The Birdwoman's Palate Page 2

  In short, this whole avian flu mess had proven very disruptive: to my colleagues, my kitchen, my confit de canard, my aunt’s character, goddammit, and also, to a certain extent, my entire life.

  The meeting room on the second floor of Building C is uncharacteristically full, with well-groomed people in starched shirts standing around, trying not to look like idiots. They’re waiting for someone to take charge and tell them why they’re here. Their collective breath reeks of heavy breakfasts—fried rice, most likely, or steamed rice with last night’s leftovers. And still they’ve managed to arrive on time. Bastards.

  I dither at the door, toying with the idea of leaving.

  To be honest, these meetings bore me to tears. And every time the media covers a new case, the Ministry acts like it’s been hit by a tornado and calls everyone together.

  The case that caused the most panic? Another corruption case, thank you very much: an exposé of corrupt management in the avian flu vaccine factory outside Jakarta. Apparently, a Ministry official, quite a big gun, was involved. The police, the Finance Audit Board, and the Anti-Corruption Committee immediately started a finger-pointing contest. They investigated, declared their undying support for each other, denounced each other, then went back to declaring undying support. The Ministry shook like an old car whenever they pulled a new stunt.

  I heard the case did a number on the minister: high fever, shortness of breath, coughing, vomiting, and drastic loss of appetite, not to mention headaches, diarrhea, and a sore throat.

  I’m not sure what caused the minister to be so distressed, much less—what’s the word?—frail. Perhaps people began accusing the Ministry of exaggerating the national threat posed by avian flu. But that’s just my guess. A number of experts also insist that the government is going about it all wrong. Rather than storming onto individuals’ farms and slaughtering their fowls, they should focus on monitoring industrial breeding farms instead. They say it’s in those factory farms, both foreign-owned and local, that the malady truly began.

  Of course, the bureaucrats have their own opinions. I was once privy to a debate between bureaucrat T and my friend A, a health reporter. We were both invited by said bureaucrat to a restaurant in Krekot Bunder, famed for its fish head curry and fried paddy squab.

  A: Word is that this whole avian flu thing has been blown out of proportion on purpose, secretly funded by certain, um, “agencies” in the US. Their real objective is to make Indonesia a case study.

  Bureaucrat T: Nah.

  A: And that it’s been further exaggerated by international businesses trying to make billions of rupiah in profit from selling vaccines.

  Bureaucrat T: Nah.

  A: Not to mention played up by corrupt government officials trying to get their hands on national budget funds to “help alleviate the crisis,” all in the service of lining their own pockets, of course.

  Bureaucrat T: Bullshit.

  And right before my eyes, my friend A went stone silent, just like that, clearly not wanting to press the matter further. Really! What a wimp. I was so disappointed in him, partly because he turned out to be not that much of a reporter after all. Worse still, in a fit of anxiety and shame, he proceeded to devour all the curry, leaving nothing behind, only thorns and gills and what looked alarmingly like an eye. His mother obviously didn’t teach him good manners. And to cap it all off, there was bureaucrat T, leering lecherously at me over his avocado smoothie, drizzled with gooey chocolate and condensed milk and served in a ridiculously tall glass. Wanna leave? his eyes asked.

  Then again, what if A in all his novice ineptitude was right about clamming up? For the facts of the matter were, and remain, puzzling: the minister, instead of burrowing into a hole and letting things blow over, made a miraculous recovery and demanded that the production of new vaccines—ones for humans—be resumed.

  Do I have my own take on this? Damn right I do: we have no need for such a vaccine because there’s no evidence of the virus spreading through human-to-human contact. None. Besides, before such a project can go forward, all kinds of things need to happen first: an official endorsement from the proper authorities, further investigation by parliament working committees, blah blah blah. The red tape stretches a mile long.

  But I never said a word, not now, not then, and not even a few months ago when I bumped into bureaucrat T during one of those interminable meetings at the Ministry. Why rock the boat? Why rock anything? And so it is that OneWorld keeps getting brought in, kept in the loop, and cooped up in laborious meetings like this one. Or rather, why I keep getting brought in, looped, and cooped.

