for Amarzan Loebis
Sago palm leaves don’t stay perpetually hidden; every now and then the new leaves, arranged in pairs, male and female, unfurl in an instant, overnight. In the morning, they are there, like magic.
The people of Buru lived with this miracle for centuries.
They knew that on certain days, at the end of its eight-year cycle, this plant, whose Latin name is Metroxylon sagu, can produce between fifteen and twenty-five meters of starch per hectare. They knew that, just like a good wife, their trusted staple could tolerate a bit of neglect—growing anywhere, if only given a bit of sunlight. In truth, agriculture had little meaning for the people of Buru because everything was edible, wherever they went. If they lived in Ambon in the year 2000 and understood English, they would laugh at the happy meals advertised by the McDonald’s in Manise Square. They were the real fast-food pioneers, needing only to harvest what was free, fresh, and ready to eat.
But now they had a problem.
The local government had just announced that, soon, foreigners would come to their island. “Beware,” said the officials in the Namlea district office. “These people are different from the ones who came before. They will not settle along the coast but push inland to where the mountain people, the alifuru people, live. They will not respect the traditional seged that were built, with great effort, to connect the coastal region to the interior. Their plagues and their strange language will not obey the boundaries of nitopuro and noropa, native soa and newcomer soa. They will not just greedily eat up your sago, but chop down your forests and flatten your fields, your hawa and gelan lalen, and then pave over the ravaged remains with cement.
Imagine, twelve thousand of them against seven thousand of you. Make no mistake: they are coming from Java, but they are not Tasijawa like the others you have known. Twelve thousand of them will crowd around Lake Rana and Lake Date, polluting their sacred waters. Twelve thousand of them, who are not even wanted, and will not be missed, in their hometowns. Rejects. Exiles.”
But the Buru people prepared for the arrival of these strange people all the same. They waited patiently until the first wave landed on Namlea Beach, then watched them from a distance. They did the same with the second and third waves, noting how they set themselves up in Waeapo Valley without coming to introduce themselves.
Six months after the third wave had settled in, a small group of natives went into the new dwellings. They were astonished at the size of those structures, at how many foreigners—maybe fifty—were living together under one roof.
“Lucky the buildings are sturdy,” said one of the newcomers in Ambonese, pointing to the roof, the posts, the walls.
“Of course they’re sturdy,” said the soa head’s son, who was fluent in Ambonese. “They are made from our sago, our staple.” He paused, as if for effect, then continued, “Sago is like our family. It feeds us, protects us, sustains us. Can you say the same thing about the strange food you’ve brought from far away?”
The newcomer was visibly affronted. “We didn’t just take whatever we could grab! Yes, we brought eggplant, beans, and water spinach, but also the fruits we believed would bring you joy. We brought rice, to grow tips that will sparkle like jewels in the bright morning sun. Stuff that tastes like the essence of life, indeed, the future.”
“Why do you care so much about the future—saving and storing, prayers and hope?” asked the soa head’s son. “For us, life is simpler than that. We plant, we harvest, we weed, we eat, we shit, we regrow what we have returned to the earth. That’s what we know. Sago helps us do that. Sago is always there, whether we need it or not. Every day, year after year. Always.”
And that was how the people of Buru and the strange foreigners were introduced.
*
In the weeks and months that followed, the natives continued to watch how the newcomers lived, although they didn’t always understand what they were seeing.
They noticed, for example, how the newcomers were given a meagre amount of rice and salt fish per day by the other foreigners, who looked just like them but for some reason beat them black and blue. The natives didn’t know how to measure weight with grams or time with months, but after some observation they learned the names and properties of a variety of objects: something that looked like rice gone brown was bulgur, and what the newcomers called “salted fish” was more bitter than salty.
Sometimes the natives felt sorry for those pathetic outsiders, who were hopelessly ignorant, and wanted to help them. But unfortunately, maybe because they were still disoriented, the newcomers also kept trespassing—into gardens, hunting forests, fishing spots, anywhere that wasn’t theirs, anywhere they liked. So instead of helping, from time to time the natives had to snare one or two, tear their stomachs open with a knife, and throw their corpses in the river.
