Bones Of The Dark Moon: A Contemporary Novel Exploring Bali's 1965 Massacres

By Richard E. Lewis

During construction of a villa on an idyllic Bali seashore, workers uncover long-buried skeletons, their shattered skulls evidence of brutal mass murder. The discovery sets the village of Batu Gede astir. The life of Made "Nol" Ziro, a stalwart member of the community with a little gambling problem, is turned upside down. Could one of those skeletons be that of his schoolteacher father, who disappeared during the political upheaval and massacres of 1965?

As Nol sets out to find the truth of what happened, his path crosses that of American anthropologist Tina Briddle, who has secrets of her own, and who is determined to give a voice to the unknown bones. She suspects that the key to their mystery lies with Reed Davis, an enigmatic retiree dwelling among the Ubud expat community and rumored to have been a CIA spy.
Drawing them together is the mysterious Luhde Srikandi, who fifty years ago whispered her enchantments from deep in the shadows of conspiracy, and who begins to whisper again. Who is she? For what happened on that sleepy beach all those decades ago isn't dusty memory. Secrets are revealed, vengeance is unleashed, and a forbidden love flares to life.

Arguably the most traumatic cataclysm of Bali's rich and fascinating history, the massacres of 1965 remain mostly unknown to the island's visitors. Interweaving historical drama with contemporary Bali life, Bones of the New Moon is compulsively readable, a page-turner with unexpected twists leavened with dashes of humor, laying bare the love and hatred, the tragedy and irony, and the joy and despair of our common human predicament.

****

Over the past few decades, Bali's local media has periodically reported the findings of human remains, exposed by coastal erosion, development, or accidental discovery. These bones are quietly cremated as an unsettling reminder of one of Bali's darkest chapters, the massacres of 1965, in which an estimated 50000 Balinese were slaughtered during a time of violent national upheaval.

The precipitating event, which occurred on 30 September 1965 and which was to be known in national history as Gestapu, was the kidnapping and murder of six army generals in Jakarta by rogue army units, reportedly acting on orders of the secret Special Bureau of the Indonesian Communist Party. At the time, the Partai Komunis Indonesia, or the PKI, was the third largest Communist party in the world and on the cusp of national power. The murders of the generals marked one of history's most startling reversals of political fortune. The nationalists' systematic bloody purging of leftist and Communists culminated in the atrocities in Bali, a horror that has remains unresolved and painfully fresh in the memory of the Balinese but is unknown to most foreigners visiting the paradise island.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard E. Lewis
• Release date: Jul 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301104376

Richard E. Lewis

My parents were American missionaries to Indonesia, where I was born and raised and still live with my family. In 1965, as a nine-year boy living in Bali, I was an eye-witness to the madness that swept over the country and the island after a failed communist coup, during which tens of thousands of innocent people were slaughtered.One rainy day in December, a man I’d never seen before hunched on the parlor sofa in my parent’s house in Klungkung, east Bali. He reeked of fright: acrid, bitter, biting. He was silent, hands clasped between his knees. A former member of a Communist party’s community organization, he was helpless, hopeless, marked for death, a marking that painted not by gray-skinned pallor but by stink. I’ll never forget that smell. My latest book is about that time: BONES OF THE DARK MOON, a contemporary novel exploring the massacres of 1965, a tragedy that is not part of the Bali myth and is unknown to most visitors and even younger Balinese themselves.I grew up reading whatever I could get my hands on. I wrote my first my first short story when I was six-years-old about a yawn that traveled around the world. I also went to the beach a lot and surfed. I attended college in the US and then bailed out of a marine geology PhD program due to technical difficulties with my soul, which did not want to be shackled to a career. I ended back in Bali, writing and surfing (as a writer, I am best known for my YA novel THE KILLING SEA, about the Asian tsunami but I have other great books out there too). I also spend a good deal of my life looking for things, such as my sunglasses, which sometimes are to be found propped up on my head.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The backhoe driver didn't notice when his bucket ripped through the first of the skeletons.

With the villa construction behind schedule, he'd climbed into the cab shortly after dawn to excavate the pool. The sun rose plump as a tangerine, orange light spreading across the ruffled sea of the Bali Straits and into the calm lagoon. Upon the beach, a Balinese woman led four pale tourists in meditation.