  So here I am once again, late for work and hungry as fuck.

  I enter the meeting room and feel all eyes on me. Everybody looks genuinely perturbed. Maybe they’ll let me have my breakfast after all.

  “Morning, Aruna. How are you?” someone says.

  How are you? I feel slightly terrorized, as if everyone in the room is actually part of me, but disguised as other people, and they’re all ganging up on me because they know me better than I know myself. I try to focus on the person who’s just asked me the question: a woman, middle-aged, someone I then realize is from the Ministry’s Directorate General of Empowerment. Just another bureaucrat to deal with. I don’t remember her name.

  “Have you had breakfast, dear? Here, have a cream puff.” She gestures to a box of baked goods someone has brought in.

  I feign a smile while sidling quickly to the corner by the window, as far away from the round table as possible. Before she can say anything else, I ask, “Where’s Irma?”

  “Still with the reporters. There’s been another case of avian flu.”

  “Really. Where?” I keep a businesslike tone—the one I keep for strangers and my mother.

  “In some village in Bogor. Gorowong, I think. A boy, four years old.”

  “Okay. Well. That’s probably why she isn’t here.”

  Irma Shihab is the go-to person at DOCIR and hence a key member of the Ministry’s staff. She’s the one tasked with talking to the media and international institutions like the Global Health Institute. She also gets to step up to the plate whenever there’s a crisis to be averted. Funnily enough, these crises always seem to occur when the head of DOCIR decides to take a long coffee break in some five-star establishment and doesn’t even bother coming back to the office.

  I like Irma. She has a lovely smile and a kind face. She’s also the only person I actually enjoy talking to in this bureaucratic snake pit. I like that she knows where to eat, and more impressively, she knows where to eat in the more obscure parts of Chinatown, which is where most good food is. Also, though she doesn’t eat pork, she never bats an eye when she sees her work colleagues supping on the forbidden meat.

  “Don’t you fear the fires of hell?” I asked her once.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” she said. “I may not eat pork myself, but far be it from me to prevent a hungry woman like you from noshing on her noodles.”

  “Noodles,” she called them, barely even blinking, though in truth you almost couldn’t see the noodles for the char siew—those glistening slices of barbequed pork, so richly lacquered it was borderline obscene. I remember wanting to say something equally profound about her faith, a reciprocal gesture, but she said what she said with such earnestness. It was the same attitude she had about her job, her family, her favorite niece and nephew, her modest but tasteful art collection. For a brief moment, I thought I was in love with her.

  In contrast, my dislike for this other woman—this overfamiliar, cream-puff-proffering bureaucrat—is growing by the minute. But I have to play nice, so I ask mundane questions in a bored-sounding voice: where the case has been referred to, when the epidemiology test was conducted, whether the lab results are available, and so on. She seems to pick up my veiled recalcitrance and replies in the same dismissive tone.

  As soon as the case was diagnosed, she says, the patient was brought to Hospital X, pronto, and within
twenty-four hours the patient’s house and surrounding area were combed. Every conceivable spot, no stone left unturned. There’s a muted sadism in the way she stresses the words “spot” and “stone.” She reminds me of the principal at my primary school—a nun who had a reputation for welcoming every stray cat that came her way with open arms; yet, before my time, she’d also belted a whole generation of students for the slightest misdeed.

  Suddenly I realize something isn’t quite right.

  “Wait,” I say. “Why wasn’t I told?”

  “How would I know?” the woman snaps. “Why didn’t you know already? Bogor’s practically next door.”

  I consider her answer for a while. It’s petty and unprofessional, but since no one in her position is paid to be anything other than petty and unprofessional, I let it go. She doesn’t seem to be the right person to ask anyway. My instinct tells me that the government rushed in—no surprise there—to put a lid on the investigation before the big, bad media machine had a chance to weigh in. Not that I don’t understand, or even occasionally approve of this impulse. In most cases, the media always messes up things anyway: an incident is blown out of proportion, and everybody goes apeshit. And the government is the last institution to know how to handle everybody going apeshit.