That fool from across the way, for example. What the hell was he thinking when he snuck into Manakati’s house in the middle of the night? Why did he tiptoe in like a thief, snatch a winnowing tray from where it was hidden away under one of the planks under the roof, and run away? Did he think there was something valuable in it?
It turned out he was merely hoping to steal leftover deer meat, having watched the Manakati family slaughter one the night before. So maybe he wasn’t that stupid after all, though he hadn’t understood that Manakati’s family would then track him, hadn’t understood they now knew he would try to steal food again, just as they knew the best way to lure hungry deer and wild boar was by burning swathes of the savannah in the days before the monsoon and then lying in wait until the animals came out of their hiding places to snuffle through the grasses that grew lush after the rainfall.
That was exactly how they waited until the fool returned the following night. They watched as he dashed out into the darkness, his chest swelling with pride, having managed to steal meat from the ruler’s house, and for the second time! They watched as he stopped in the middle of a field, barely able to contain himself, crooning at the moon in thanks before he crouched under a tree and began devouring his loot.
When he realized that he wasn’t eating a deer’s heart but the placenta of Mukabelen’s baby, who had been stillborn, it was too late; at least he wasn’t too stupid to realize he was now a dead man. When the spear pierced his chest, his spirit fled faster than his feet had run back toward the barracks. It took less time for him to die than it took him to learn that Mukabelen was the daughter of Hinolong, from the Baman soa, the highest ruler in this land after Raja Kayeli. Even Jakarta dignitaries froze before him.
The Manakati family stood over his body, their lesson imparted: If you want to live, don’t steal from people like us. Learn some local history.
Luckily for these foreigners, their ignorance didn’t always cost them their lives; sometimes, it even saved them. But someone always had to pay the price.
Mukaburung, Mukabelen’s little sister, has a story.
*
Of all the things the people of Buru now knew about the foreigners, one was most clear: they were always starving.
Mukaburung realized this the first time she saw Sentanu chop down a sago tree in her family’s neten embalit. Maybe that was why she didn’t kill him straightaway and even felt kindly toward him—that fool from across the sea, who couldn’t stop himself from stealing someone else’s sago, who didn’t realize he was sealing his own doom.
Usually Mukaburung wouldn’t waste her time or energy thinking about the fate of a man like Sentanu; she would just take her position, aim, and hurl her spear. End of story. But lately she had been feeling a little tender in her belly, like a ripening banana. So, for the next four days she let Sentanu pillage and steal from her land as she watched him from behind a tree.
One night, Mukaburung decided it was time to show herself. She liked the look of the forest at that hour, koin lalen, hands and feet; branches and leaves standing tall and gnarled, like characters who know themselves better than their scribe.
The air grew heavy. The moment Sentanu turned toward her, his face draining of color, Mukaburung felt that strange softening again in her womb.
“Don’t kill me,” Sentanu whispered, though he knew there was no use, since they didn’t speak the same language. “I beg you.”
Mukaburung pointed to the penknife folded into the waist of Sentanu’s sarong. His heart seemed to stop for a moment. The knife was cheap. Back in Java you could buy one anywhere, for twenty-five thousand rupiah at most. It was nothing compared to the weapons the natives carried and Sentanu was not at all prepared to fight for his life—not now, Allah, not while I’m still starving and I haven’t even had the chance to send a letter home to my village. But he was even less prepared to be stabbed with his own knife.
As Sentanu was thinking of what else he could say to the woman, Mukaburung leapt through the air, knocked him over, and landed heavily on his chest. Then, with her two knees pressing into his ribs she pulled the dagger from him. Sentanu looked up to a moon as pale as chalk and said his goodbye.
Waiting for death, he felt like he was watching the shapes of the world slip away from him as if from inside a speeding train. But the stabbing and tearing he was expecting didn’t come; instead he felt himself enfolded in a warm, unfamiliar wetness.