The driver lit a cigarette, respectfully waiting for them to finish. He yawned plumes of smoke, tired after spending the night in a whorehouse, where his favorite girl had been more interested in the TV news about a memorial remembrance for former President Soeharto and politicians wanting him declared a National Hero.

I agree, she said. I don't care what other people say, he was a good president. He did a lot for my village.

I'm not here to talk politics, the driver complained.

Did you know he had a talking parrot? she said as she shucked off her dress. That bird would have made a better president than the others we've had.

The driver startled as the supervisor rapped the side of the cab and gestured for him to start digging. He fired up the engine, which belched smoke that drifted through the few palms the landscaper had left standing in the last of Batu Gede's beachfront coconut groves. Some lucky villager had struck it rich. What had been arid land good only for palms was now some of the island's most expensive real estate.

The bucket chewed through a bed of loose sand and into hard volcanic loam. Several scoops later, a round object tumbled loose from the dark soil and lodged against the bucket's teeth. The driver shifted the bucket close to the cab window, the back of his neck prickling.

A hollow-eyed skull grinned at him.

"Iyallah," he breathed. He lowered the bucket to the ground and jumped out of the cab. Gingerly picking up the skull, heavy with clogged dirt, he noticed on its back a depressed fracture the size of his thumb, as if from a heavy blow. In the mound of dirt piled to the side, what the driver had first taken to be broken driftwood were discolored bones. Using a bamboo stake, he scraped away soil from what appeared to be a clam shell but was another skull with a similar fracture.

At the bottom of the pit were more bones.

More skulls.

The driver sat back on his haunches and lit a fresh cigarette. He was pretty sure what this was. Old history come to light. History never taught in the school books but known nonetheless by whispers in quiet corners.

This wasn't his problem, though. He just followed orders.

The supervisor stomped over. Before he could start yelling, the driver nodded at the bones. What do you what me to do about them?

The supervisor blinked rapidly, as if the bones were an illusion and the blinking would erase them from view. The driver thought he was going to be ordered to quietly rebury them.

But other workers had noticed, and some were running over with gape-mouthed astonishment. One yelled to his comrades at the other end of the site, Hey, come here, look at this!

The supervisor sighed again and got out his cell phone. This wasn't his problem either.

Chapter 2

The previous evening, Madé Ziro, known to all as Nol, sat down in his parlor to watch the news with his wife and mother.

Suti sold T-shirts and knick-knacks at her shop on the beach arcade, and this morning Nol had borrowed fifty million from the bank to renew the shop's lease and had promptly lost every single rupiah at the cockfights. He hadn't told his wife and wasn't going to tell her and so pretended nothing was wrong as he turned on the TV, prepared to fake a serene interest in the country's troubles while frantically wondering how to wriggle out of his own.

A reporter prattled breathlessly about a memorial for former President Soeharto, part of a campaign to have him declared a National Hero.

Steal ten dollars, and you get arrested, Suti said, but steal ten billion, you get to be a national hero.

She was repairing one of the reed coasters she sold in the shop, peering over the rim of her reading glasses at the TV. Nol's mother, Wayan Arini, perched on the edge of a chair, her white hair coiffed, her slender back erect, her elegant hands folded in her lap. The evening's news had drawn her like a judge to her court, and she watched the reporter with a stern gaze, as if ready to catch him out in a lie. Suti relaxed in sarong and blouse, but Nol's fastidious mother had put on a freshly ironed dress to sit in his parlor as if she were a guest.

As a panel of TV analysts discussed the issue, Nol slumped lower. Why oh why had his friend Sudana called him about the cockfights just as Nol was leaving the bank? Why oh why had the cockfights been at the Renon cockpit pavilion, right there on the way home?

Why oh why had he stopped?

He vowed he'd only gamble a million.

But the entire fifty million vanished like a magic trick, leaving Nol with an empty leather satchel. Disgusted and angry, he threw it out the window as he drove off. But it was a perfectly good satchel, and he sped around the one-way block to retrieve it. It was already gone. Some lousy thief had taken it.

