here, combined with the in-migration of people from surrounding areas drawn by the availability of all these goods and services.
According to an informal pact dating back to colonial times, the half of New Guinea north of the mountains was the turf of Protestant missionaries and the south was Catholic. This explained the existence, in Tuaba, of a new Catholic cathedral and an associated complex of religious schools, convent, hospital, and so on. White European Catholics could, of course, go to church there; but it had all been built mostly to serve a flock of Papuans who had been converted by missionary activity that was still going on. Thus Sister Catherine, the Papuan nun Willem had broken bread with in The Hague on the morning of the great storm, which now seemed a hundred years and a hundred light-years away.
Sound arguments could be, and often were, constructed as to why all these different groups should not get along. To nationalist Indonesians, the white mining companies were colonizers pure and simple, only allowed to be here because the people who had been in charge of Indonesia in the 1970s had realized that if they were ever going to attract development capital they were going to have to make things good for the likes of Brazos RoDuSh. That company’s efforts to train Indonesian engineers and managers—effectively nationalizing the operation one head count at a time—were, from a certain point of view, particularly sneaky forms of cultural imperialism.
To the Papuans, it was the Indonesians who were the foreign colonizers, moving to places like Tuaba in their tens and hundreds of thousands and putting up mosques and such. The Christian whites were no better in principle, but they had ties to media outlets, human rights organizations, and the United Nations, which might be of some help in enabling the Papuans to get their country back. For its being part of Indonesia made no sense on any level. Most activists were in the orderly, systematic mold of Beatrix and Sister Catherine. But there were enough angry young men up in the hills with guns, machetes, and dynamite to justify the presence in Tuaba of Indonesian black ops security forces. Obvious targets had been hardened—as anyone who tried to sneak
into Uncle Ed’s compound would soon discover—and so when violence happened it tended to be on weak links in the security chain: people getting shot by assailants on motor scooters while out running errands. Slurry pipelines dynamited in inaccessible swamps. Truck engines sabotaged. Adding to the overall feeling of paranoia and dread was the perception—right or wrong, it didn’t matter—that some of those outrages had actually been committed by Indonesian security cops pretending to be Papuan nationalists, to justify their presence here and boost their budget. Living in a separate bubble from all that were the expats in their gated communities with their private security forces drawn from a pool of mostly Western ex-military.
“What the hell are you doing here?” asked Uncle Ed, after giving Willem a decent interval to unpack and get settled.
“Getting drunk,” Willem said, which was not wrong. He had found his way out to a sort of screened-in patio adjacent to the badminton court and uncorked a bottle of duty-free whiskey he had scored while changing planes in Jakarta. Not at the old airport, which was usually underwater, but at the new one they had just built on higher ground. Ed was finishing up a sweaty doubles match with some of the usual crew of Chinese gaffers. This was the coldest part of the year. It was a little above room temperature, but extremely humid. Willem was almost comfortable in a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. No rain was spattering the tin roof at the moment, but it had been recently and it would be soon.
“I thought you were going to be the prime minister of the Netherlands or something!”
“For a brief moment, it looked like it was on the table, but . . .” Willem sipped his whiskey and tried to remember that brief moment. For all its apparent stability, Dutch politics could be convoluted. It had been in—what—December? No, after the holidays. He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about all that stuff.”
“Instead you are retired. And you come . . . here!?” Ed looked around. “Don’t get me wrong, you are most welcome. Would you like some tea, or are you going to stick with whiskey?”
“Whiskey is fine, thank you.”
“Then I will smoke.” Ed knocked an unfiltered cigarette from a pack—some Chinese brand—and bit slightly into the middle, creating a tear in the paper. He put the cigarette in his mouth crosswise and lit both of the ends, a glowing coal projecting to either side as he inhaled through the central hole. In Papua it was not an unusual practice, but for new arrival Willem it took a little getting used to. “You said another person is coming? A woman?” Ed asked. He knew that Willem was gay and so there was an implicit question.