Rofik and Teguh remained still, their gazes fixed upon Mrs Suharti, who now stood cloaked in silence, as though sifting through a weightless yet heavy truth.
Moments trickled by in hushed anticipation before Mrs Suharti drew a long, deliberate breath.
With quiet resolve, she turned her head towards Havi.
“Havi…” she began, her voice no louder than a whisper, soft as the hush of morning mist. “Before I say another word to Rofik and Teguh, I must ask you once more. Did you truly come here to offer them a job?”
Havi met her gaze with steady calm, then gave a single, assured nod, “Yes, Mrs Suharti,” he replied.
Turning now to face Rofik and Teguh, his eyes held a depth beyond his years, “Because the nature of this job…” he said, his voice gaining strength, “…requires men like them.” His words rang out, clear and unflinching.
Mrs Suharti closed her eyes briefly, as though giving silent consent to the inevitable.
Then, with a gentle tilt of her head, she nodded, “Very well,” she said softly, though each syllable bore the weight of certainty.
She turned to Rofik and Teguh once more, her expression now sharpened with quiet intensity, her voice composed yet charged with quiet power.
“What Havi meant when he spoke of selling your reputation, and how it intertwines with the work he proposes, is this…”
She paused, and the stillness around them thickened, as though even the air dared not interrupt.
“…Havi requires you both to serve as overseers and as guardians. That, at least, is how I’ve come to understand it,” she concluded, firm in tone, yet not without grace.
Rofik and Teguh exchanged a look, their brows knitted with unease.
“Overseers?” Rofik murmured, half in disbelief.
“And guardians?!” Teguh echoed, his voice pitched higher, as if the word itself was foreign to his tongue.
“What on earth does that mean?!” they exclaimed almost in unison, confusion and wariness twining like smoke in the air.
But Havi merely smiled, a quiet, composed smile, as if he were privy to a secret the world had overlooked.
“Mrs Suharti is quite right,” he said at last, his voice calm but resolute. “I am seeking the right people for something important. And the two of you, believe it or not, are precisely who I need.”
Rofik scoffed, “Us? You know exactly who we are. Our reputation isn’t something embroidered in gold. We’re criminals,” he said, the word sharp on his tongue.
“Exactly,” Havi replied, without hesitation. “And that’s why I have no doubt.”
The surrounding atmosphere fell silent again.
Rofik and Teguh stared at each other, the air between them thick with disbelief.
Havi’s words had landed oddly, too bold to be a joke, too calm to be madness.
“You’re not right in the head, Havi,” Rofik said, shaking his head. “Most people, when they need workers, go looking for saints. But you? You come to us.”
“Two men with no prospects, no compass, no future,” Teguh added, the edge in his voice softening into something that sounded almost like sorrow.
Havi rose to his feet, not in defiance, but with a kind of gentle determination.
He stepped closer, until his presence was impossible to ignore.
“You say you have no future?” he said quietly, eyes locked onto theirs. “I couldn’t disagree more.”
There was a pause.
“What do you mean?” Teguh asked, frowning as though trying to peer through a fog.
Rofik remained still, his gaze fixed on the floor, thoughts turning slowly like rusted gears.
"May I pose a question?" asked Havi, his voice light, almost offhand, but beneath it, a quiet weight lingered.
Rofik and Teguh raised their brows in unison, "You’ve been asking questions all evening," Rofik replied dryly, his tone a mixture of irritation and curiosity.
"Am I permitted or not?" Havi pressed, his voice rising a notch, not with anger, but with the insistence of someone nudging open a door others preferred closed.
"Fine, fine... Ask to your heart’s content," Teguh muttered, half-exasperated, half-resigned.
A ghost of a smile crossed Havi’s face, "Have either of you ever stolen a motorbike? Or a car?" he asked, the words slipping out with startling directness.
Rofik and Teguh turned toward one another, their expressions briefly caught between amusement and suspicion.
Then, in unspoken agreement, they shook their heads, not in denial, but as if to say, why bother asking what’s already written in stone?
"You grow stranger with every breath, Havi," Rofik said, his voice laced with disbelief. "That’s no secret. Every soul in this village and the next, knows what we’ve done."
"But you have, haven’t you?" Havi persisted, his eyes steady, his tone no longer casual.
"‘Have’, you say?" scoffed Teguh. "We’ve done it so many times, we lost count. It wasn’t a phase. It was survival."
In the stillness that followed, Mrs Suharti watched without a word.
Yet in the quiet chamber of her heart, something stirred.
A realisation, faint but undeniable. There was a pattern beneath Havi’s questions, a meaning concealed within the mundane.
And she found herself listening now as someone trying to piece together a puzzle whose edges had only just begun to show.
Havi's smile widened, slow and deliberate, as his eyes lingered on the two young men before him.
Eyes not mocking, but laden with something deeper, something unspoken.
“If you’d successfully stolen a motorbike or a car,” he asked in a voice low and measured, “would you have pushed it, or driven it away?”
Rofik scoffed, a mixture of irritation and disbelief colouring his tone, “You’re supposed to be a brilliant student, aren’t you? Second-best in the entire Hensa Province, no less."
"Yet here you are, asking questions like someone who’s only just discovered how to think."
"Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if those exam results were someone else’s work entirely.”
Teguh released a long, tired breath, his voice edged with weariness, “What exactly are you getting at? Of course we drove them. Who in their right mind would push a stolen bike?"
"Try doing that and you’ll get caught and beaten to a pulp before you’ve gone twenty metres. What sort of idiot would even consider otherwise?”
But Havi merely chuckled, soft yet certain. Then his tone shifted, sharp, purposeful, unmistakably resolute.
“That’s it!!”
Mrs Suharti, who had been silently observing from behind, allowed a small smile to touch her lips, more a knowing curve than an expression of amusement.
Her eyes did not leave Havi, as if seeing him for the first time not as a boy, but as something far more intricate.
“I understand now,” she thought to herself. “Havi isn’t merely bright. He’s deliberate. Calculated. A boy who plays chess when everyone else is still fiddling with checkers.”