A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [113]
“She felt she had to do it,” her friend Rens Heringa recalled. “And she did it.”
She would go back for a year, she seems to have imagined. She would return to Honolulu in time to register at the University of Hawai‘i in late August and would stay through the spring semester. She would audit whatever basic theory courses were offered, take her comprehensives, and defend her dissertation before the end of the spring term. To support herself and Maya, she hoped to find a research or teaching position. “Something in the areas of peasant studies, women’s studies or applied anthropology would probably be most suitable,” she wrote to her department chairman, Alan Howard. She asked Dewey to look out for a two-bedroom apartment or house-sharing arrangement on a good bus route or within two miles of campus. Then she set about packing up her life in Jakarta—finishing up evaluations on several grants, clearing out her office, moving out of her house, finding homes for her animals. She would stop in Singapore with Maya for two days for insurance physicals. She would make one last visit to Yogyakarta and her villages, on which Dewey would join her. She suggested Dewey pass up the opportunity to make the return trip to Hawaii with her and Maya. “After nearly nine years in Indonesia, I will probably need to hire a camel caravan and an elephant or two to load all our baggage on the plane, and I’m sure you don’t want to see all those airline agents weeping and rending their garments,” she wrote. Her sea freight shipping allowance of three thousand three hundred pounds, she said, “should about cover my batik collection.”
At a farewell party at Yang Suwan’s house in Kebayoran Baru, Yang told Ann to choose anything in the house as a farewell gift. In the years they had known each other, Yang had made a point of bringing Ann handicrafts from remote reaches of Indonesia that Ann had not visited. She admired Ann’s knowledge and never dared give her anything second-rate. Yang had built up her own collection, too. One of the most beautiful pieces in it was a sarong by Masina, a batik artist from Cirebon on the north coast of Java, where the mixing of Javanese, Sundanese, and Chinese influences had produced a rich culture and a distinctive style of batik. The pattern on the sarong was mega mendung, or rain clouds in reds and blues, dyed naturally in just the right weather. The sarong hung on a wall in her house. On the day of the party, the house was filled with Ann’s friends—Julia Suryakusuma, Wahyono Martowikrido, Pete Vayda, and many others. When Yang made the offer of any object in the house, Ann spun on her heel without a moment’s hesitation and pointed to the sarong, displayed on the wall directly behind her.
“This!” she said.
Perhaps Ann had had her eye on that batik for a long time, Yang thought later. After all, Ann knew everything you had in your house. Ann knew her friends, too, Yang thought, fondly.
“She knew I could never say no.”
In early July, a shipping company packed up Ann’s possessions: batiks, ikats, wayang puppets, wood carvings, wall decorations, paddy-field hats, ten boxes of books, three wooden chests, one trunk of clothes, a rattan sofa, five rattan tables, two rattan cabinets, a rattan bed, kitchen utensils, one mirror, and so on. The total weight fell well short of the 3,300-pound limit.
Then she and Maya headed for Honolulu, leaving Indonesia behind.
“It wouldn’t have surprised me if she had stayed forever,” Sidney Jones, Ann’s colleague, told me one afternoon in Jakarta,