“Not much.”
I scowled at him. “You don’t have a lot of room to talk.”
He grinned, and again tried unsuccessfully to disengage his daughter.
Ani reached past him, took her granddaughter, and set her on the ground. Then she led me across the courtyard and away from the others. “And here. What do you remember? About Bali, not just about our home or your bungalow. If we had known that you were coming, you could have stayed in the bungalow, but now a couple from Chile is there. We’ll take you over after we eat so that you can see it.”
“I told Wayan Tyo, I remember this courtyard. In the early morning, I think. It’s not my most vivid memory. That took place at the bungalow where we stayed.”
She nodded encouragement, and I saw that she was leading me away from the others back to her world, her kitchen, as if she wanted a private conversation with me. No one followed us or interrupted. The kids continued chasing each other around the tree. Wayan Tyo joined his friend, brothers, and uncle. The young women tended to a crying baby.
Just to be talking, I said, “I remember peddlers coming around in the evening to sell textiles and paintings, sculptures. And I remember one evening in particular. We came back from dinner or a walk to find a young man squatting at the bottom of the steps, smoking. He had the longest, straightest pinky fingernail that I’d ever seen, longer than the cigarette. Not curved as they usually are. He held that little finger arched in such a way that I thought he was smoking two cigarettes.”
Ani handed me a bowl of beans to snap.
“He preceded us up to the porch, opened his bag, and began to spread out paintings on the deck. All this without a word. My parents took chairs and my brother and I stood around looking down on the sheets of paper at our feet, those paintings with their masses of tiny people, the foliage arranged like wallpaper. I’d never seen anything like them. It must have been early in our time here, because we certainly saw many more young men with paintings. Didn’t we?”
She was silent, peering into a pot on the stove that sent up a scent I couldn’t identify. The rice cooker clicked to warm and I lifted the lid, letting out a cloud of steam and the comfort of the smell of rice.
“The peddler spread out sheet after sheet of paper, and we kids squatted down to look. The detail created patterns. People cooking, bathing, swimming, washing their clothes, all within a jungle that formed the ground, the backdrop of the everyday scenes. Trees consisted of identical leaves, flattened and pressed one against the other. Now I know that these paintings were in the style developed in the 1920s and ’30s, the style of painting I’m here to research. Then I knew that they were paintings like I dreamed.” Ani stirred whatever was in the pot.
“After looking for some time, my parents began speaking with the peddler, but he didn’t have much English. He just nodded and smiled. Finally my mother said, ‘Jenna, which one do you like the best?’ My brother had jumped off the porch and was running around with a bunch of kids.” Finished with the beans, I fanned the greens on the table into a pattern.
“My mother’s question broke my reverie, so I began walking around the paintings, looking carefully at each one. This part might not be my memory. My parents still tell this story about me, so they may have filled in what I’ve lost. I looked and looked. It began growing dark and harder to see, and finally I pointed at one painting.
“The young man looked at me more closely and turned to someone who was standing on the ground below the deck. By then a group of people had gathered. He said something in Balinese. A woman translated for him.” I snapped the stem off a bean I’d missed and pictured the arrangement of patterns on the bamboo deck. Most of the paintings were dark, but there was one that had a light background.
“Yes,” she said.
“The woman was you? Ah. Well, you remember then, you translated for him and said that it was the one painting by his teacher. The best painting of all.” I laughed. “It’s the story that my family uses to illustrate why I became an art historian.”
“Do you think it is the reason?”
“In part. My love of art, and the books, the words, the ideas that describe the art. The research.”
She looked at me expectantly.
“They ground me. It’s the place I go to slow my racing mind. And this story, well, I suppose it’s the story that explains why I’m here. Researching the art.”
“It is one reason you are here.” Ani turned back to her cooking.
I looked at her. Was the other reason to discover the killer of the dead man? No, I thought. “Fate, is that what you mean?”
She sidestepped my question. “How does it make you feel being here?”
I thought for a moment. “I feel comfortable. I feel at home.”
“How are you?”
“Very well, it’s wonderful to be here.”
“No, I mean how are you?”
“You mean the murder, finding the body?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m . . .” I faltered. “I think I’m fine.”
Ani looked at me steadily, and I took a breath and said, “I don’t know. I don’t know how I am. I feel confused. You know I came here to talk with Flip, to look at art and to talk with him. And now there’s no Flip. So I guess I need to regroup and try to figure out a way to meet someone to help with my research.” To my surprise, tears welled up in my eyes. Embarrassed, I turned away.
She waited.
“Then, also, violent death. It’s not the first time.” I saw her start at this bit of news. “Last year, I . . . But that was someone I knew, and my response was very different. I felt very sad. This time I felt physically ill.”
“That seems normal.”
“Yes. I began analyzing the room, the scene of the crime, to keep myself from getting sick. I wanted to know who killed him, more than, more than . . .”
She nodded and took my hand in hers, which only brought more tears. “Tyo has told me that when he has seen someone die badly, cruelly, he finds himself floating above them, a distance away, even if he is right there with the body. I think this is natural.”
“Really? I know I didn’t want to be there, but at the same time I did. I didn’t make any attempt to leave. I rationalized that I shouldn’t move my feet, that they might think my footprints were the killer’s footprints. I tried to think of other things. I closed my eyes. I listened to the monkeys.”
“You tried to find safety in your mind.”
“Yes, but in retrospect my response was more disturbing than if I’d become hysterical or run screaming from the room. Do you understand?”
I took her silence as a judgment.
“What I felt. Well, actually that’s it. It was not so much about emotions. It was about intellect, knowing. I want to know who killed him. I want to know what happened. As I stood there with the body, I felt as if I’d been there in that room when it happened. I could see the killer’s anger, not just the way the spear was thrust through the dead man, but in the way things were pulled off the wall. The cushions on the floor.”
“Tyo said you stayed. This is why you stayed. To try to solve the mystery.”
“Someone needed to stay with him.” I looked at my hand in hers and felt the comfort in it. “You’re smiling.”
“Yes, you think that you did not feel anything, yet you felt compassion for him. You felt that someone had to stay with him.”
“You