Dr. M. Muhamad Angsar Kartakusuma left his supper to see them. He listened gravely as Barbara outlined the symptoms. Then he took a tongue depressor (the one item Barbara hadn’t thought to bring) and made an easy diagnosis—tonsillitis.
“A shot of penicillin”—he administered it almost before Jessica had time to flinch; “and these pills every four hours”—he handed an envelope to Barbara—“and I think you have nothing more to worry!”
“But—what about the rash?” Barbara protested.
Dr. Kartakusuma examined it briefly. “From heat,” he said, and added a box of medicated powder to relieve the itch.
The charge: nothing!
As Dr. Kartakusuma expressed it, “You are strangers in my country—and in trouble.” He shook hands all around and returned to his supper.
After several days of medication—complicated by the discovery that she had a penicillin allergy—Jessica was recovered enough to pour into her Journal a hundred pages of impressions of Bali, which she has since epitomized in a single word: eerie! The street noises outside her hotel room; a flute and the weird cadence of a gamelin; an old sow who splashed her way up the drainage ditch every morning; the startling cry of a gekko lizard in the night—these apparently had merged in her delirium with distorted memories of ceremonies she had seen, such as the tooth filing and the cremation. Most haunting of all, she and her grandmother had had an experience the rest of us did not share. One night, escorted by a fellow guest at the hotel, they had ridden many miles into the country to witness a kris dance at a village temple. The dancers had gone into trance and ended by plunging the twisted blades of their daggers into their own bodies “right up to the handle!” as Jessica insisted. People near her had fallen to the ground, “invaded by spirits,” and Jessica could actually feel the ground shaking.
As she summed it up, “It was enough to make anybody get tonsillitis—or something!”
We could have spent much longer in Bali, but if we were to get another sampling of Indonesia, the capital, we had to push on. In Jakarta, Marjorie Harris—a childhood friend of Barbara’s—and her husband Mike, of the Ford Foundation, were waiting for us, and Jessica was looking forward to meeting their thirteen-year-old Susan.
Remembering our violently rough entry into Benoa, I put my foot down firmly on Minnetta’s proposal that she return to Jakarta on the Phoenix. No matter how indomitable the spirit, the bones of a woman in her seventies are liable to be brittle and the ways of the sea, especially in interisland channels, can be rugged, as we had cause to know. And so, using my authority as captain, I sent her back to Java by plane, to wait for us there.