The TV reporter popped back into view, a weedy young man who must have been in diapers when Soeharto had abruptly resigned during the 1998 riots and retreated to untouchable seclusion, finally dying years later. The Soeharto Saga continues, the reporter said. Now the question is whether parliament will declare him a National Hero.

I hope he's burning in hell, Arini said evenly.

Having pronounced her judgment, she glided out the door, heading across the courtyard to her own house in the compound.

Nol and Suti exchanged a glance. On December 9, 1965, more than two months after a failed Communist coup, Red Beret commandos loyal to then Major General Soeharto had hauled Nol's father out the gates for questioning. Madé Catra was the grade school headmaster and a scholar. His arrest was a tragic misunderstanding, and before he had a chance to clear his name, he was executed, leaving behind his pregnant wife and four-year-old daughter.

It was something Arini never talked about.

Nol either, at least not to his mother. Soeharto hadn't doomed his father. That had been brutal but simple fate. Truth to tell, Nol admired the President, who'd had the most excellent wisdom to allow for a few wonderful years a national lottery to fund national sports programs. One sweet day Nol placed his numbers and won a million rupiah. Cash right in the hand. Oh, the euphoria! Not even Suti's observation he'd spent at least twice that on his bets could dim the glow.

His reverie of winning another lottery, fifty million cash in his outstretched arms, evaporated as his teenage daughter Dian burst through the door, a sarong wrapped around her, her damp hair caught up in a towel. She reached for the remote, but Nol held it away from her. You have exams. No TV.

"But my favorite show is on! Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire. And it's not TV anyways."

Oh, really? What do you call that thing right there if it's not a TV?

"It's a reality show. It's real people, not actors, so it's not really TV TV—"

Go. Study. Now.

Dian flounced out with a scowl. Her bedroom, decorated with posters of Korean boy bands, was the closest in a row of three rooms that shared a common porch. Nol kept a constant and stern eye on her guests. Her older brother Putu had the far room, which Nol kept locked, as his son was finishing up his first year at university in America. Not just any school, but Stanford University, one of the world's best, to which Putu had won a full scholarship.

You've been grumpy all day, Suti said, peering at the coaster.

Grumpy? Of course. He had fifty million reasons to be grumpy.

Well? Suti prodded.

"That Frenchman who looked at our villa rental? He took a place in Canggu instead. Why do all the bulés want to live in Canggu? The traffic's horrible, the beaches are dirty, the rivers polluted."

It might help if our pool was clean.

Nol kept silent. All during the villa's construction, they'd argued about the pool. Suti had a knack for selling souvenirs to tourists, but she had little understanding of Westerners' love for bodies of artificially blue water. And keeping water blue was much more difficult than she realized.

He flicked through the channels, settling for a moment on Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, some handsome but penniless Balinese surfer living in an Ubud estate the producers rented, pretending to be loaded with money for a bunch of pretty Jakarta girls who were dumb enough to believe this was all for real. He jabbed the off button. Kids these days. They think it's so easy.

Suti dropped the mended coaster into a plastic bag. Did you get to the bank today?

He scratched his armpit. I forgot the bank book, and they wouldn't let me take out the money. I'm me, I said, you know I'm me, but no, I'm not me without my bank book. I'll go tomorrow.

Suti brushed trimmings off her lap. You had coffee with Anak Agung Mantera this afternoon.

The abrupt change of topic made Nol suspicious. Suti had a way of discussing this and that and the other thing, and without warning you found yourself trapped. He was having coffee with Mother, and I was just being polite.

What did he want?

The village's leading aristocrat from the palace on the north side of town, Mantera was of minor but still royal blood. Not to mention rich. Lately he'd been by a few times to visit Mother, which was odd to the point of suspicion, and which was why Nol had joined them at the garden pavilion. They talk about old times, he said. They went to school together when they were children.

Your mother is very gracious.

And why shouldn't I have coffee with him?

Because you don't like him. You call him a skinny weasel. You want to borrow money from him, don't you?

Borrow? The idea struck Nol like a mallet to a gong. He hadn't thought beyond his suspicions of Mantera to regard the rich prince as a possible solution for his predicament, a most shameful oversight for someone of his acumen.

