The Borrowed Lives

Chapter One: The Last Night of the Giling

By the third hour before dawn, Ratri could taste the cane smoke in her own voice.

It had been in the air for eight months — the sweet, burnt, sticky breath of the Wanasari mill, rolling down the valley whenever the wind shifted off Sumbing's shoulder. It got into the rice, into the drinking water, into the wash hung out on the bamboo lines. Tonight it was in her throat, and she sang through it anyway, the way a person walks through mud, lifting each note a little higher than it wanted to go.

She sat at the edge of the gamelan, on a mat laid over the packed earth of the estate's drying yard, with the great screen glowing white at her left shoulder. Four hundred people had come and most of them were still awake. The cutters had been paid that afternoon, the last of the harvest money, and the company had bought them a shadow play to keep them from carrying that money down to the gambling sheds at Karangputih. Everyone understood this. Nobody minded. A whole night of wayang for nothing was a whole night of wayang.

In front of the screen sat the women and children and the old men with their tobacco, watching the shadows. Behind it, where Ratri sat, the puppets were not shadows at all. They were painted leather, gold and crimson and peacock blue, and old Ki Wignyo held them up one at a time into the light of the blencong lamp, and in his hands they breathed.

He was sixty-four years old and he had been blind for six of those years, and he had not missed the screen once.

"Sing it lower," he had told her before they started, without turning his head. "They're tired. Come under them, not over them."

So she had come under them. She sang the lament of the queen in the forest, the one that comes near the end when the night has gone thin, and the rebab player leaned into her line, and out beyond the lamps eight hundred cane cutters and their families sat with the grass smell of morning already rising off the ground.

Ratri was nineteen. She had been singing the woman's part for Ki Wignyo's troupe since she was fourteen, which in the district was a scandal for about a year and then simply a fact. The pesindhen at Wanasari, people said. The one with the voice like cold water. She had heard herself described that way by a stranger in the Karangputih market and had gone home and not slept.

From her mat she could see everything a person was not supposed to see: the wooden chest at Ki Wignyo's left hand, the banana trunk stuck full of puppets like a garden of standing knives, the old man's bare feet, one of them gripping the little wooden knocker that he beat against the chest to cue the drums. His hands moved among the puppets without hesitation. His fingers read the hide the way other men read a page. He could find the clown from the king in a rack of fifty by the shape of a nose.

He had taught her the hands, too, in secret, on nights when the troupe slept. He had never said why. She had never asked, because to ask would be to make him say the obvious thing out loud: that a woman does not sit behind the screen, not in this district, not ever, and that teaching her was a game two lonely people played in the dark.

Her brother Bayu was asleep on the mat behind the gong rack, wrapped in a sarong although the night was warm. He had come because he always came. He was sixteen and had not been well since the wet season, and Ratri had learned to tell the depth of his sleep by the sound of his breathing in the gaps between gongs. Tonight the sound was wrong, a wet catching, like someone stirring gruel very slowly. She kept singing. There was nothing else to be done with a sound like that at four in the morning.

Darmi, who led the gamelan, caught her eye across the drums and tipped her chin toward Bayu: I hear it too. Darmi was forty, wide-shouldered, with the blunt hands of a woman who had been beating bronze since she was nine. She had been with Ki Wignyo longer than anyone. When the old man's sight had gone, it was Darmi who had held the troupe together for the two seasons it took him to learn to work blind.

The story on the screen was the war of the cousins, the one everybody knew, the one nobody ever got tired of. Ki Wignyo had taken it slowly all night, the way he liked, with long stretches of talk and a clown scene that had gone on for an hour and a half and left men wiping their eyes. Now the armies were forming in the dark before the battle, and by rights he had perhaps forty minutes left, and then the sun would come up and the drying yard would smell of coffee and everyone would go home.

Instead he stopped.

It was not a pause. Ratri knew his pauses; she knew the weight of every one of them. This was a hole in the night. The rebab died away uncertainly. Darmi's hand hovered over the drum. Out beyond the screen somebody laughed, thinking it was a joke coming.

Ki Wignyo's hands went to the chest at his side.

Ratri watched him lift the lid. He did not reach into the rack in the banana trunk, where the night's puppets stood ready. He reached down into the chest itself, among the ones that had not been taken out, and when his hand came up it was holding a figure she had never seen in her life.

It was small. It was ugly. It had none of the gold leaf and none of the fine chiselling that made the troupe's puppets worth more than the cart that carried them. The hide was dark with age and rough at the edges, as though whoever cut it had been in a great hurry, and the profile was a crude hooked thing, more beak than nose. The handle was not the usual polished horn with its curve like a bow. It was a straight splinter of buffalo horn, and there were marks scratched into it.

Ratri, who could read a little, was six feet away, and she saw that the marks were letters.

Ki Wignyo held the puppet up into the blencong light. On the other side of the cloth, four hundred people saw a shadow they did not recognise step out of nowhere, flat and lopsided, and walk once from left to right across the screen, slowly, the way an old man walks through his own house in the dark.

Then Ki Wignyo said one word, in his ordinary voice, not the voice of any character:

"Wiryo."

He laid the puppet down flat inside the chest and shut the lid, and his foot found the knocker and struck four sharp beats, the cue for the battle, and Darmi's hand came down on the drum out of pure habit, and the gamelan crashed into the loudest music of the night as if nothing at all had happened.

Ratri had a cue in nine bars. She sang it. Her mouth did the work while the rest of her sat very still.

The sky greyed. The play ended. The old men in front stretched and called out their compliments, and women started folding mats, and the estate's foremen went along the lines telling the cutters to be at the field office by seven. Ki Wignyo sat where he was while the musicians packed the bronze, with his hands loose in his lap, and let the boys lift the chest into the cart without touching it himself.

Ratri knelt in front of him. His face was turned toward her — he had always been able to find a person by their breathing — and the lamp was still burning behind him, throwing his shadow over her.

"Bapa," she said. "What was that puppet?"

"Which puppet?"

"The one at the end. The one with the writing on it."

His hands closed. That was all. She had lived with him for eight years and she saw his hands close, and it told her more than anything he could have said.

"I was tired," he said. "An old man's mistake."

"You said a name."

"Did I?"

"You said Wiryo. The lurah of Karangputih is called Wiryo."

"There are forty men in this valley called Wiryo." He put out a hand, found her wrist, and gripped it hard enough to hurt. His palm was dry as paper and shaking. "Ratri. Don't say that name today. Not to anyone. Not once."

"Why?"

He let go of her. The sun came up over the mill's chimney, and the first whistle of the morning shift tore across the valley, and the old man turned his blind face toward the sound as if he were trying to see how far it carried.

"Because I have made a mistake," he said, "and the size of it is going to be in the market by noon."

Ratri went to wake her brother. Bayu sat up with the print of the mat on his cheek and coughed, and when he took the cloth away from his mouth there was a single bright thread on it, red as a betel stain, and he folded the cloth quickly so that she would not see.

She had already seen.

Behind them the troupe's cart creaked away with the chest in it, and the mill began to eat the last of the cane, and the day started the way every day in that valley started, with smoke.