Anna and the Green Man

Anna came into Daniel’s life with the ease of sunlight through a window; as if a cool breeze had stirred the afternoon curtains.

Her father, Pak Kumis, was a fisherman. Each day the brittle chuffing of the diesel on his skiff would shatter the otherwise peaceful morning air as Kumis and dozens of fishermen like him set off up-river from Bukit Layang to make their quota on Borneo’s huge river system.

Daniel was a consultant in a poverty alleviation project running in the area. He had given Kumis the role of team leader for a group of fishermen selected for a productivity study. Kumis had to ensure his group filled out questionnaires which Daniel used to assist in developing their prospects.

When Daniel came one afternoon to pick up the last of these reports, Kumis invited him into his home for a cup of tea. Daniel climbed the five wooden steps to the door and ducked a little to enter.

Kumis’s daughter and her younger brother had been playing in the bedroom and the girl ran out like a skittish filly on all fours, neighed, and then galloped out the back to put water on to boil, glancing back in to see just who the tall guest was.

Pak Kumis called her in and introduced her. Her name was Anna. She squatted on the floor and Kumis instructed her to kiss Daniel’s hand. He held it out and Anna took it gently, turning his palm up and giving it a kiss, as is the custom for children with respected visitors.

At this point Pak Kumis asked if Daniel might teach her some English to improve her chances of getting into one of the better schools.

Daniel explained that he would be moving back to Palangkaraya, the provincial capital, in six weeks. He normally lived there but to avoid travel back and forth while collecting data for the final report he was staying in a little farmhouse that he had purchased the year before.

He agreed that if Anna could work after school in that house during the next six weeks, helping with cleaning and so forth, then he could probably find a little time to give her lessons and perhaps by the next intake she could do better on the exam.

Pak Kumis was delighted with the arrangement. Anna started coming to Daniel’s little farmhouse after school. She arrived about midday, and worked until four in the afternoon, three days a week.

Daniel couldn’t come to terms with the sensations that stirred in him. Certainly he found the young girl a pleasant and hardworking house-help. But he also became aware that he was increasingly looking forward to her appointed work days and even more to the short hour after work when he taught her English; which she picked up quickly.

He conducted these sessions with a rigorous formality, not his usual approach, but adopted to avoid giving himself the opportunity, otherwise easily afforded, to seek a more relaxed relationship. On the contrary he was somewhat demanding, rarely looking her in the eye and particularly careful not to touch her hand or pat her on the head, although the desire to do exactly that often arose in him.

Each day, when she asked permission to go home, he would give her a little pocket money and watch her walk up the road until she disappeared over the crest. A hovering tenderness in him followed her as if she were his own child and left him already anxious to have her back again scrubbing away at his dirty jeans on the bathroom floor, sweeping the driveway, or watering the pot plants with a little bucket.

The young girl was rigorous in her appointed prayer times. She slipped on a white rukuh at three in the afternoon and proceeded to four raka’at followed by a round of whispered zikir, the Islamic equivalent of meditation, rather like the Catholic rosary. This was then punctuated with what seemed a rather ardent appeal to heaven about something.

She did her prayers in the bedroom, apparently for privacy, but Daniel would position himself at those times at his filing cabinet, which stood opposite the opening, pretending to search for documents. He furtively watched her form in admiration. The beauty of her motions of surrender moved something in his heart that had not been touched for years.

When she had completed her set tasks she would come into the living room where he was reading. She would sit against the wall, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes lowered, attendant upon his next order.

On one such occasion he felt she had been working a little over hard considering it was so hot and humid.

‘Anna, are you ready for more work? Or, would you like a drink?’

‘Work. I have finished the bedding’.

‘I’ll get you a drink first. It’s too hot today. You just relax a minute.’

He squatted before her and handed her the glass, waiting for her to finish. He knew she was thirsty and took a special interest in her drinking, which seemed at once to satisfy quite another thirst in himself. Her healthy quaffing: the gulping of her throat muscles, the lick of her lips, the water that trickled to her neck and chest, had a quality that restored something in him.

He rose and went to the porch, not knowing what prompted him to do this. Perhaps it was the deeply organic magic of that water trickling down her neck.