But what was this look Suti was giving him? Had somebody told her about the cockfights? Why would I want to borrow money?

For one of your get rich quick schemes.

Immensely relieved, Nol put on an offended scowl. I don't have schemes. I have good ideas that others steal. He lumbered to his feet. Conjuring a yawn that turned into a real one, he said he was going to bed.

Chapter 3

Reed Davis had made his first fortune in Balinese hair.

I was dealing in the usual, antiques and art, he told Tina Briddle. In Singapore I met this Chinese guy from New York who traded anything, including hair. Said he'd buy all the hair I could get. I'd never heard of such a thing, but when I put the word out, I had people coming to me from all over the island.

The two reclined on rattan couches on the verandah of Reed's bungalow that had been his home since practically the age of dinosaurs, when people hand-wrote letters and sent telegrams for their more urgent messages. Overlooking a lush ravine, with a stream gurgling through volcanic boulders, the bungalow had been the first expat residence in the hinterlands of Ubud. Now the bungalow felt cramped, hemmed upstream and down by spa resorts and grand villas and trendy cafés advertising free Internet. The verandah melded into an elevated, open-air living room decorated with an eclectic mix of antiques and art and plants. On the walls hung several of Reed's famous photographs, of palm-fringed shores and terraced fields and majestic volcanoes. One of the few portraits was a black-and-white of two girls in school uniforms playing hopscotch, the boxes chalked on a road's uneven asphalt. Reed had caught one of the girls in mid-jump, her long afternoon shadow trailing after her, her pigtail flying, her smile wide as wings.

These days of electronic games, Balinese children no longer played hopscotch. The photo, and the landscapes, were of a long-ago Bali that Tina only knew as romanticized myth. When she first met Reed as a graduate student doing field work for her anthropology PhD, that Bali had already faded, although not Reed Davis. He was now in his seventies and still a handsome man in a salted cod sort of way, if a cod could be said to have strong patrician features. A scar traced a thin white line down the leathery furrows of his right cheek, giving him a hint of rakish derring-do.

It was the best hair in the world, no chemicals, no dyes, Reed said. Some women had hair to their knees. My God, it was like chopping down thousand-year-old redwoods. But I was paying good money, more than their own wigmakers, so they insisted on selling.

Tina patted her hair, which frizzed like copper wire. Mine's all natural, but I don't think I'd get much.

I told Harry I wanted a premium. This was Balinese hair. He told me it wasn't any different than other hair but I said, man, it's the name. Bali. Genuine Bali hair. The cachet, you know? His big clients were Hollywood and Broadway. It was just the craziest improvised business. Nothing I went to college for, that was for sure, but I was making money hand over fist. He hoisted the vodka bottle from the coffee table. Another drink?

Tina had barely touched her first. I have to drive back to Batu Gede. The traffic's already crazy enough without me being tipsy.

An assistant professor at Stanford, Tina was coming to the end of a productive research sabbatical. The Balinese had been gone over and over again with a fine-toothed anthropological comb, but hers was original work she was confident would clinch her tenure. I'm thinking of doing a side paper, she said. On 1965. The failed coup attempt and the subsequent mass murders.

Reed clanked more ice cubes into his glass and drowned them in vodka.

You were here, Tina said, coming to the point of her visit. In Bali.

Reed sipped. Yes, I was.

Reed had a dozen stories of how he'd come to be in Bali in the early sixties. He'd been kicked out of Yale for gambling. He was the disinherited scion of a banking family. He was a sailor who jumped ship. He'd worked in Hollywood as a bit actor and heard of Bali's charms from Charlie Chaplin.

Reed never said anything about the CIA, but Tina had heard persistent rumors that as an art dealer and photographer and general all-around foreign dabbler, he'd also doubled as a deep-cover agent, involved all the way up to those devil eyebrows in the 1965 Communist coup and counter-coup that resulted in the systematic extermination of the Communists. The killings began in Java, and took two months to start in the neighboring island of Bali, but when they did, it was to new heights of thoroughness and savagery, with over fifty thousand Balinese killed by other Balinese.