Half-conscious, he simply followed the rhythm, like a slowing heartbeat: lift, dip, lift, dip, while waiting for his last breath. He felt as if he was being rocked between life and death, as if he was floating in the ocean, far in the distance; from there, it was as if he could see the flickering lights on the terrace of his parents’ house on the beach, the drops of sweat on the nape of his mother’s neck shining as she recited her prayers.
Sentanu came from a poor family that was nevertheless well-respected as hard workers who never complained or lamented their fate. Nor did they lament when one day Father disappeared: the sea had swallowed him up like a jealous lover. They kept working hard, even though she kept sulking and withheld her catch, and all that was left for them to eat was a three-day-old fish. That rotten fish had made the hair on his neck stand up, yet he could almost smell it again now as he inhaled, thicker and more familiar with every thrust, every lift and dip, every rise and fall.
He was waiting for the pain to come. Take me now, oh God. I’m ready.
But the pain never came. Finally, after gathering the courage to open his eyes, he saw his knife lying forgotten on the ground. For a moment he couldn’t make sense of it. Then with a gasp it hit him—Mukaburung had never intended to hurt him; the woman had just wanted to move the knife from his waist so that she could take him more freely. After all, Sentanu was twice her size.
His eyes stung and then, in a swirl of tears and pleasure, he caught a whiff of something strange, a smell alien to him that seemed to rise from under the woman’s skin and bloom as soon as it touched the air—a funk that grew stronger every time Mukaburung gripped him and put his hard cock inside her. Somehow, the smell aroused Sentanu’s desire, and a moment later made him come.
*
And that was how the ritual was formed, and Sentanu and Mukaburung met almost every day to re-enact it.
First, Mukaburung would drag Sentanu to a place in the forest, one she’d usually primed beforehand, a little love nest made from a pile of branches. When she was sure they were alone she would start running around a tree, with him close on her heels, and they would go on like that with increasing abandon and jubilation, until she would stop and hug the tree, and he would enter her with full force, from behind.
There was something in the ritual that made Sentanu feel liberated, and he would find himself going back again and again to the same spot, to the same tree, to the same release such as he had never known before. And each time he would rise to the occasion, as though to escape himself, or return to the self he had lost. But it was only once Sentanu had grown used to their ritual that he started to realize: the part that he liked the best was the fact that he could come so fast without feeling in any way that he had done Mukaburung wrong. He wanted and simultaneously resisted her. He longed for their lovemaking every day, even though as time passed he became more disturbed by the woman’s face, which in certain raw moments could frighten him, and by her odor—a smell that seemed to hover just under her skin, as if it had been trapped there for a long time and could only push through to the surface at his touch. She seemed to him half human, half something else, and somehow it drove him crazy with lust.
After a few weeks, he didn’t want to see her again. What before had sparked the embers of his desire now aroused a disgust that was difficult for him to explain. He just wanted to finish inside Mukaburung. That was all.
Soon after that, he stopped seeing her and no longer went looking for sago in her family’s forest.
*
Days passed. Sentanu still did not go looking for Mukaburung even though he started to dream about her—her face when they fucked, her eyes that shone every time they touched.
One evening, when he was lying on his cot in the barracks, amidst the sweat, stink, and sour breath of the other political prisoners, he suddenly felt an extraordinary longing for Mukaburung. For her body, that was so foreign but always ready and available to him.
Meanwhile, Mukaburung almost went mad seeking Sentanu. She searched for days, in every far hollow of the forest, like a dog who had lost its master. One day she even gathered up the courage to go wait for him outside the barracks in hopes he would emerge.
If Sentanu longed for her only occasionally, she longed for him without cease.
She missed his face, especially his expression when he was taking her. She missed his smell—the aroma of wood and shrubs, dirt and tobacco. She missed how, early on, in rare moments after their tree ritual, the man would sometimes kiss and fondle her until her head was about to explode. She missed how then he would seduce and caress her, before she finally re-enveloped him in her still-damp sex.
