The Flame Tree (13 page)

“Yes, Allah is mightier than all of us, mightier than the looters who thieved in his name with the cry of
Allahu akbar
, mightier than we faithful believers, mightier even than Tuan Guru Haji Abdullah Abubakar; and the Tuan Guru himself would be the first to tell you that,” Lieutenant Nugroho said. Nothing more was said for a few seconds, and then the police officer said, “Thank you for your time. Please contact us if you have any further information about the boy. Remember that the hands closest to the fire are in the greatest danger of being burned.”

“That is true,” the
bapak
said.

The door closed.

Udin carefully let go of Isaac. Isaac spun around and shoved. Udin went tumbling backward, his arm and side landing on top of the burlap bag Isaac had used for a toilet. He was puzzled by the substance sticking to his skin. He took a quick suspicious sniff and then rocketed to his feet. He screamed, calling Isaac all kinds of obscene names. He got Isaac by his hair and the nape of his neck and forced his face down into the burlap bag.

Isaac fought back, but Udin in his fury was too strong.

“Hey, hey, here now, stop that,” the
bapak
said, pulling Udin away from Isaac.

Isaac got to his knees, spitting and gagging and crying.

“He’s worse than a dog,” Udin panted. “Even dogs get trained not to shit in the house.”

“Where else could I go?” Isaac wailed. He said to the bapak, “Please let me go. I’m sick, I have malaria, please let me go.”

“By God,” another man growled. “Are you keeping a boy or a pig in here?”

Isaac stared at the feet in the doorway—thick horny feet in sandals, the feet of a gardener who likes working barefoot so he can feel the earth under his soles. The stout legs were encased in trousers and the broad shoulders in a batik shirt. Isaac had never seen Tanto so dressed up before. Even his peci cap was a dark blue velvet that shone in the dim light of the corridor’s single bulb. He returned Isaac’s stare with a wrinkle-nosed frown of distaste.

Isaac stood. “Hello, Mas Tanto,” he said.

“Shut up,” Tanto said tonelessly but meaning it. “Don’t speak unless it’s to answer a question.”

Udin and Tanto marched Isaac up a narrow stairway to a tiled bathroom with a cement cistern of water. A naked lightbulb dangled on a wire, shedding yellow light.

“Get him some clean clothes,” Tanto ordered Udin. “And not rags. Something halfway decent. And a towel.”

Tanto told Isaac to undress. Isaac complied reluctantly, recalling how the others had reacted to his uncircumcised penis. All Tanto said was, “You’ll have to have that taken care of if you are going to be a Muslim.”

“I don’t want to become a—”

“Shut up. Use lots of soap. You stink.”

Isaac stared at the water in the cistern. His thirst suddenly became overwhelming. The water looked clean enough, but he didn’t care if it was loaded with enough bacteria to light up a thousand petri dishes. He dunked a plastic dipper and drank greedily. Tanto said, “Stop, you’re going to blow up.”

His thirst slaked, Isaac poured water over himself. He shivered and kept shivering, not from malarial fever, but because the fever had burned through so much of his insulating fat that the water seemed to be as cold as the Arctic Ocean.

Tanto said, “What is wrong with you?”

“I have malaria. Mas Tanto, my parents, are they—”

“Shut up.”

“Are they okay?”

“
Shut up
.” It wasn’t quite a roar, but the menace was loud and certain.

Isaac shut up. He soaped his skin and his hair. He cleaned the
wound on his cheek as best he could. Udin brought back a hand towel and a Javanese high school uniform. Isaac rubbed himself dry and put on the blue shorts and the white short-sleeved shirt. The clothes were a size too big and smelled of mothballs.

Tanto blindfolded Isaac with the wet towel. “One word out of you and I will stuff another towel down your throat,” he threatened.

They led Isaac out of the house and into the back of what he guessed was a box van. An engine started, and the vehicle drove off with enough wobble and bounce that Isaac had to brace himself against the front wall of the box.

Isaac lifted the bottom of his blindfold. It was pitch-black. He crawled to the rear of the box and tried the door for formality’s sake. It was locked, as he knew it would be.

Isaac tried to trace the van’s route in his mind, but it was hopeless. The vehicle rolled along the flatlands for a while and then turned up into the hills. Isaac grew nauseous from an interminable series of swaying curves that bounced him around. The ride seemed endless. At last the vehicle stopped. The driver shut off the engine. There was the sound of a key in a lock, and then the rear door opened. The bottom of Isaac’s blindfold was still lifted and tucked into the top. Night had fully fallen. There were enough scattered lights for him to get a glimpse of field, part of it fenced. Beyond a silhouette of trees were the distinctive cupola of a small mosque and a stout three-story building, around which were more elegant rooflines of shorter buildings. The draft of air into the clammy box was cold; wherever they were was at a much higher altitude than Wonobo.