He had recently planted about an acre of corn in a borrowed field opposite his house. The stalks had reached maturity and were laden with cob and he had been like an expectant father all that week.

As he looked out over the corn it was stirred by a heavy gust of wind, this sudden swell rolling through the stalks like a wave. This wave mounted until its surge blustered through the leaves of the great bread fruit tree in the front yard, where it rang the wind chime at his front door, then died like a sigh, returning a total calm.

It seemed odd to Daniel. It had been dead calm and windless all morning, and such strong gusts were rare.

Great thunderclouds were banked up on the distant horizon. The late afternoon sun mounted over them, streaming bright rays that fanned out like a Cecil B. Demille covenant.

The dry season would soon end.

At that moment he felt watched. Turning back he found Anna looking at him from her spot on the floor, framed by the entrance. Her gaze was steady, entering him with a warm intimacy.

He would reflect a thousand times on this moment but he could only say that it felt as if she opened something in his forgotten self, as one might open a dusty jewel case, tenderly brushing it off, gently prying open the lid.

Upon this touch something moved within him, a shadow with wings. He heard himself say ‘Ann-naah!’ as if delighted and with rather too much the inflection of love on the ‘naah’ part.

Upon this exclamation he made an embarrassed retreat to one side of the porch, hoping neither the inflection of love nor the blush on his face had been noticed. There he took breath, feeling foolish, trying to compose himself, looking desperately hard at the sky then down at the cracked floorboards to distract his feelings.

The deepest temptation, that of new life, had rushed into his heart and that heart had leapt and darted in mad delight. Many moments of confusion followed and not a little pacing on the porch before he regained control.

In those moments he was forced to admit that he had just fallen in love with a nine year old girl. Whatever that ‘love’ was, it felt terribly real, something in him insisting ‘this is she, for whom you have waited, for whom you have asked.’

That night after sunset prayer he involved God in the matter, in this way believing that whatever happened would be His work and leave him blameless. As he knelt in the dark he let all the confused flow of what he was feeling come out.

It seemed that through watching her childlike yet intense devotional movements he had exposed himself to something in the girl that was uniquely beautiful, renewing a yearning to revisit something long forgotten. Then too, there were those little playful flashes of light in her eyes and her carriage of herself; straight, purposeful; something so utterly appealing for which he had no name but ‘alive’ and to which he ached to be close. There was no way out for him. And if there was a way out he did not want to know about it.

So he asked God, if He thought it good, to arrange that the girl become his wife. It was that simple he thought. He considered himself as only confirming what the corn gods had already brought through the stir in the fields that afternoon.

He knew too that his already over-tried wives would be aghast, sighing ‘Why Daniel? Why?’ And he knew that he would need their honest approval.

There had been a furtive agreement roughed out with both of them. The gist of it was that were he to be loved by someone, genuinely loved, then they would consider sharing him with such a woman, and she among them become a sister. This was his understanding of the agreement although he had nothing in writing from either of them on the matter. What was firm was that everything had to be in the open.

Admittedly there was more that he hoped for in this shared act between them. He hoped to finally make Gandasari, who was called Sari, and his first wife, Juliet, ‘sisters’ through this joint sacrifice; sisterhood being a condition to which they had not yet fully subscribed.

Sari doubted there could be such a woman, whom she called ‘your dream girl’, on the planet.

‘Daniel you are half blind, losing your teeth, always scraping for money, already married to two women, and have young children who need your time. How could anyone ever want to be with you? I cannot imagine. I absolutely cannot imagine! I don’t even know why I want to be with you! Can you imagine any woman on this earth putting up with a husband who is spending all his spare energy on the pursuit of other women? Just try. Take two minutes out and just imagine that!’

Sari had warned him not to bring for consideration impoverished widows, village girls thinking he was the American Dollar incarnate, tarnished divorcees, or ex-prostitutes looking to settle down. And she couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t withdraw herself over the issue. He remembered scowling at that last remark, insisting that it had no validity if she withdrew. It would be he who backed down in such a case.

She had then become silent, sighed, and asked, ‘Why don’t you do the honest thing and divorce me. Divorce us both. I don’t understand this game you are playing.’

At these times he couldn’t resist quoting the Prophet, (blessings and peace be upon him), ‘The most detestable thing for me, and in my religion, is divorce.’

