The Flame Tree

This is a work of fiction. While there is a Brantas River, the town of Wonobo is fictional, as is its Immanuel Hospital. The Union of American Baptists and the Nahdlatul Umat Islam are fictional organizations. Apart from obvious historical characters and events, all other characters and events in the novel are drawn from the imagination.

A glossary of foreign terms appears at the end of this book.

Chapter One

Chapter 2

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Glossary

T
HE
T
UAN
G
URU
H
AJI
Abdullah Abubakar first appeared in twelve-year-old Isaac Williams’s largely untroubled life on a Saturday morning in late August.

Isaac sat thirty feet above the ground in the flame tree by the school wall, waiting for his best friend Ismail, who lived in a
kampung
on the other side of the Muslim cemetery. Three overlapping branches the size of his wrist, each carved with his initials, made a natural seat in front of an oval gap in the foliage through which he could observe a wide swath of the neighborhood before him.

Behind him was his other world. The American Academy of Wonobo, Java, a boarding school of the Union of American Baptists, offered a rigorous, godly education from first through ninth grades. Above the school’s main doors, sternly carved on the sandstone gable pediment, was a verse from the Psalms:
TEACH ME GOOD JUDGMENT AND KNOWLEDGE.
Isaac did not board in the dorm there. He lived with his parents in a house on the residential side of the tangerine trees and hibiscus hedge that divided the large mission compound. Graham and Mary Williams were doctors at the Union of American Baptists’ Immanuel Hospital, a four-story building that was the tallest for miles around and took up a good portion of the skyline to Isaac’s right.

Isaac had just returned from a six-week summer trip to the States, most of that time spent with his family at the Connecticut gentleman’s farm his grandpa Tarleton owned. His sixteen-year-old sister, Rachel, had stayed behind to go to a Christian boarding school in Virginia for her tenth grade. Such a fate was looming for Isaac, but he did his best not to think about it. Boy, it was great to be back home, even if his perch was smaller than he remembered and the top of the wall beneath him not as far away. The mission walls, quarried limestone blocks two feet thick and stacked eight feet high, kept the compound a world unto itself. The flame tree grew by the northern wall, shading a good part of the playground, but several of its branches thrust out over the wall and the public sidewalk of Hospital Street beyond.

Flame-of-the-forest trees, like American boys, are not native to Java, but flame trees and white boys born on the rich Javanese soil sink deep roots. This particular flame-of-the-forest had been planted thirty years ago as a promise tree, when the Wonobo Medical Mission had first opened its doors. The tree had grown with the mission, sprouting seedpods about the same time the mission added a school for the doctors’ children. The tree grew and so did the school, which began accepting boarding students. When the tree could grow no higher, it grew thicker and wider. It seemed to Isaac that the tree had been there since the time of Creation and would be there until the Day of Judgment.

On the two-lane but occasionally four-way Hospital Street trishaws, bicycles, mopeds, motorbikes, sedans, public transport jitneys, and a sugarcane cart pulled by two oxen rattled and
rumbled and tooted and clopped. Pedestrians ambled along the cement brick sidewalks, many heading for the hospital’s public gates a hundred yards to Isaac’s right. Across the street the neighborhood mosque had new tin sheets on the roof and a new plywood facade of Moorish arches on the sagging front porch. The minaret displayed new speakers, with four of the six aimed at the school and hospital. The new Imam squatted on the front porch, a storky, beady-eyed man who wore white robes and the white cap of a haji who’d made the pilgrimage to Mecca. The old Imam had been fat and jovial; this one gave Isaac the shivers.

Sometime that morning a green banner had been stretched across the mosque’s freshly painted wooden picket fence. Its ornate calligraphy proclaimed the mosque to be an official post of the Muslim society of the Nahdat Ummat al-Islam, or, according to the Indonesianized version of the name printed below it, the Nahdlatul Umat al-Islam. Isaac had never heard of it before. Printed on the banner was a portrait of the society’s leader, an ancient man in robes and turban, with sunken eyes, tombstone cheeks, a white tuft of a beard, and exorbitant eyebrows.
TUAN GURU HAJI ABDULLAH ABUBAKAR
, the portrait’s title said. If the Imam gave Isaac the shivers, then this old man’s lifeless gaze chilled his soul.