She missed seeing his eyes close every time they shared warmth, as if he felt so satisfied, so fulfilled. She missed watching Sentanu undress so that he could more fully feel the pleasure of her, proof that he wasn’t just looking for a quick release and didn’t mind putting in a little effort. She missed looking at Sentanu’s face up close after they had made love, his face brown and foreign, like the strange fruit he had brought from Java.
She missed seeing him put tobacco in a scrap of paper, and then rolling it, just like he had rolled her body over in his hands—carefully, like it was something valuable. She missed seeing him pick up the unfinished cigarette, two fingers at the far end and the thumb at the near end, then tap the tobacco into the cylinder before rolling the paper, turning it into something that could be inhaled and exhaled. She missed seeing Sentanu sitting still after his first inhale, his gaze looking out into the distance, to who knows where, until he felt moved to look back over at her with a pleasant smile.
Mukaburung noticed that almost all those foreigners had the same ability, as if there were certain muscles on their faces that had been trained to radiate gratitude at certain moments. But Sentanu was of course different than all the other men she knew. He wasn’t like Manahonja, who liked to smack her and throw her around as if she were a dog, or a lizard—even though there were times when Sentanu avoided her gaze. Maybe that was an effect of cigarettes. They slowed people down.
Sometimes, Sentanu even seemed as if he wanted to talk. A few times, for instance, he had pointed to where he lived with the other foreigners, behind a two-meter-high iron fence guarded by a group of men in green uniforms. His eyes softened, as if he wanted to say, that place is not as bad as you imagine. It’s filled with people like me.
Mukaburung asked, in her language, “But don’t they beat you there?” hitting her own body to demonstrate.
“We can be beaten anywhere, at any time,” Sentanu replied, his two arms tracing an arc around the trees, and the mountains in the distance, embracing the air. “What does it matter?”
Mukaburung didn’t reply, but something inside her understood. She had seen how Sentanu exchanged cigarettes with those green-uniformed men. Their interactions weren’t always unfriendly. She had also seen them share rice, which Sentanu then saved in his hiding place, deep in the heart of the jungle. Even though they often berated Sentanu and his friends, and jabbed their asses with the barrels of their guns, she could see there was a kind of interdependency between them—because in fact wasn’t it Sentanu and his friends who went out hunting, who cooked, and who stored everything those green-uniformed men needed?
Yes, she understood that part, but not much else of their behavior. She would never understand their obsessions: for those strange, milky-white grains that they called rice, say, despite the fact that their humalolin was already bulging with the foods of where they came from—corn, cassava, soybeans, and who knows what other strange plants. But she understood the use of dependency. And her feelings for Sentanu needed no explanation: she wanted to be with him always.
So much so, that before Sentanu disappeared, Mukaburung had begun to chant her love every time they finished having sex. She couldn’t bear the thought of Sentanu leaving her for those fetid barracks. Sometimes she sang her feelings in the middle of the night, crooning like a wounded bird and waking the whole jungle. Later, she would use this feeling to beg her tribe for mercy for Sentanu. Because despite Sentanu’s gall in approaching her, a married woman, he had given her pleasure, and surely that was only punishable by a fine, if at all? Even though she was the daughter-in-law of Hinolong, the All Knowing and the All Powerful ruler of the soa, wasn’t she human too?
He has given me pleasure! Isn’t that something beautiful? But she didn’t know how to express this feeling in words, not even in her own language.
And especially not to her husband, Manahonja.
The problem was, Manahonja was suspicious of the changes in his wife. Why was Mukaburung’s face suddenly glowing? Why had her voice changed? A few times he thought he had heard her howls from deep in the jungle, but he couldn’t be sure.
So one night Manahonja and a few tribesmen decided to spy on Mukaburung. As soon as it all became clear, Manahonja dragged Sentanu into the village, tied him to a tree, and beat him until he was almost dead.