  But I’m still unappeased. Why didn’t the Ministry call us over? Is it possible that they’ve stopped trusting us? Is it possible that this is a special meeting to axe us OneWorld consultants and appoint someone else?

  The woman stares at me, unable to mask her disdain. I blink an imaginary dust particle from my eye and shove a hand into my bag, pretending to look for something. Suddenly, she perks herself up and joins the consultants from the Global Health Institute, who orbit the round table like vultures.

  As usual, they own the space. I’ve forgotten the name of the American with eyes like raisins stuck on a snowman’s face. He looks like a rodent and talks all the time. One thing’s for sure, his underling, Katrin—from Flores, and drop-dead gorgeous—is completely smitten with him: her mouth hangs open as she takes in every word he says.

  More people are taking their seats at the table. Along with the mouseman and the beauty queen from the Global Health Institute, there are twelve people from SoWeFit, aka the Ministry—including three DOCIR officials and their secretary, the dislikable cream-puff profferer, and that Nina woman from R&D. Also in attendance are two officials from another ministry—the Ministry of Agriculture—and a bunch of people I don’t know: academic types, from their distracted gazes, and assorted individuals from the private sector.

  There’s a lull, and I find myself glad that Leon isn’t here. He’s a consultant, too, but for the Global Health Institute. Two months ago, he ratted me out to my boss at OneWorld when he caught me stuffing my face with chicken wings during an out-of-town work assignment when everyone else was dealing with dead chicken of a different kind. Granted, I was guilty as charged, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a jerk. He is a jerk who thinks he’s God’s gift to women. So, okay, he is very good-looking. But I’m glad he’s not here for another reason. I don’t think I could handle the sight of him drooling all over Katrin like a stupid teenage boy.

  It’s 9:42. More cream puffs and some lemper—little rice dumplings stuffed with chicken—are offered to me. This time by Tam. He’s a lecturer in veterinary medicine at the Agriculture Institute in Bandung and, like me, a consultant for the Ministry—someone I actually don’t particularly dislike (though that’s not saying much). I’m momentarily seized by the urge to say something hackneyed like “Et tu, Tam?” But he’s sharp. He sees my situation quite clearly.

  “All alone, huh?”

  Damn Tam.

  “Yup, just me.”

  “Hmm.”

  I know he really wants to say something. His eyes dart this way and that. I quickly look down at my BlackBerry. I’m just about to start a round of Doodle Jump, the only game I have any semblance of competence in, when Tam begins squawking like one of my aunt’s late birds.

  “I’ve said it a thousand times. We can’t blame SoWeFit for everything. The responsibility also lies with those dipshits at the Ministry of Livestock. They should have come up with an effective vaccine for the birds long ago. But why bother when you can create a vaccine that’s both useless and expensive?” He pauses. “Still, joking aside—”

  “You call that a joke?” I ask.

  He ignores me.

  “How many times have I said that veterinarians are the first line of defense? As long as we’re still being sidelined, this is exactly where we’ll always be—stuck in perpetual stasis. Holding our useless meetings, issuing useless statements to the press, swapping out useless consultants.”

  I try to ignore the possible jab.

  “Okay, okay. But what are you saying that we don’t already know? We all know the Ministry of Livestock has been co-opted.” I deliberately linger on that word, “co-opted,” such a sterling example of almost half a century of bubble-headed bureaucratese. “The culture of corruption pervades vaccine production. But what do you expect? The people who work there are mostly party people.”

  Culture of corruption. There’s more superlative gibberish for you.

  “A very particular party,” says Tam ominously.

  “Yes, yes. Of course,” I say impatiently. “What’s new, though? Why kick up a fuss now? We’ve been working for a long time with SoWeFit, you and I. Six fucking years. Being too outspoken will just get us fired.”

  He shrugs. “Whatever.”

  “Hey,” I say, “six years isn’t bad in exchange for some ass-licking.”

