The Secrets of a Fire King (28 page)

The sun was so hot that day that it consumed the sky and filled the air with a harsh metallic glare that had driven all the animals—chickens, cats, and mangy dogs—underneath the houses for shade. Nonetheless Muda ran the entire way back to the river, not even pausing at the fork that led to the rubber plantation.

When he reached the river he saw that Norliza and her children were still there, crouching by a shallow hole they had dug. The knuckle of gold was resting on a flat gray rock. When Norliza saw him she jumped up at once, wiping her damp hands against her sarong. She snatched the gold from the rock and ran to him.

“Muda, you fool,” Norliza said, planting herself before him.

He had run so hard that he could not answer and stood before her gasping for breath. “How could you speak to me so in front of the women from the village when I have made the greatest discovery in the memory of any person alive? Muda, you are my brother, but you are also a fool.”

To her surprise Muda smiled at her, then broke out in laughter.

No one had spoken to him this way since he had become a man.

“Norliza,” he said, when he could speak. “Take care of what you say. I am not one of your children, and I am no fool. You might as well say so of a crocodile, sitting still and thoughtless as a log in the river.”

“This is gold,” she insisted, but in a softer voice. Strands of hair had fallen against her face and she brushed at them with the back of her hand.

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Muda reached out and once again held the nugget in his hand. He could not get enough of the soft feel of it on his skin, and worked it between his fi ngers.

“Yes,” he said. “It is gold. Now show me exactly where you found it before all the women in this village return, with their husbands and their neighbors, to dig.”

Once Norliza understood, she worked as Muda had known she would—quietly, quickly, and with the fi erce determination of a woman who had always been poor. Together they drove stakes into the ground, marking off a plot that stretched along the river and reached to the edge of the jungle. When the stakes were secure he tied ropes between them. Then he climbed inside the area they had claimed and began to dig. Norliza sent the two oldest boys into the shallows of the river where they washed the stones she and Muda took from the red earth. The younger children ferried dirt and rocks back and forth in the cooking pot.

The older boys sorted the stones into two piles for their mother to examine: those that shone, and those that did not.

On the long run from his house Muda had lost his straw hat, and now his hair was like lit kindling against his neck and ears.

From time to time he went to the river and splashed water over his head, but he did not stop to rest. In the rubber trees he had learned how to work efficiently in the midday heat. There he knew how much work had to be finished and how long it would take, and so he rested often in the hot afternoons, sometimes curling up in the old caretaker’s huts, other times leaning against the slender trunk of a tree. Here the heat was greater, the work harder, but there was also no limit to what he might fi nd. He moved surely and swiftly and without a single break in the movements of his hands.

Muda was a poor man. As a child this had never bothered him. Everyone in the village was poor, after all, and in the next village it was just the same. He had not thought of it as a lack.

There was always fruit to eat, the river was full of fish, and water buffalos were killed for wedding feasts. As a child, running in the murky water of the rice fields, or shimmying up the young coconut trees to shake down the fruit, he had been happy.

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At sixteen all of this changed. He was offered a job in the rubber plantation. That first day, he had walked the six miles from his house to arrive, scared and shy, before daybreak. In those early months he worked as he was working now in the earth, all his attention focused on the rows of graceful rubber trees, on the thin streams of white that flowed into the cups he placed. Due to his industry he won a bonus that he used to buy a motorbike, the first in his village. He was the envy of the men, and he knew he could have any of the young girls, swaying in their tight sarongs as he sped past them, for his wife.

It was then that he began to notice the new cars and expensive suits of the plantation owners. They came once a month to inspect their investments, and Muda watched them with awe, their shiny leather shoes, the odd flap of their ties, as they disappeared beneath the trees. When they were out of sight he crept up to one of the cars, a gold Mercedes, and ran his fi ngers across the smooth hot metal. Inside the seats were upholstered in a leather as soft as a monkey’s palm. He thought of his own small motorbike, how it sent sparks through the girls and put envy in the eyes of his former schoolmates, and tried to imagine how it would feel to own this gleaming car. Then the men were coming back; he moved silently into the trees and watched them drive away, the golden car disappearing in a cloud of fine red dust.

Later, deep in the forest, making the thin cuts in the bark, his fingertips still held the various textures of the car. He worked at the rubber harder than ever, determined that one day such a car would be his.

The next year he married. Khamina was not the prettiest girl in the village, but she was famous for her pandanus weaving, for deft fingers that could shape the fragrant leaves. She made a mat for his bike to rest on, and when they were married she covered the whole of their little house with woven mats. At night they lay on these. He was surrounded by the smell of cut grass, by the warm fleshy scent that rose like clear smoke from Khamina. In that year his plans for the rubber trees diminished. He thought: Next week I will get to the plantation early, I will tap another dozen trees, I will earn another bonus, and another, and some
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day I will be rich. But he did not do that, preferring to linger near the smooth tempting body of his new wife, and within a year the fi rst baby came. He was working just as hard but suddenly there was less money, not more, and as his other children came he was working more and more hours just to earn enough to feed them. Now, as he dug, he did not think of the endless rows of rubber trees. He did not regret the white sap falling silently, spilling over in the cups and wasting on the earth. What he remembered was the buttery car of the plantation boss, trimmed with brilliant gold.

In the late afternoon the other villagers began to arrive. When they saw what Muda and Norliza had done, excitement spread among them like a swift river wind. Muda heard their sighs, their gasps and exclamations, he heard the stakes driven into land, the sound of digging and excited voices. But he did not look up, and he did not change his pace.

He did not look up until a shadow fell across his back like the brush of a cool hand. It was Khamina standing over him. She had been a delicate girl, lithe and nimble. Now her sarong found no indentation at the waist and the fabric of her blouse pulled tightly against her breasts and arms. Even the skin on her face was drawn tightly over her cheekbones. Her lips were thin and trembled with anger.

