiches and bottled water from his uncle's warung. He adopted a proprietary manner and made a point of asking after my health. He said he was "proud to be making rantau" with me. "You too, En? You're going to the new world?" He nodded emphatically. "Also my father, my mother, my uncle," and a dozen other close relations for whom he used Minang kinship words. His eyes glittered. "Perhaps you'll teach me medicine there."
Perhaps I would have to. Crossing the Arch would pretty much rule out a traditional education. This might not be the best thing for En, and I wondered if his parents had given their decision enough thought.
But that wasn't my business, and En was clearly excited about the journey. He could hardly control his voice when he talked about it. And I relished the eager, open expression on his face. En belonged to a generation capable of regarding the future with more hope than dread. No one in my generation of grotesques had ever smiled into the future like that. It was a good, deeply human look, and it made me happy, and it made me sad.
Ina came back the night before we were due to leave, bearing dinner and a plan.
"My cousin's son's brother-in-law," she said, "drives ambulances for the hospital in Batusangkar. He can borrow an ambulance from the motor pool to take you into Padang. There will be at least two cars ahead of us with wireless phones, so if there's a roadblock we ought to have some warning."
"I don't need an ambulance," I said.
"The ambulance is a disguise. You in the back, hidden, and me in my medical regalia, and a villager—En is pleading for the role—to play sick. Do you understand? If the police look in the back of the ambulance they see me and an ill child, and I say 'CVWS,' and the police become reluctant to search more thoroughly. Thus the ridiculously tall American doctor is smuggled past them."
"You think this will work?"
"I think it has a very good chance of working."
"But if you're caught with me—"
"As bad as things may be, the police can't arrest me unless I've committed a crime. Transporting a Westerner isn't a crime."
"Transporting a criminal might be."
"Are you criminal, Pak Tyler?"
"Depends how you interpret certain acts of Congress."
"I choose not to interpret them at all. Please don't worry about it. Did I tell you the trip has been delayed a day?"
"Why?"
"A wedding. Of course, weddings aren't what they once were. Wedding adat has eroded terribly since the Spin. As has everything else since money and roads and fast-food restaurants came to the highlands. I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive. Young people are in a hurry nowadays. At least we don't have Las Vegas-style ten-minute weddings... Do those still exist in your country?"
I admitted they did.
"Well, we're headed in that direction as well. Minang hiking, tinggal kerbau. At least there will still be a palaminan and lots of sticky rice and saluang music. Are you well enough to attend? At least for the music?"
"I would be privileged."
"So tomorrow night we sing, and on the following morning we defy the American Congress. The wedding works in our favor, too. Lots of traveling, lots of vehicles on the road; we won't seem conspicuous, our little rantau group heading for Teluk Bayur."
I slept late and woke feeling better than I had for a long time, stronger and subtly more alert. The morning breeze was warm and rich with the smell of cooking and the complaints of roosters and hammering from the center of town where an outdoor stage was under construction. I spent the day at the window, reading and watching the public procession of the bride and groom on their way to the groom's house. Ina's village was small enough that the wedding had brought it to a standstill. Even the local warungs had closed for the day, though the franchise businesses on the main road were staffed for tourists. By late afternoon the smell of curried chicken and coconut milk was thick in the air, and En dropped by very briefly with a prepared meal for me.
Ibu Ina, in an embroidered gown and silk head scarf, came to the door a little after nightfall and said, "It's done, the wedding proper, I mean. Nothing left but the singing and dancing. Do you still want to come along, Tyler?"
I dressed in the best clothes I had with me, white cotton pants and a white shirt. I was nervous about being seen in public, but Ina assured me there were no strangers in the wedding party and I would be welcome in the crowd.
Despite Ina's reassurances I felt painfully conspicuous as we walked together down the street toward the stage and the music, less because of my height than because I had been indoors too long. Leaving the house was like stepping out of water into air; suddenly I was surrounded by nothing substantial at all. Ina distracted me by talking about the newly-weds. The groom, a pharmacist's apprentice from Belubus, was a young cousin of hers. (Ina called any relative more distant than brother, sister, aunt or uncle her "cousin"; the Minang kinship system used precise words for which there were no simple English equivalents.) The bride was a local girl with a slightly disreputable past. Both would be going rantau after the wedding. The new world beckoned.
The music began at dusk and would continue, she said, until morning. It was broadcast village-wide through enormous pole-mounted loudspeakers, but the source was the raised stage and the group seated on reed mats there, two male instrumentalists and two female singers. The songs, Ina explained, were about love, marriage, disappointment, fate, sex. Lots of sex, couched in metaphors Chaucer would have appreciated. We sat on a bench at the periphery of the celebration. I drew more than a few long looks from people in the crowd, at least some of whom must have heard the story of the burned clinic and the fugitive American, but Ina was careful not to let me become a distraction. She kept me to herself, though she smiled indulgently at the young people mobbing the stage. "I'm past the age of lament. My field no longer requires ploughing, as the song has it. All this fuss. My goodness."
Bride and groom in their embroidered finery sat on mock thrones near the platform. I thought the groom, with his whip-thin mustache, looked shifty; but no, Ina insisted, it was the girl, so innocent in her blue and white brocaded costume, who was the one to watch. We drank coconut milk. We smiled. Coming on toward midnight many of the village's women drifted away, leaving a crowd of men, young men mobbing the stage, laughing; older men sitting at tables gambling studiously at cards, faces blank as aged leather.
I had shown Ina the pages I had written about my first meeting with Wun Ngo Wen. "But the account can't be entirely accurate," she said during a lull in the music. "You sounded much too calm."