Can I pick your brain? Put you on tape? Tina asked.

Reed grinned wryly. Bali. Shake a bush and out pops an anthropologist. His grin died into a sigh. You don't need to talk to me, Tina. Everybody of a certain age has a story to tell about that time.

Nobody wants to talk about it.

Well. You know how small this place is. Everybody still has to live together, tied to local community and to village temples. A woman who was widowed in 1965 still has to attend festivals with the man who killed her husband. Reed stared into his drink. You either killed your neighbor or your neighbor killed you. In 1965 we got right down to the fundamentals of human nature.

That's rather pessimistic.

This airport taxi driver, for example. Had this old '39 Ford. All he was trying to do was support his family. He drove Communist officials. That was his crime. He was killed. You know who stuffed him in his car and set fire to it? His fellow taxi drivers. And they'd driven Communists, too. But better him than them.

What was his name?

Don't remember. I rode with him just once. But that didn't count in his favor, I guess.

Over fifty thousand were massacred in Bali alone, Tina said. Not just the Partai Komunist Indonesia cadres, but members of leftist organizations like the Peasant's League, and Gerwani, the Gerakan—

Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Reed said. The Indonesian Women's Movement. You don't have to tell me who they were.

Completely legal organizations. One day you were a law-abiding citizen, and the next day you were killed.

Reed tossed back the rest of his drink and stared at the setting sun with a hooded gaze.

Like you say, Bali's a small island, Tina continued. A certain momentum had built up. Whole families, entire hamlets wiped out. Fifty thousand on a small island—that's the equivalent of what, twenty million Americans taken out and slaughtered? The Nazi Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge horror, the Rwanda genocide: all well-known atrocities but the 1965 killings, hardly a blip.

Above the ravine, pigeons circled in descending flight to their coop. From the whistles attached to their feet ebbed and flowed a mournful music for the dying day.

Tina took out a folded note from her bag. When I was doing my research, I was also asking around about 1965. An elderly woman handed me this and left without a word. She cleared her throat and read the typewritten lines:

"We Gerwani women were called immoral, lascivious, depraved. They said we danced naked and seduced men and had orgies. Lies! Tell me, what is so immoral about teaching children working in the fields how to read and write? Tell me, what is so lascivious about insisting a man have only one wife? Tell me, what is so depraved in demanding that a poor farmer be given a small plot of land to call his own? If you can tell me this, then fine, we deserved to be hunted down and killed like mad dogs, to be kept like dangerous beasts in prison cages, to be tortured and raped."

Reed unfolded his long legs and hitched up his sarong, revealing bare bony feet. Standing by the verandah railing, he brooded down at the stream a hundred feet below, dark water whisking through the rocks.

Christmas Day of '65 I went to Mass with a Red Beret officer, he finally said. "Most of the killings on Bali were done by the tameng, the Black Shirts, but the Red Berets took care of special targets. He told me how he and his men entered a Communist hamlet the Black Shirts had been through. A boy of about nine came up to him and said, 'sir, they have killed my mother and father so please kill me too'. The officer told me, 'I felt sorry for the kid so I pulled out my pistol and shot him.' Is this the sort of thing you want to hear?"

Tina glanced again at the photograph of the two girls playing hopscotch. An old ache rose like a muddy whirl. When Tina was fifteen, her twelve-year-old sister Nancy had been abducted from the scrub brush behind their California home and was never found.

Anything you think can help me, she said.

Reed picked up the bottle of vodka and slugged a straight shot, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. Maybe you should start asking questions right there in Batu Gede.

Why is that?

Lowering the bottle, he watched the last pigeon disappear behind the tree line. That's where it started. Batu Gede is where the blood began, a trickle that turned into a flood.

* * *

A good host, Reed saw his guest to her rental car, a rusty VW Safari. She drove off with a final wave, the car burping clouds of exhaust. Reed shuffled back to the house, feeling his years, the weight of them layered on his heart like sandstone. He sat down to polish off the vodka that he'd opened as a courtesy.