Underneath Isaac’s dangling right foot the sidewalk arced around an ornamental stand of head-high, yellow bamboo that clumped up against the compound wall. The ripe scent of aged urine floated up from the bamboo. A man in black trousers and white shirt broke his stride to step into the stand, where he
unzipped his trousers and peed against the wall. His groan of relief rose as clear as a gamelan gong.

There was something different about the bamboo that caught Isaac’s attention. The shoots closest to the wall had been cut down. From his elevated angle, something was off-kilter about the wall, too. Curious, he scrambled down the tree and slipped into the stifling shade of the tangerine tree that hid this section of wall from ground-level view. He brushed off a sweat drop trickling down his forehead, frowning at the thick sandstone bricks like he would at an algebra problem. Then he saw the gate. Somebody had cunningly detached a four-foot-square section of wall and then rebricked it within a thin frame of steel strips painted the same color as the stone. The frame was in turn attached on its right side by inset hinges to a stouter I beam inserted behind a facade of sandstone brick. A small gate, but nonetheless one that would allow even a large man to leave the compound.

Or enter.

I wonder if Tanto
…But even as the question formed in Isaac’s mind, there came from the large lawn on the far side of the residences the blatting of the gardener’s mower. Tanto was a hard worker. When would he have had the time to make this gate? Not only that, he was security-conscious. The previous year he had caught a thief climbing over the wall with a bundle of clothes taken off the Higgenbothams’ drying line, and he’d nearly bludgeoned the man to death.

It took Isaac a minute to figure out the latching mechanism, cleverly hidden inside a loose brick. With just a touch, the gate
opened silently outward. The inch-wide gap beckoned as alluringly as a hole into another universe.

I should tell Dad.

Isaac pushed harder. The bamboo on the other side had been cut to allow the gate to swing open. He bent and stepped through the hole in the wall, scrunching his nose against the acrid stench of urine. Wouldn’t anyone who used this patch of bamboo as a pissoir notice the gate? He closed it. On this side the gate was even harder to see.

Now it is really time to tell Dad.

Through a gap in the bamboo, he spotted Ismail darting across the street. Ismail halted underneath the flame tree and glanced up at Isaac’s empty perch, his narrow brown face looking as lively as a crackling electric wire. Isaac grinned and slipped out of the bamboo stand. He came close to his friend and tapped Ismail on the shoulder.

Ismail whirled around, his mended shirt flapping loosely on his skinny bones. He was a foot shorter and half as heavy as Isaac, but his scrawny muscles were just as strong. “
Iyallah
, where did you come from?”

“I have mastered the art of teleportation,” Isaac said.

“That so? Then teleport us down to the river.”

Isaac waved his hand and intoned,
“Bim-sallah-bim.”

Ismail looked with exaggerated wonder around him. “
Aiyah
, it almost worked.”

Isaac returned Ismail’s snaggletoothed grin with his orthodontically shining one. He wondered if he should tell his friend about the
gate, but he decided to keep it his delicious secret for a while longer.

“You’re fatter,” Ismail said. “And your eyes are more blue.”

“They’re just the same as they were,” Isaac said. “Let’s go, we got treasure to find.”

They dashed down Hospital Street, weaving around pedestrians. They ran past Pak Harianto’s barbershop. The petite man lifted his hand clipper from a black-haired head to wave at Isaac. “Welcome back!” he called out. Isaac was a valued customer—the only blond among Harianto’s clients. Above the barber’s wall mirror was a plaque bearing an Arabic inscription, a phrase from the Qur’an:
BISMILLAH AR-RAHMAN AR-RAHIM
. This stand-alone phrase was so common, Isaac could recognize what the Arabic script meant on sight: “In the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful.”

On the corner opposite the hospital gates was the Toko Sahabat, or the Friendship Shop. A crowd of shoppers, mostly families of patients, milled around its entrance. The boys slowed to a twisting crawl to pass through the congestion. The owner, Mr. Ah Kiat, hovered behind the two checkout girls on the registers, snuffling his nose into a handkerchief while his sharp eyes kept watch on everything. He always had that handkerchief in hand. The other students called him “Ah Choo.” Ah Kiat glanced out the doors at the discount clothes rack on the sidewalk and lowered his handkerchief to yell, “Udin, where are you? I’ve told you a dozen times to straighten out the sales rack.”

From behind the rack, a voice muttered, “By Allah, what does the bastard think I’m doing?” A young man wearing a dirty Iron
Mike Tyson T-shirt and an Iron Mike frown stepped out, pushing Isaac to the side.

