“Of course not.”
“You are the supervisor of the trading post.”
“Ah. And you would like to speak to the owner?”
Both Tan and Bouman looked up the coast, where a mere two hundred feet away there was another house, much like Bouman’s, only this one was still and dark. “Peter Versteegh is on a hunt,” Bouman said.
“When did he leave?”
“Five years ago.”
“When do you expect him back?”
“I don’t,” said Bouman. “He was foolishly hunting with a stout businessman from Marseille, someone he knew from the trade. They were hunting orangutan. I suspect the Batak got them, that Versteegh’s bony head is gracing a chieftain’s mantel as is that Frenchman’s. He had a very plump head and impressive mustaches. Even I could see the value in collecting a head like that. .”
“Father!”
“Ah. She speaks. I’m sorry to offend.” Bouman laughed. “Go get some sweets for our guest. I’m sure we have something.”
Bouman waved Katrina off. She reluctantly pushed away from the table and the chair legs ground loudly across the floor. Bouman saw her look at Tan with complete frustration and Tan smiled back.
“The Frenchman,” whispered Bouman as Katrina left, “had little appreciation for life. He shot an ape and brought it in. It was a female, lactating. He’d lost the infant and didn’t seem to care. I went out looking for the baby. I went out for hours, all night, with a lantern. Call me sentimental, but I know what it’s like when a child loses the mother.”
“Do you really think the Batak killed them?”
“You know better than I do their beliefs, that the ancestors come back as animals — elephant, tiger, and orangutan. Even death is not permanent. I saw little value to the lives of Versteegh and this Frenchman. His name, I remember, was Guillotte. Yes. And they are dead.”
“But you say they are still hunting?”
“I wrote to Guillotte’s family saying that I doubted he would return. And as for Versteegh, his native wife is still living in the house. Why would I write to his cousins in Holland? They would come and sell this and where would I go? And why should they have this place? You cannot put the value of our little house, our compound, and small business into guilders. Besides, is it not a romantic thought that the Dutchman and Frenchman are wandering through the heart of Sumatra chasing an elusive ape who stays always two steps ahead?”
“A pretty myth,” said Tan. “You are romantic, from another time. You forget that it is 1922, that the ways of the ancestors, yours and mine, have long been buried with them. I don’t mourn that. Change is good.”
“Change?” said Bouman sadly. Katrina appeared in the doorway with a plate. She had picked more blossoms and arranged these in with the rice cakes and wafers. “If I could make this evening last indefinitely, I would do it.”
The prahu returned six days later. Bouman had convinced Tan that he had no weapons for sale. Bouman had a half-dozen rifles and countless boxes of cartridges, but Tan was unwilling to name his enemy and rampaging bull elephants were no longer the problem they’d been twenty years earlier. Bouman decided to give the boy a good deal on some bolts of cotton. He’d thrown in a few pairs of embroidered slippers for the boy’s relatives, offered gin and tobacco, which had not been of interest, and an immense cooking pot (for boiling missionaries, Bouman had joked), which Tan had thought would be useful. Bouman was just coming out of the warehouse when he saw Tan running down the steps of the house. A figure appeared in the doorway immediately afterward, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Tan stopped and turned, then he ran back up the stairs and embraced her. In his shock, Bouman wanted to believe that the woman was Aya, who, gnarled as she was, could offer occasional sexual gratification. But no. It was Katrina and a cold chill slowly took over Bouman’s heart.
When Tan entered the warehouse Bouman was sitting at his desk. There was a box of ammunition by his feet. A dozen rifles leaned against the wall. Bouman sat at his desk, his face covered by his hands. Tan could see the man trembling and at first thought that he had been moved to tears, but when Bouman lifted his head, his eyes were clearly fired with anger. Bouman stood up.
“You were a guest in my house and you have deceived me.”
“My intentions are honorable.”
“Who is the judge of that?”
Tan was silent. “You know my family. .”
“That they are rich, powerful — yes, I know that. And I tell you that you will never have my daughter. Take the guns. Leave. Never come back.”
“She wants to go with me.”
“What does she know of what she wants? She is seventeen years old.” Bouman picked up a rifle and swung it gracefully to point into Tan’s face. “I am offering you the gun. You take the muzzle or the trigger.”
Tan was silent.
“I will kill you. I have killed dozens of men in my time and not once has my sleep been disturbed.”
Bouman watched the prahu round the promontory and thought with a cautious satisfaction that he would never see the boy again. No doubt, Katrina was in tears and would not speak to him for months. His household was in disorder. Aya would be glaring at him from behind the posts of the house, going about her daily tasks with more than the usual menace; she would be spitting in his food. Bouman shook his head. A stiff breeze stirred the water and the palms dipped and swayed. More than the usual monkey chatter was going on overhead. The birds dipped and swooped with unusual urgency. On the ground Bouman saw the ants coursing fervently in streams. There was the burn of electricity in the air. At the edge of the horizon a beam of lightning flared, leaving the margin a menacing dark purple. Bouman sighed deeply, baring his teeth at the world. He knew he was in for trouble.
About many things, Bouman had been wrong. He was wrong to think that his father-love could satisfy his daughter and wrong to think that he would never see Tan again. By the time the young man returned he was no longer a young man and Bouman had seen so many things — more than twenty years had passed — that he questioned every reality. The very nose in the center of his face was up for debate, as far as he was concerned. But as he squatted and smoked in the burned-out square of earth that had once been his house, he somehow knew that the prahu dipping over the edge of the water, rising up like the sun, bore his old acquaintance, Tan. And Bouman thought, in an uncharacteristically mystical way, that his new clairvoyance meant that his life was drawing to a close.
Tan had lost the colonial whites and was now wearing the baggy batik trousers of his people, those and a European shirt of coarse cotton, with a belt of ammunition slung from shoulder to hip. There was silver in with the black, but he looked much the same. Bouman got up and threw his cigarette. He cocked his head to one side. Tan hesitated, stopping twenty feet from where Bouman stood. To his surprise, Bouman laughed.
“I told you not to come back or I would kill you, but it is you who are armed and I have nothing but these two imperfect hands.” Bouman splayed his eight fingers up for inspection.
“How can it be,” said Tan, “that you have not changed?”
“A mystery,” Bouman shrugged. “I am wiser now and so I will ask you to dinner, to have some tea with me, because I now know what an enemy looks like.” Bouman laughed again.
“I thought you were dead,” said Tan. “I myself looked in all the nine camps of Sumatra. I had my people check every Javanese camp, every Dutchman.”
“Did you not think I might be lost under a different name? And the islands are full of Dutchmen.”
“Eight-fingered Dutchmen?” said Tan.
“So thinking I was dead, you came back for my daughter, but it is she who is dead.”