Udin jumped up into the back and attacked Isaac, his fist crunching into Isaac’s chest and belly and shoulders while he shouted at him to keep the blindfold in place. “I’ll teach you a lesson,” he said, and smacked Isaac with such a stunning blow to the face that Isaac thought his right cheekbone had cracked. He fell to the floor of the box, holding his hands over his head.

“Let him be,” Tanto said, scrambling into the box and getting between them.

Isaac cried. He wanted to be stoic and brave, but the pain and fear were too much for him to keep at bay. “What have I done to you?” he sobbed.

“Be quiet,” Tanto told him. Isaac took a deep breath and put a clamp on his sniffles. Tanto fixed the blindfold and helped him down out of the box and across the field. The ground was soft and chilly under Isaac’s bare feet. Crickets chirped. The odor of mud and cow was strong on the nippy air. A gate creaked opened and then a door, accompanied by annoyed snorts and the shuffling of hooves. Isaac’s bare feet now scraped on rough cement. Tanto pulled him to a stop and removed the blindfold. Udin held a flashlight. They were in a large shed, divided in two by a half wall of split planks. A bulky, two-wheeled cart took up most of one side. The flashlight glinted off a tin-sheeted roof and plywood walls. On the other side of the half wall were two bulls in ox stalls. They weren’t happy with Isaac’s presence. They blew air and swung their horns.

“Get in the cart,” Tanto ordered. “It will be your new home for a while.”

He put a clamp on Isaac’s left wrist. The clamp was a large U bolt with a padlocked pin attached to a heavy iron chain. It was meant to be attached to the cart to prevent anyone from making off with it. The other end of the chain was banded onto a stout coconut log stump on which the front of the cart rested.

“I’d be quiet if I were you,” Tanto said. “These Madurese racing bulls don’t like the smell of bulé.”

Udin shined the flashlight in their direction. Isaac saw red eyeballs and wicked horn tips.

“See that bucket on the ground there? That’s your toilet,” Tanto went on. “Try to keep your clothes clean; those are the last clothes you’re getting.”

Isaac was quiet. His right eye was swelling rapidly. Somebody was bound to show up to take care of the bulls. He would beg to be released or at least to have a message taken to the cops.

Tanto and Udin left without another word.

Isaac’s thirst returned. It was a convenient focal point for his thoughts, which if given free rein would have overwhelmed him, reducing him to hysteria. He did not know how long he sat in the cart before a malarial fever spiked again. He heard in his hallucinations a man chanting in Arabic. “Ar-Razzaz, Al-Fattah, Al-Alim, Al-Basit…no, no, not Al-Basit. Al-Qabiz. Al-Qabiz. Al-Qabiz before Al-Basit, Al-Qabiz and then Al-Basit, you stupid brain of mine.” Isaac opened his good eye and saw a man as squat as a toadstool holding a kerosene lantern high, studying him.

“Hello, Pak,” Isaac said as courteously as he could. “How are you tonight?”

The man said nothing. He was a hunchback. He had no neck. It looked as though his head had been placed onto a pit in his shoulders. His eyes were sunken pools rimmed by thick bone and adorned by heavy brows. He had a thin, twisted nose. He looked like a creature that a fevered imagination would produce.

Isaac asked, “My parents, are they okay?”

The hunchback did not reply. Isaac’s mind swirled away. When he next came back to consciousness, two faces drifted in the unstable vision of his good eye. One was the heavy-browed and sharp-nosed hunchback, still holding his lantern high. The other was a woman in a green jilbab headdress that emphasized the roundness of her face, which bobbed around like a balloon.

The hunchback said to her in Javanese, “He was shaking so much, the chain was clanking. Something’s wrong with him. I’ll keep an eye on him like Mas Tanto said, yes, but not to watch him die.”

The woman lifted Isaac’s chained wrist. Her fingers were cool and strong. She took his other wrist and counted his pulse. She put the palm of her hand to his neck to gauge his temperature. She bent closer to study the crow peck on his cheek and his swollen right eye.

“That Tanto,” she said. “He pretends he’s a bin Laden militant and forgets he’s a cultured Javanese. You shouldn’t even treat an animal like this. And he’s burning up. Malaria, probably.” She lowered Isaac’s wrist. “Thank you, Mas Bengkok. Let’s get him out of here. Mas Tanto gave you a key to this lock, didn’t he?”

The hunchback nodded. “But what if Imam Ali finds out we’ve moved this boy?”