Isaac protested. “Hey!
Awas lo!
”

The older boy pointed the handful of coarse hairs on his chin at Isaac as though they were porcupine quills, his face one big bad mood. Isaac, knowing that teenage nastiness transcended cultures, lowered his head and scooted along.
Oomph
—he ran right into a barrel belly encased in a blue security officer’s uniform. He looked up with a sinking heart at the broad black face and pale yellow eyes of Mr. Theophilus, the hospital’s Irianese chief of security.

“You be going where, Isak?” Mr. Theophilus asked in his peculiar outer-island patois.

“Just down to Ismail’s house,” Isaac said.

“Your mother, does she know this?”

“Of course she does.”

Behind the security chief, Ismail bounced from one foot to the other.

“And you are a Christian boy who tells no lies, is that so?”

“I always go out, she knows that. I wouldn’t be out if she didn’t know it.”

Mr. Theophilus’s eyes narrowed, but he stepped to the side. “This I will be asking her.”

The boys ran around the corner onto Hayam Wuruk Avenue, wide enough for six intercity buses to race side by side on four marked lanes or for any rambunctious mob to spread its elbows. They ran and ran, and the world that was behind Isaac grew smaller and smaller, dwindling down to a memory no more consequential
than a wad of Juicy Fruit gum stuck to the bottom of a tennis shoe. They ran past the flower shop with floral arrangements laid out in front like the life of man, from baby bouquets to funeral wreaths. They dodged the cutout cardboard Fuji girl who stood all green and smiles in front of the camera and photocopy shop. They sped up to pass the red-tiled house used as a children’s Islamic study hall, where Ismail was supposed to be in present attendance, chanting Qur’an verses with the others. They slowed down to a hopeful trolling pace in front of Pak Heru’s fruit shop.

Sure enough, Pak Heru called out, “Isak, wait.” Isaac’s dad had saved Pak Heru’s skin, in the literal sense of the term, for Graham Williams was a dermatologist as well as the hospital’s medical director. Pak Heru handed Isaac a tall tangerine slurp. He beamed at Isaac and waved away Isaac’s thanks.

Isaac and Ismail walked on, passing the cup back and forth to suck on the tangy ice shavings. They strolled by the establishment owned by Muhammad Ali Benny, a formerly indifferent Buddhist and avid boxing fan who had recited in front of two witnesses the
shahadah
—the Muslim confession of faith that there is only one God and Muhammad is His prophet, and had so become a strict Muslim. He continued to serve all faiths as a poor man’s dentist. He replaced the teeth he pulled with off-the-rack dentures made in Taiwan, enormous models of which were painted on a whitewashed window, huge pink things with painful-looking, beaver-size teeth. The
bismillah
sign in his dentist’s office was one of the most appropriately placed
bismillahs
in all of Wonobo. How many patients had those monster chompers levered into place as they
tearfully stared at the plaque proclaiming God’s compassion and mercy?

On one crumbling warehouse wall, posters had been pasted. The blaring red letters advertised a free
dangdut
show in the town square the following Sunday, with a silhouetted picture of a slinky female singer at the microphone.

“Hey, this ought to be fun,” Ismail said. “You want to go?”

The show was scheduled for the first Sunday of Spiritual Emphasis Week. Reverend Biggs would be arriving from mission headquarters that day to lead the week-long event, and Isaac knew from past years that he would be preaching both morning and evening sermons. But there would be no church service in the afternoon, and Isaac now had a secret gate to sneak out of the compound. “You bet,” he said. “Just remind me the day before.”

“So how is America?” Ismail asked. “Any
dangdut
there?”

“America is funny,” Isaac said. “You can drink the water. You don’t have to take off your shoes when you walk into a house. But you want to know what’s really funny?”

“What?”

“There’s no people there. Not in the country, anyway. You can drive and drive and drive and hardly see anyone out walking or working. It’s spooky.”

They passed the dirty, legless beggar sitting on his four-wheeled trolley in the bus stop’s dilapidated security post, a cup for coins placed beside the sidewalk. Isaac had no coins to give. He sucked up the last drops of the drink and tossed the empty cup into the gutter. Isaac Williams the American boy would have been
horrified at the littering, but at the moment he was Isaac Williams the Javanese
bulé
out with his best friend. In Java you scoured your houses and yards clean as heaven, and the jinns and the government took care of the rest.