“Muda,” she called out sternly. All the heads turned at once to look at her. They were familiar faces, each one known to her for as many years as she had lived on earth, but she ignored them and looked directly at her husband. “Muda,” she said. “What has possessed you?”

“Khamina,” he said, standing up. “This is a great day in the village, Khamina. We have discovered gold.”

“Gold?” she repeated. Behind him Norliza came up with the nugget displayed in her palm.

“It is true, Khamina. Gold.”

“One piece,” she scoffed.

“There must be more,” Muda said. “To find only one nugget would be like finding only a single leaf on a tree.” For a moment it seemed she would be pacified by these words
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and by the bright irregular lump in Norliza’s dirty palm. Then her eyes, following the trenches Muda had been digging, fell upon her cooking pot. With a cry she reached down and swept it up, shaking out the red dust and rocks he had carefully assembled.

“I have one cooking pot,” she said. “It is not for carrying dirt.

And I have one husband, whose job is in the rubber trees. What are you doing here, Muda? Abdullah has been to the house twice looking for you. Your trees have spread their sap all over the ground. Muda, I did not marry a ditchdigger.” She turned then toward home, holding the dirty pot out to her side. She walked quickly and Muda knew that she was hurrying because the dusk was coming. Khamina was religious, but she also believed in spirits, and she did not want to be alone on the road at the hour when they came out.

Khamina was not alone in her fears, and before the sun set many people went home. Muda watched them leave, wondering which among them would seek his job in the rubber trees. Still, despite Khamina’s words he did not leave. Like others, he lit torches along the riverbank and kept digging long past the time he could see clearly. Finally Norliza put her hand on his shoulder and told him to stop. She handed him some rice she had brought from home. He rinsed his hands in the river and began to eat, sucking the sticky grains off his fingers. He had missed his lunch, and in the cool night air from the river he was suddenly very hungry.

“What will you do?” Norliza asked finally. Only a few people were left, quietly digging. “Will you come back tomorrow?” Muda shaped some pebbles into a small hill. Then he dug his hands into the center of it and let the smooth stones rain across the ground. As they fell an idea came to him.

“I will spend tonight at the mosque praying about this matter.”

She nodded. It had been their father’s habit to sleep in the mosque when faced with a severe problem, waiting for guidance.

They sat quietly for several minutes. Muda continued sifting through the stones. He liked their smooth feel, the warmth they still retained from the heat of the day. It was Norliza who no-Gold

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ticed that one stone caught the moonlight in a different way, and Muda who picked it up and rinsed it in the river. It was another nugget, much smaller than Norliza’s piece. But it was gold, all the same.

“Your fate,” she said, wonder in her voice.

“Yes,” Muda said. He felt the wonder too.

Khamina could not answer him when he handed her the gold and the story of the sign he had received, but she was not happy. She closed her lips and refused to make him food to take to the riverside, and after a few days he realized that she had sent the children to her mother’s house and had taken over his job in the rubber trees. This shamed him. However, his days were full of hard work and the excitement that had possessed him on the first day did not die. Even when a day passed, or sometimes two or three days, in which no gold was found, Muda maintained his hope. Some people gave up; others began to grumble and speak of quitting. The mood of the group would grow dark and futile, and the pace of the work would slow. Then, suddenly, there would come a shout. No find was as big as the first one Norliza had made, but each one was enough to revive the spirits of the gold diggers. For every person that quit, two others came to dig, and soon the area was a swamp of mud and deep holes that fi lled with water when they were left overnight.

Muda dug. Even at night he dreamed that he was digging, and in his dreams his shovel touched vast boulders of gold, or caches of gold nuggets that he lifted up and let spill from his fi ngers. Once, in his dream, he unearthed a big car made purely of gold, and another time it was hermit crabs who came running to him, discarding their stolen shells, their soft bodies and scuttling legs all, miraculously, made from gold. He often woke from these dreams with a start, into the deep night, the soft breathing of his wife and children all around him. At these times he looked at Khamina’s face, soft with sleep. She would no longer speak to him, and put his evening rice down with a tired thump. Even the children avoided him now; when he came in, late and muddy, they retreated to the edges of the room, staring, as if he were a river spirit that had come to carry them off. Once awake, Muda
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often could not return to sleep. Instead, he went to the river where he worked the rest of the night in the dark, as if by blurring the state between waking and dreaming he could bring the plenty of his dreams into the vivid light of day.

Yet he found no more gold. Many others had success; even Norliza had a small bag around her waist, heavy with nuggets she had sifted from the mud and water. It seemed to be a gift in her hands, that they knew where to seek, felt the shine that Muda could only see. Muda worked hard, sometimes digging far into the night, until the hole he had made reached up above his shoulders. Because Khamina had taken over his job, he worked with a great and ongoing guilt. Some nights he was afraid that if he went home he would not have the courage to return to the gold fields the next day. On those nights he went instead to the mosque.

There, lying on the cool stone floor, he held his single piece of gold in his palm and prayed. For if this was truly a message from his god, why now was he being ignored, while all around him others profi ted?

One day the rains began, first as a light mist and then harder, so that a small pool formed in the bottom of his newest hole, and mud ran down his arms with each shovel he lifted from the earth.

Late that afternoon, as Muda squatted on his heels by the side of the river, soaking wet and empty-handed, he thought that Khamina was right. He should give it up, this foolishness. He could not continue to live on hope. The night before he had been forced to ask for a loan of rice from one of his friends. Walking home, the rice had been an enormous weight in his hands. He remembered the joy of his wedding, and how that joy had dwindled into something much smaller, smaller with each child and the responsibility until it no longer buoyed him up, but hung from him like a weight.