Tina. Not a bad sort for an anthropologist. She wanted to get her teeth into 1965, did she? He should have kept his big mouth shut. Or sloughed her off onto Dominick Legard, that excitable man who'd be happy to talk her ear off on the treacherous machinations of the CIA, the real masterminds behind the coup. Get a few drinks into Dominick, and he'd be badgering Reed to show everybody his little bag of spy gadgets, the pen with invisible ink, the miniaturized camera disguised as cigarette lighter, the pen light that could shoot you dead. On one occasion at a local watering hole, Dominick had been so obnoxious that Reed said, You forgot this spy gadget, holding up a clenched fist, and knocked the jerk off his barstool.

Oh, Tina had said the politically correct things about justice, and she did have a point there, but Reed would bet his knobby knees that she was in it for the paper. Publish or perish.

As for himself, rot and perish.

God Almighty, he was getting tired of Bali, of what it had become. Nothing stayed the same anywhere, but too rapid and ugly a change was called a malignancy. He was weary of how noisy and polluted and overcrowded the island was, everybody cramming into a paradise that was getting seedier by the day, condotel salesmen and dull arrivistes and air-headed spiritualists getting high colonics with sacred spring water, trying to find in Bali what they couldn't find at home.

After the terrorist bombs of 2002 had ripped through the Kuta nightclubs, foreigners had fled the island as fast as Red Sox fans abandoning Fenway Park after a Yankee thrashing. Even the expats who'd blathered on and on about how they'd found their home on earth had bailed as soon as they could book a flight. You could walk from one end of Ubud to the other on the actual goddam sidewalk. It was a bad time for the economy, sure, but people slowed way down and talked to each other without the hustle. You could hear the birds instead of the tour buses. It reminded Reed of the Bali he'd once known.

Maybe the island needed a massacre every so often. Feed the gods, give Siva his destruction and Durga her blood.

His housekeeper Komang appeared on the verandah. What time do you want to eat, Pak Reed?

I'm not hungry tonight, Komang, Reed said. He spoke in Balinese, his teeth tight with the vodka. You can go home. I'll clean up.

Komang picked up the glasses and ice bucket anyway, a strand of hair slipping out of her pinned coil.

You know, Komang, if you sold your hair, you'd make a lot of money.

She chuckled. My husband likes it how it is.

How's the salt harvest coming?

Several years previously, Komang's husband Ruda and some other progressively minded Balinese had bought several hectares of destroyed mangrove swamps from underneath a Jakarta consortium planning a landfill and a golf course. Ruda had replanted most of the swamp with mangrove seedlings, but had kept part as a salt farm, with the idea of selling organic sea salt to help fund the operation. It'd taken a while to clean the fine black sand of pesticides and chemicals, but now the first batch of coarse sparkling salt crystals was being processed. A French company had already bought the whole crop at a good profit.

And to think that when Reed first came to Bali, organic sea salt was the only salt around, sold by the basketful, cheap as dirt.

We're having a celebration party next month, Komang said. You'll come and dance for us?

"The bumbling bulé? Sure. Can you make your spicy turtle lawar?"

You know turtle's illegal, Komang scolded.

I have connections. I can get you one.

I wouldn't mind, Komang said with a laugh, but Ruda would be very angry.

After Komang left, Reed sat in the gathering dark for awhile longer and then rose with a creak of knees. In his bedroom, he turned on the overhead lights. By the canopy bed stood an antique Ming cabinet. Reed opened the polished rosewood doors and felt underneath a dresser panel for a latch. Releasing it, he tugged out a hidden drawer.

Lying within was a back-and-white photograph of a young woman in a crisp white blouse, half-turned to glare over her shoulder at the camera. The afternoon light caught her high cheeks and sparked the irises of her upswept eyes. A barrette pinned her coiled hair, but a few loose strands dipped into the shadowed hollows of her neck.

Behind her in the photograph, and standing in rows upon the weedy grass of a village square, were dozens of cadres in black trousers and white shirts, blurred together by the camera's short depth of field. But on the banners the hammer and sickle were clear enough.

Reed held the photograph with a trembling hand as he studied the woman's face. He tried to think of the good things, but on the sway of vodka there crept other memories, the foul raw stink of fear that a hunted person gives off, the pall of smoke and stench of burned flesh, the hacked bodies in the ditches with their clouds of flies, the grim Black Shirts silently and swiftly marching.

