The church she went to is big, but though I come here often, I am nearly always alone. I sit in the front pew, near the statues that crowd around the altar. These are faces I recognize, smooth expressions of grief and rapture I find familiar. I do not have these feelings anymore, such extremes of pain or ecstasy. My life on this cold island has a pattern, but my feelings have paled like the skins of the people here, my smiles are smiles of habit only. It is true I do not suffer. I think if I went back, saw the hibiscus and brown river of my childhood, pain would flower in me to match the colors I could touch. Even here, in this place that is a shadow of my other life, the memories stir. My brother had dark eyes, and the skin beneath his fingernails was the rosy pink of coral. My mother smelled like jasmine, she wove bright waxy orchids in her hair. When she sang to me there was bougainvillea outside the window, fuchsia leaves like flames. There was green all around us, deep and rich, and when the rains fell they ran like juice from the sky. Even Nangka, with her city voice, knew the power of red on the lips, of deep blue silk that fell around her calves.
This is what I think of at that church. I see the statues, and I am reminded, faintly, of what to feel. I close my eyes and see first my brother, pulled from the river on that day he did not drown. He is pale beneath his skin, like these statues, but he is alive, and that night my mother wears a red dress to church, she tosses flowers into the baptismal fountain to celebrate his life. I go on like this, remembering, feeling a surge of life and color. But then there are the other things, which also come. My mother with a fever that sent water streaming from her skin, my brother turning his head to wipe the tears of wind from his eyes. Or Nangka, head tilted back, her hair wet and heavy, before that last inch was cut away. The worst memory is Nangka, turning past the strange arm to give me one last smile, while behind her the rain was falling, sealed from us by glass.
I open my eyes, then, filled with memory, and seek the faces of the statues, which at home would let me weep. But here they are so pale, and like me their tears are frozen in their eyes. They are as cold as mountain earth, but all the same I seem to hear them speak.
Listen, they whisper, their voices as urgent as wind before the rain. Let me tell you. Let me tell you how it began.
Gold
ON THE DAY THAT GOLD WAS DISCOVERED NEAR HIS VILLAGE, Mohammed Muda Nor had worked all morning tapping rubber. At one o’clock he walked out from the airy rows of trees, waved to Abdullah, the entry guard, who was already eating his lunch, and started down the dusty road home. The call to prayer wavered from the village mosque, and it seemed to Muda that he could see it, waves of sound shimmering concurrently with the midday heat. It was the end of the fruit season, one of the last hot weeks before the rains began, and the weather was a fiery hand against his back. Muda walked with his straw hat pulled down low over his forehead, so he didn’t see the children running toward him until they were quite near. They circled around him and pulled in close, like the petals on a closing flower.
“Pachik Muda.” It was his oldest nephew, a boy named Amin. He was wearing shorts and holding the hand of his youngest sister, Maimunah, who stood brown and naked beside him. “Uncle, our mother says for you to come quickly to the river.”
Muda stopped to consider. He was hungry, and the river was in the opposite direction of his home. He had risen before dawn and had worked hard all morning. Each tree required a narrow cut in the bark and a cup, precisely set, to collect the rubbery white sap. There were hundreds of trees in his area. He had worked hard, and he was hungry.
“Tell your mother,” he said, “that I will come later. Right now I am going for my lunch.” He expected them to run off then. They were the children of his sister, Norliza, and they were rarely naughty. But instead Amin released his sister’s hand. He reached out and tugged at Muda’s sarong.
“My mother says to come,” he repeated. “Please, Pachik Muda, she says it is important.”
Muda sighed, then, but he turned and followed the children back along the road. Red rambutans and smooth green mangoes hung from the trees. He plucked some of these and ate them as he walked, wondering what he would find on the riverbank. Norliza had worked the rubber too, before she married, and she would not take him lightly from his rest and prayers.
When he reached the river he saw a cluster of women standing on the grassy bank. Norliza was in the center, her sarong wet to the knees, holding something out for the others to see.
“Norliza,” he called. He was going to scold her for consuming his time with her bit of woman’s nonsense, but before he could speak she ran to him and uncurled her fist. The lines in her palm were creased with dirt, so that the skin around them looked very pale. The words he had planned stopped in his mouth. For on her palm lay a piece of gold as large as a knuckle. It was wet with river water, and it caught the noon light like fire in her hand.
“The children found it,” she said. “I was digging for roots.” Norliza was a midwife, known in the village for her skill in herbs and massage. She came into the jungle every week to search for the healing roots and bark. “I was digging there, near the trees by the river. The children were playing next to me, sorting out the rocks for a game. This one they liked because of its shine. At first I did not realize. It was only when Amin washed it in the river that I understood.” Her dark eyes gleamed with an unfamiliar excitement. “To think,” she said. “To think he might have dropped it, and I would never have known.”
Muda reached out and took the knot of gold. It was smooth, almost soft, against his fingers. He ran his thumb against it again and again. Some of the women drew close to stare. Others, he noticed, were already moving away with the news.
“It’s not real,” he said loudly, and dropped the lump of gold back into his sister’s hand.
“Muda!” she said. She looked up at him from dark eyes. Once she had been the most beautiful girl in the village. Now the dark eyes were connected by a finely etched skin, and the expression on her face was reproachful. He took a deep breath and spoke again.
“I’ve worked all day in the rubber, and you waste my lunch time with this foolishness. You are a silly woman,” he added, though it gave him great pain to see how she flinched under the eyes of the other women. A ripple of murmuring voices moved through the crowd. They had lived in the village all their lives, and he had never spoken to his sister sharply. Even the women who had reached the road paused and turned back to watch. “You are a foolish woman,” he repeated. “Foolish. And I am going home.”
He turned and walked away with slow dignity. He didn’t look back, but when he was certain he was out of sight he began to run with a speed he had not summoned since he was a boy.
Khamina was washing dishes when he burst inside. His lunch was set out on the floor—a plate of fish stuffed with coconut, a vegetable curry, several small bananas—but he paid no attention to it. Instead he ran to the wooden porch where his wife was squatting amid a pile of soapy dishes.
“Khamina,” he said. “Give me your cooking pot.”
She stood up in surprise and gestured to the soapy wok soaking in the water. Then her eyes narrowed, and she looked him up and down.
“Muda,” she said. “Why are you running through my house with your shoes on? Where is your mind? Today I scrubbed these floors, and here you are dragging the rubber field across them.”
“Khamina,” he said. He had scrubbed the pot and was now pouring water over it, clearing away the soap. “Let me tell you something. It is no time to complain about a little mud. This is an important day. My sister Norliza may be here soon. If she comes I want you to tell her that I have gone back to the river. Tell her to come there at once. She is not to speak to anyone. Do you hear me? Not to anyone! Tell her to come alone.”
Muda splashed water on his face. Then he picked up Khamina’s cooking pot and left the house. She followed him, stepping over the food he had ignored, standing in the doorway to watch him running through the heat of the day, her black pot swinging from his h
and.
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.
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 fingers.
“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 fierce 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 find. 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.
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 fingers 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 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 first 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 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 th
eir 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 noticed 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 filled with water when they were left overnight.