  He stops talking. Despite myself, I realize I’m angry at him, as if he were responsible for my imagined precariousness.

  When Irma finally enters the meeting room at five minutes to ten, she looks tense. With her are six people: a foreign consultant whose face I’ve been seeing a lot in DOCIR internal meetings, a DOCIR director who oversees avian flu, and four others I’ve never met.

  It’s when I realize that the four others are the heads, respectively, of the Directorate General of Animal Contagious Diseases, the Directorate General of Outbreak Management, the Directorate General of Zoonotic Diseases, and the Directorate General of National Surveillance that I know this is not just some routine meeting. It’s a full-blown emergency.

  Two and a half hours after the meeting wraps up, Irma and I are sitting at a restaurant at the corner of Jalan Salemba Raya. I’m not quite sure why we’ve ended up here, rather than, say, one of the local Arab joints, which are still pretty decent even if they don’t hold a candle to the glorious gems in Little Arabia in the Condet Pejaten area, the ones that do goat and biryanis because they were born for it. Or why not the Padang food stall in front of the Salemba prison that is always packed to the gills? When Irma walks ahead of me into the restaurant, I notice her usually flat stomach is looking a tad paunchier than usual. Terrible. Not the paunch, but my noticing it and feeling a little smug, as though we’re in the same league to begin with.

  “You must want somewhere quiet,” I offer, trying to make sense of her choice while noticing too that her arm muscles are taut from all that early morning Bikram Yoga she does. That’s right. Early morning. Bikram Yoga. Packed like sardines in an airless room, at 105 fucking degrees. I’d rather die.

  I check her out again. Not bad for forty-four. Not bad for any age.

  “No,” she says, laughing with surprising lightness. “I just want someplace with healthy food.”

  I sit there, trying not to hate myself too much.

  We study the menu: Sayur Asam, Karedok,Rrujak Buah—tamarind vegetable soup, blanched vegetables in spicy peanut sauce, spicy fruit salad. I watch as Irma’s eyes linger briefly over Lontong Sayur, a Medanese dish: rice cakes drenched in a coconut-cream-based vegetable curry. While she hesitates—lontong sayur may have vegetables, but it’s far from virtuous—I quickly place an order for Kol Nenek, a rare find, not just in Jakarta, but also in its home province, Central J
ava, in whose cuisine this restaurant purports to specialize. I try to explain to Irma that this delicacy isn’t as terrible as it sounds, because I know what she’s thinking: Doesn’t “kol nenek” mean, of all things, “Grandma’s cabbage,” and is there anything more homely and harmless than that? But nothing could be further from the truth. The dish actually consists of tiny boiled snails swimming in a pungent pool of fermented soybean gravy.

  Irma isn’t interested. She seems preoccupied.

  I, on the other hand, am pleased as punch. The details flood back to me. Right after the meeting she grabbed me by the arm and whispered in my ear, huskily, urgently, like a secret lover: “Let’s escape. Lunch. Just the two of us.”

  This, I should stress, doesn’t happen very often. Everywhere she goes, people trail after her like the tail of a comet. It’s no secret that she’s likely going to be the next head of DOCIR—and the first woman, too. She’s used to living on borrowed time and a hell of a lot of stress. Whereas I—I am a world champion of petty disaster. My feelings, if they count as feelings at all, are too minor league for the likes of her. Yet today she wants to escape, to have lunch, just the two of us. On one of her worst days.

  As we wait for our food, I try to give her time to absorb all that has taken place during the meeting. She looks at me with her clear brown eyes—so sincere, so troubled, so beautiful.

  “It isn’t as if it’s, like, easy.” She sighs. “I mean, this whole thing.”

  I nod.

  “If we say these recent cases aren’t cause enough for concern—that there are still no known cases of avian flu spreading through human-to-human contact—people will think we’re being passive and incompetent. I mean, I’m not saying it isn’t true: people in Indonesia have been getting infected with avian flu since 2005. But as long as the biomedical industry in this country has an interest in pushing homegrown vaccine production, they’ll keep stirring the shit and causing public panic.”