And Manahonja wasn’t even finished. I’ll have this bastard pay a hefty fine first, then I’ll slit his throat in front of the whole soa, he thought to himself. He hasn’t just humiliated me. He’s been stealing my sago for months. I must keep my dignity. I must not appear weak. And when I’m done with this Javanese fuckface, I’ll kill that whore and throw her in the Wai Apo River.
With that thought, he brandished his machete at Sentanu, shouting, “Whatever you have, you must give it to me.”
“I have nothing,” Sentanu murmured.
“But you had the balls to keto-keto with my wife. You have to pay me.”
“I’m sorry. Oh God, I’m so sorry.”
The words “God” and “sorry” meant nothing to Manahonja, and he would have chopped off Sentanu’s head right then if Jajitama and the foreigner who had come with him hadn’t held him back.
Jajitama was the mauweng of the soa—a highly respected traditional leader. The foreigner with him was one of the unit commanders of the Buru Rehabilitation Camp, a strapping man with a square jaw and an inscrutable face. Of late, he had been paying frequent visits to Jajitama’s house and joining the elders in their private meetings. Everyone deferred to him. Even though Manahonja didn’t trust him, or any foreign man, he had to ensure that Jajitama was on his side.
Dammit, Manahonja thought. Ever since these foreigners had come to Buru, it was as if every value and tradition he knew had been turned upside down. Wives were seeking their pleasure in the arms of strange men, and the men who guarded and beat those same strange men were giving their husbands unsolicited advice about the politics of keto-keto.
“What if I just kill him now,” he whispered to Jajitama so that the military commander couldn’t hear him. But Jajitama shook his head.
“You can’t. They didn’t conduct their affair in your house.”
“They didn’t?”
“Oh, come on. You saw it with the eyes in your own head—you and at least two dozen witnesses—that they didn’t do it in the house.”
“And so that means they didn’t do it?”
“Those are the rules. You know that.”
“But where’s the justice in that?”
“Don’t make everything so complicated. Let’s just think of an easy way, like a fine.”
“But Mukaburung is my wife! Are you telling me I won’t get the chance to defend my honor?”
“The fact hasn’t changed. They didn’t do it in the house.”
“He’ll pay with his blood! And Mukaburung, that whore!”
“Stop being so stubborn, Manahonja. It’s too risky. There are more of them than there are of us. They’ll destroy us in no time if we even so much as touch him. You should have done what Manakati did to the fool who ate his baby’s placenta. Gut him quietly in the night and toss him into the river. Now you’ll be lucky if you get paid at all and if your wife still wants to keto-keto with you.”
Jajitama was old, rumored to have lived for more than a century. He had learned that the only certainty in life was that everything—all the aromas, tastes, and textures of what seemed indispensable—would eventually vanish, as had even the memories of his wife, who had gone before him.
Jajitama knew his people. Unpaid fines were the surefire trigger of wars between soas. But when the foreigners began to descend upon them, starting with the Butonese and the Ambonese, followed by the Javanese—with their knack for diplomacy—and the Bugis—happiest in trade—he realized that there were some things in this world you could learn only from outsiders. If Manahonja could have just been patient and waited until his wife had strayed completely, like most women do, then they certainly wouldn’t have needed to bother dealing with the barrack commanders, who would take revenge if one of their own were hurt by someone from outside. But Manahonja was still young. And young people didn’t think with their brains.
In the end, the soa decided to forgive Sentanu’s debt on one condition: he would never again set foot on their land. If he broke that rule, they would fall upon him. All deals were off.
To their astonishment, the barrack commanders agreed almost immediately, no questions asked. They even swore they would watch over the degenerate as if he was their own unmarried daughter. “These guys, they are like monkeys,” they said with a boisterous laugh. “They’ll toe the line as long as you feed them. But don’t think we don’t want something in exchange. From now on, you will invite us to every tribal meeting.”
Even though Jajitama knew that many people still didn’t understand that the newcomers were political prisoners and still didn’t know what rules the newcomers had in fact already broken to be exiled to this island, he also knew that the fewer questions asked, the easier life would be.
