A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [141]
“The tears were a surprise,” Harker remembered. “Who’s accustomed to having a fellow professional start crying in a private meeting over a disagreement about money? It should have told me how much stress she was under. What I took from that experience was what I would take from practically anyone: This is a person who is exhausted, who is extremely frustrated, and who is struggling. To this day, I don’t know if there were struggles in her personal life that made her especially concerned about the personal-expenses side of it. That was an issue that led to tears. I don’t know what it was anymore—about the housing, the car, not having enough gas money. These are little things that I had long since, in my own life, paid out of my own pocket. I was taken aback by some of it.”
Ann had found a small, sparsely furnished house in a kampung, a villagelike neighborhood within the city, where her neighbors were largely Indonesian. The street was so narrow, and space so tight, it took geometric precision for Sabaruddin to park Ann’s car in its allotted space. The house had a little living room with a bedroom off it, a study, a bathroom, and a kitchen. There was room in the back for the one woman she employed as her pembantu. (The Indonesian word means “helper” but is variously translated as house staff, housekeeper, or servant.) Rens Heringa found the place to be “a poky, uncared-for little house” in a neighborhood very different from where Ann had lived earlier. Gillie Brown, a younger British woman whom Development Alternatives Inc. had retained in Jakarta to handle financial management and records, as well as other matters, called the house “an incredibly humble sort of place.” But Ann was not like other consultants—those who spoke no Indonesian, lived in “smart houses,” and relied on Brown to make arrangements. Brown felt a certain affinity with Ann, though Ann was twenty years her senior. Brown had left the United Kingdom in her mid-twenties with her husband and their three children—a three-year-old, a two-year-old, and a five-week-old baby. They had gone to live in a village in Bangladesh, then on a rice farm in southern Somalia. Trained as an engineer, she had grown accustomed to working in professional settings dominated by men. It seemed to Brown that the humble house was what Ann had wanted—to live surrounded by Indonesians, buying her food on the street. To Brown, Ann seemed to feel she had come home.
Some of Ann’s oldest expatriate friends, including Nancy Peluso, had returned to the United States, but she picked up her friendships with Julia Suryakusuma, Yang Suwan, and others where she had left off. Made Suarjana, the young journalist Ann had first met in Yogyakarta in 1988, had moved by himself to Jakarta in February, though he would move with his wife and two children to Bali the following December. He saw Ann occasionally in Jakarta in 1994, he told me. When I asked him if he thought that Ann would have liked to have made a life with him, he told me she knew he was married. Her closest friends, however, did not remember Ann telling them that Suarjana had a wife. They told me they doubted that she knew—or if she did, that she must have believed the marriage was effectively over. Several, including Rens Heringa and Alice Dewey, used almost identical language in describing what Ann had told them about what had become of her relationship with Suarjana. “She told me that she felt that in the end, the difference in their ages