Juliet said it was a matter of proof. If a sensible woman would wish to be taken into his already overburdened life and share it with yet two other women who themselves were still not really happy with sharing him, well that would indeed be a miracle. She said it would now only be the emergence of such a woman that would force her and Sari to admit that there might be something in this otherwise disturbing quest; a quest he had now pursued for years, and which had created so much pain and confusion for them both. ‘Show us this woman!’

Juliet then reminded him that she had given way to his request to marry Sari on this basis. ‘So was that a mistake?’ she asked. Was Sari now a failed state, a true wife who just hadn’t worked out? ‘Or what, Daniel? Just what is it you are doing? What is it you want? What must we do to satisfy you? Is there going to be no end to this? Do you think any sane woman would want anything but divorce in answer to this?’

He couldn’t answer easily. He said they could divorce him if that was their wish.

‘You’re exhausting!’ they cried.

Nothing in Daniel would relinquish them and the family they had together. He just wanted to stretch it a little more. He knew this seemed perverse. But he would argue that it was all in the stretching, that in that acceptance was an opportunity little afforded in the average marriage, an opportunity to widen their feelings and create new bonds. The women rather saw an obstacle in the acceptance part, feeling they did not have the strength, and suspecting in him other motives.

But Daniel was hopelessly serious. There was no ‘life’ for him without this pursuit of the ‘miracle’ woman who would light him up as he imagined.

Juliet at least understood that for Daniel life was a confusing puzzle which he felt had to be solved before he died. That was a feeling she shared with him. Somehow the experience of the soul mate was an important piece in that puzzle. She was therefore willing to allow him a bit of leeway on the prospect that he was going to find something real that he could share with her, something that could bring their relationship truly to life.

Juliet, unlike Sari, believed in magic.

Juliet and Sari knew of the principle behind truly practiced polygamy; that they could discover empowering bonds and intimacies in a relation of sisters, joined upon a common care, not only upon a common man, but with each other. This was something secreted in the depths of female desire and having no name.

‘There’s this thing I cannot name.’

Juliet had spoken these words into the darkness and to the stars at the window.

‘What?’ Daniel encouraged.

‘I mean, once when I laid my hand on Sari’s belly, she was about seven months then, she had felt a kick and wanted me to feel you know, and then there was this... well, we were looking in each other’s eyes. We felt something; I don’t mean the kicking... I mean... it was almost like... ’

He didn’t know what she meant but remained quiet, hoping it would dawn on him.

‘Sometimes, I admit, I wish... ’

‘What?’

‘That I could watch.’

‘Watch what?’ he said, almost turning to her. But then, realizing, he said no more; nor she. Such, often, were their odd communications on this matter.

Daniel just stared with her out the window, realizing how oddly bright the stars were and how ridiculously clear the night.

Daniel had promoted an unusual idea. He firmly believed that any woman added in love to the family would add to all their love together; that his finding a ‘soul mate’ would bring them all finally together in that condition, making them all ‘soul mates’. It was a little difficult for them to accept, yet never was it entirely dismissed.

Sari made fun of the true wife concept every chance she could get, insisting the one-eyed vegetable woman who stopped in with her basket of wares every Tuesday morning was indeed his true love. She waxed prolific in her detailed accounts of their trysts, actually quite entertaining. Her point was not lost on Daniel. Nevertheless, he could see there survived in her an abiding curiosity to see just what he would come up with.

And there he now stood, believing that he had finally found this creature in the person of Anna.

He knew it would be a miracle for his wives if that woman who loved him was a generous and honest child as Anna seemed to be. He played out in his imagination, again and again in the years that followed, the possible scenarios of his ‘breaking the news’ to them. But that was dangerous. He knew he must not allow himself to day dream. He must find the real track down this road. Or so he told himself.

There was no way he was going to mention this matter to them until it had some greater basis in reality. As his heart began to settle in its new position, he began to admit to himself that he would have to wait at least six years for her to become a woman and for the minimal conditions of the modern world to be satisfied. How long that seemed. How very long.

He should have also been aware that it was highly unlikely that this girl, this Anna, would be interested in him six years on or ever, but then that objection did not enter his thoughts; strangely, not at all. He would simply need patience he thought; lots of patience.