His jaws flexing with a soundless groan, Reed slammed the drawer shut.

Chapter 4

The VW Safari's headlights skewed to the left, and the steering had an alarming tendency to follow suit, but despite the concentration this required, Tina Briddle reflected on her unsatisfactory visit to Reed, which had left her more curious than before.

Tina had rented a bungalow in Batu Gede, a seaside village that played second fiddle to its more famous neighbor of Sanur. The rent was cheap, the area was quiet, and she had no friends around to distract her as she started work on her paper.

Batu Gede is where it all started, Reed had said, which had certainly grabbed her interest, but he'd annoyingly sidestepped her subsequent questions, saying it wasn't a time he liked to think about. If Balinese of a certain age had their secret stories, then what was Reed's? Did he pass on from the CIA lists of Communists to be purged? Did he hand over briefcases of cash to fund the killing teams?

As for Batu Gede, perhaps there was something to Reed's hint. The woman who cleaned Tina's bungalow often brought her child, a bright-eyed girl who tried to get into everything. In frustration one day the mother scolded her child, saying if she didn't sit still, the wicked Communist leyak Luhde Srikandi was going to steal her away. The shape-shifting leyak, the Balinese version of a vampire, was standard black magic fare, but Tina had never before heard of a Communist one. She asked the mother, who embarrassedly replied it was just a local tale. Keeping her ears open, Tina heard whispers of Luhde Srikandi elsewhere in the village, but when she expressed interest, the villagers either gave her a blank look or changed the topic.

Scholars of Bali most often dismissed the massacres of 1965 as either a unique aberration due to historical contingencies or as a grotesque monstrous version of the 'Balinese-run-amok-with-a-knife' trope.

Tina wasn't so sure.

Should she stay on for another month or so? But what could she do in one month, or even two? She had a major paper to write. She had to return home and prepare for the start of term and her shining eager students, many of whom who were downright scary with their savage smarts and naked ambition. The bungalow's rent was up in a few days, and her flight to San Francisco was booked.

Wrestling the Safari through a pot hole, Tina approached an intersection where Big Baby glowed under spotlights, an enormous and cherubic limestone infant, one of Bali's more whimsical statues. He reminded Tina of a diaper commercial, and now brought to mind all the hassle of changing bookings and finding a new rental and moving house. She decided there was little benefit to staying on. She had enough to do. She'd finish the packing and call the cargo people.

Chapter 5

Fifty million nightmares nibbled at Nol's sleep, and he finally woke for good to an early rooster's braggart crowing.

Let's see how well you do in the cockfights, he thought sourly.

He was a good man, and a humble man who didn't trumpet his virtues, but there was nothing wrong in a private and reassuring listing. He was a reliable and respected member of his community who faithfully carried out his obligations towards village and temple. He wasn't afraid of hard work. At an age when men began to lessen life's labors, he put in two days a week as a security guard at the Japanese-owned golf course on the hill overlooking the town. He checked all suspicious packages, and suspicious people too, figuring if he was going to get blown up then it was his fate to be a posthumous hero. His bravery was beyond dispute. Consider that time he chased away the thieves who thought they could steal grass sod from the putting greens.

What else, what else. Possessed of vision? Indeed. Consider his concept for a submersible glass-bottom boat, long before such machines appeared in Bali's water sports companies.

A man of the times? Without question. Take, for example, the occasion when he'd escorted Dian and her classmates to Serangan Island to release baby sea turtles into the ocean. In the village feasts of years past, turtles were turned into turtle satay, and Nol's taste buds quivered at the memory of such succulent treats, but now turtle meat was illegal and there he was releasing baby turtles with his beloved daughter. When he mournfully observed that all would be snapped up within hours by ocean predators, Dian fiercely shushed him.

He was healthy, with a small paunch that spoke of a sound diet, and his teeth were stout. He was a faithful husband and loyal to his wife. He didn't drink. He didn't smoke. He was honest. He did not let any merchant or salesman get the better of him. He was a safe driver with excellent traffic sense and swift reflexes who knew how to hit the accelerator when a red light