And that was how Sentanu got his freedom and became the most famous—and most protected—foreigner on Buru Island. If he broke the rules again, not one native would dare report him, because who was prepared to die foolishly, riddled by hot lead, just for some idiot who played around with the wife of a jerk like Manahonja?
But in the end, every conflict needs a victim. And by the time Mukaburung understood that, it was too late.
*
Three days later, Manahonja beat her in front of her whole family and all their neighbors. Unlike her secret lover, she was stripped naked and bound to stakes in the town square.
The next day, she was taken to an empty house and forced to make thirty spears and carve a wooden penis two times longer than her own thigh bone. Then she was dragged out of the house, still naked, and paraded around the village seven times while carrying this creation on her shoulders. The whole time, she cursed emangin that had left her alive to suffer. She wanted to die and come back as a savage nituro so that she wouldn’t just haunt Manahonja but also chop off his penis and stuff it into his own filthy mouth. For the first time she howled and sobbed, although she didn’t know whether she was crying from grief, rage, or pain. When she was returned to the empty house, without food, without water, she thought of Manahonja who had never really shown the least care for her, let alone made love to her with the eagerness of the stranger she had so loved. She felt more alone than she had ever been—with no hope of a man or sagu to call her own.
When Mukaburung was freed from her punishment, no one would greet her, or even approach her, except for Jajitama. “Forgive me. I wish I could help you,” the old man said. “But we were not put on this earth to be happy.”
*
Meanwhile, life, as Jajitama understood it, kept going. After months of “collaborating” with the barrack commanders, he urged his tribesmen to change their relationship with sago. “As soon as the tree is tall enough, chop it down,” he advised. “You don’t have to wait until it’s twelve meters tall.”
But not everyone understood what he meant. A little group debate at the head soa’s house, one day:
“We should listen to Jajitama. His suggestions are usually in our favor. Now we don’t have to wait until the Raja gives us eight tomang to do something with what we’ve grown.”
“Yes, but that’s because our Raja is foolish.”
“Isn’t it actually us who are foolish?”
“You’re telling us our Raja is foolish?”
“And what, a Raja can’t be foolish?”
“But won’t the Raja also clearly profit if he follows Jajitama’s advice? Won’t the Raja get more tomang in a much shorter time? Why can’t he see that as a profit?”
“Do you think I can read the Raja’s mind?”
“I’ve certainly already seen the benefits. In three weeks, I chopped down three sago trees. That means twenty-five tomang, or one hundred and eighty-seven and a half kilograms. One kilo is fifty thousand rupiah, so if you multiply, that’s almost one million rupiah, in only three weeks. That’s five times what I usually get in six months!”
“Where did you suddenly learn how to count like that?”
“If we keep going like this, won’t our tomang soon be all used up?”
“You care so much about what our Raja says. I see no problem if we have to do business with those foreigners every day. The important thing is we get rich.”
“Sure, doing business with them doesn’t mean being friends with them.”
*
And when the boundaries between the inner world and the outer world had been torn down, and everything had changed and melted together—friend and enemy, native and newcomer, political prisoner and barrack commander, the ruler and the ruled—Mukaburung slipped away into the darkest night and left the soa where she had been born and had grown into a woman.
Yet even after days of walking, she still didn’t understand what rules Sentanu and the men in his barrack had broken, just as she didn’t understand what rule she had broken, that her husband could beat her in front of everyone she knew, that she could be so punished, so hated, so exiled.
She had never in her lifetime been so struck by how little difference there was between Us and Them, Native and Foreign, Sago and Rice, jostling to cement their place on this earth of mankind—forces that left no space for her. Clearly she had been cast out from this new world. Now no one would help her, or meet her in the forest, or let her ride her lust without questions, without demands, without judgement, even though they didn’t speak the same language.
Mukaburung was overcome by an extraordinary grief, more overpowering than what she felt when she was being dragged around the village naked, the soles of her feet blistering on the black asphalt. As if, before her, there was no one in this world who had ever trespassed, no one who had ever sinned.