The millennium clock had been about to strike 2000 when Daniel was offered the chance to buy the little farmhouse where Anna would later work for him. He had bought it on a whim, or he thought it a whim.

It was set in the midst of a cluster of farms called ‘Little Bali’ due to the preponderance of Balinese migrants who had settled there. The farm’s two hectares carried a few palm, coffee, and fruit trees. Behind the house an old Mango stretched its ancient arms over a small ravine. In that ravine ran a stream that meandered its way through neighboring fields, running down to join the great Kahayan River near the neighboring village of Bukit Layang, about two kilometers away.

Perhaps it had been ‘millennium madness’ that had gripped him as it did many; a desire for new worlds to drop out of the clouds. He had kept his little purchase a secret, because he immediately began to believe that somewhere on that land was a magical well from which he could draw a medicine for his life, or perhaps a place where he could plant his own Garden of Eden.

As a European Union project consultant he should have been embarrassed by these arguably delusional thoughts. He was supposed to be functioning on the EU’s tempered policy of ‘small, defined and achievable’.

He had lived on the farm from time to time to save travel time to the project area while Sari had chosen to stay on in town.

She was still nursing their recently born son, Davy. Naturally she preferred the convenience of the bustling capital, their well-equipped home, and the two maids who eased her burdens.

It was while living in the little farm house that Daniel had first toyed with farming, and corn.

His aged and limber neighbor, ‘Pak Bali’ as people called him, sat on a stump rolling a cigarette. He had already done the hard part for Daniel: planting and then watering for weeks until the stalks were waist height.

‘Corn is an easy choice’ said Pak Bali. ‘It never fails if you plant it properly and water it.’ And with a bit of a twinkle in his voice he added that it could be good for Daniel’s ‘sakti’, his power, if he was very kind to the stalks, even petting and kissing them.

‘Corn is a divine food plant Mister Dani; like Manna from heaven. In fact it is under the direct order of God to help feed mankind.’

He had certainly never thought of corn in that way: ‘manna from heaven’.

He quickly got into watering it daily with a hose early in the morning as Pak Bali instructed; although the occasional petting and kissing of it did find him furtively glancing about to ensure he was alone. There were four hundred stalks. They took nearly an hour to water using a 125 watt pump. He enjoyed this meditative slaking of the corn’s thirst and was delighted by the simple satisfaction this gave as the lovely green cobs finally emerged.

Daniel’s suspicions of a magical earth were aroused only a few days into this routine. First he thought it was his imagination. He began to pay closer attention so as to be sure he was not fooling himself.

The magic consisted in a vaporous yellow-white powder or what Walt Disney would call ‘pixie dust’, that substance Tinker Bell trailed in her wake, a kind of barely visible light or sweetness. It seemed to come up through the corn roots. The sensation of its vaporous presence became stronger as the cobs reached maturity. He experienced it as giving him a tickling warmth just under the navel. Entranced by this phenomenon, watering the corn became his covert religion.

One morning while watering a steamy rush of conviction had heated his blood. In that moment he was certain he held the attention of those lanky stalks and in a hissed whisper commanded, ‘Bring her to me!’

This ‘Her’ of course was his ‘twin soul’ or ‘soul mate’, his ‘true wife’; that ‘she’ for whom his yearning had once again grown to bursting.

These communications with the corn and his pixy dust tingles were not experiences he shared with anyone.

Deserving or not he had asked and now, only months after his appeal, the corn gods had spoken. Young Anna, he felt certain, was ‘Her’. Whatever conditions would be required of him to pay for this incredible gift he was, he thought, ready to suffer.

Carefully he stored it in his most secret file, marked ‘delusional obsessions’, and hid the key.

As in all fairy tales there would be conditions attached. Of course he knew that. However, in his haste he signed a blank contract. The terms and conditions could come later.

Time moved on, and life successfully swamped his heart with a surplus of dubious concerns. There were periods when he forgot Anna entirely. Yet all was submerged just under the surface, waiting.

His journey through the shadow of the valley of death and a stay in purgatory were to be less than he probably deserved, and probably attempts by the gods to address the un-preparedness of his heart for what Anna would one day show him.

In fact it was only shortly after his consternation on the porch and his hasty signing of the etheric agreements with the great universe that the machinery went quietly into motion.