The woman pondered briefly. “I’ll tell the kiai,” she said. “If the honored teacher takes an interest in this boy, which I think he will, then there is not much that group can do. Please, remove the shackle.”

The hunchback obeyed. Isaac moaned and touched his wrist, already cut from the shackle’s chafing.

The woman said, “We’ll put him in the second-floor
mushollah
in the tower. Only the first-floor bathrooms are still being used. It’s a perfect place to keep him. But we’ll have to sneak him in. The children haven’t gone to bed. If they see a bulé child,
aiyah
, they’d be worse than a pack of Balinese dogs barking at a jinn.”

Mas Bengkok put a large burlap feed bag onto a trolley with wooden wheels and told Isaac to get into the bag. The woman helped him, smiling reassuringly. She wore a matronly blouse and a full skirt that grazed the ground, both the same shade of green as her headdress. She said in the same soothing tones she would use for an injured animal, not knowing he could understand, “Don’t be frightened. We’re moving you to a more comfortable place where we can take better care of you.”

The hunchback, who still hadn’t said a word to Isaac, said to the woman, “He speaks Javanese.”

The woman’s brows rose in surprise.

“My parents,” Isaac whispered, looking up at her from the bag. “Are they okay?”

“Oh, you do speak Javanese,” the woman said. She said to the hunchback, “I’ll go ahead and get the room ready.”

“Please. My parents.”

“You must be quiet,” the woman said, not unkindly.

The hunchback pulled the bag over Isaac’s head. The gates to the shed creaked open. It seemed that the hunchback pushed the trolley over every rut and bump he could find. The air in the bag was rank with remnants of decaying hay. But a little bit more misery on top of Isaac’s fever and pains meant nothing.

The hunchback began muttering in that gravelly voice of his, “Start at Al-Mumit, and what comes after Al-Mumit is Al-Haiy, Al-Qaiyum, Al-Wajid, Al-Wahid, Al-Qadir—no, no, no, not Al-Qadir. As-Samad, As-Samad, As-Samad! Aiyah, start from the beginning again: Allah Ar-Rahman, Ar-Rahim, Al-Malik…”

A creaking of a gate, some more rough bumps, and then sounds familiar from the American Academy boarders’ dorm, of rambunctious children expending their last bit of energy just before bed. There was a thwack of a ball being kicked and then the thump of the ball as it hit the trolley. A boy shouted, “Beware the hunchback, for a jinn rides upon his shoulders.”

The hunchback shouted back, “The insult of a eunuch is praise to a real man’s ears.”

The fragrance of night blooming jasmine, the earthy mustiness of turned dirt, and the biting odor of fertilizer penetrated the sack, as did the pleasantly bitter scent of roasting coffee. A radio, or possibly a television, blared its evening news from Jakarta. The woman broadcaster talked of looming war and of ambassadors being summoned here and there to receive warnings and complaints. She mentioned military aircraft and airspace intrusions and spoke of crashed helicopters and a missing American child and the Wonobo Tragedy.

The hunchback pushed on, resuming his recital of Arabic. He got stuck. “What comes next?” he muttered. “What a dung heap of a brain I have.” He sighed and a moment later opened the top of the burlap sack. “We’re at the stairs. You take this blanket and pull it over your head, and then you hurry up those stairs. I’ll be right behind you, so no tricks.”

Isaac did as he was told. It was too dark to see the steps. His head was spinning by the time they got to the second-floor landing. He panted with ragged gasps. He was so weak, the hunchback had to hold him up. He reached around Isaac and opened the unlocked door. He half carried, half dragged Isaac down a dark, empty, echoey corridor and into a tiny room lit by a round fluorescent bulb. The round-faced woman in green helped him onto a canvas cot.

“I have something here for you to drink,” the woman said. “It is for your malaria and will help you sleep.”

She held the teacup to his lips. Her fingers were blunt and calloused. Her right forefinger was crooked from an old and poorly mended break. The brew was bitter enough that he grimaced and tried to turn away, but she forced the green liquid down him. She gave him a glass of warm boiled water to rinse his mouth.

“You’ll sleep now,” the woman said.

The
jamu
had a quick effect on Isaac’s shrunken stomach. The circuits of his brain shut off. When they came back on, it was with the sensation that time had passed, but everything was still the same, including the round-faced woman, ready with more jamu. “So, your name is Isak. That is a good name from the Book. I am
Ibu Halimah, named after a woman of a desert tribe who had the great honor of becoming the Prophet’s wet nurse when the Prophet,
salla allahu alaihi wa sallam
, was still a baby. He suckled at Halimah’s breast, along with her own child.”