Black Water (22 page)

And then, softly, it comes. It comes with the birds: the outlier birds,
cheep, cheep
, such a tiny, hopeful sound. The first hint of grey appears at the edges of the sky – you think it does, you can’t be sure – and, then, after a bit of tuning up, the whole chorus breaks out, the birds’ triumphant orchestra, the musical holler of it all, because however black the night has been they are still there and they cry out and then comes distant cock-crowing, dog-barking, and all at once, yes, the sky is grey and lightening by the minute, and you turn in the ditch, stiff and frozen to the core, and lever yourself up slowly on one elbow, in pain, covered in mud, and you are still afraid but now it is light enough to see across the rice field, growing greener by the minute. The men with machetes have gone and, unbelievably – there are no words to describe it – you are still alive.

He was sitting on the veranda of his hut, smoking, and watching dawn break across the valley above the Ayung River. The steep wall of palm trees emerged from the dark, grey at first, then lighter and lighter but still monochrome, then magically green. The call of birds in the trees; the humming stillness of the air; it was there. It had always been there. And here was the thing both mysterious and obvious, he thought: the relentlessness of dawn, the fact that whatever had occurred in the hours of darkness, the light came and illuminated it all.

After they had killed him, it would be silent inside the hut. His corpse would lie in the pitch black for a while. There he would be; motionless, unbreathing, alone. As dawn broke, the scene inside the hut would become colourised. The light would reveal that his skin had been rendered ashen by death. There would be a pool of blood, already oxidising, dark against the wooden floor – or more livid, perhaps, if he was lying on the white sheets of his bed. He thought of Kadek arriving that morning, finding the shutters smashed and heavy doors ajar and entering, slowly and carefully, surveying the scene. They would mutilate him, the boys. They would feel the need to kill him more than once. A gaping neck, limbs detached: he didn’t want Kadek to have images like that in his head. Kadek wasn’t even born when the massacres happened in 1965.

It was the pictures, the pictures in your head – you never escaped them. He knew that now.

He finished the
kretek
and held the stub for a while between his fingers, then rose and took the two steps to the edge of the veranda, leaning his elbows on it and looking out over the valley.

‘Smoking first thing?’

Rita stood in the doorway behind him, dressed only in her underwear and one of his shirts, unbuttoned to her waist and crumpled. Her face was pale and tired, a little puffy from sleep. She smiled and stepped over the threshold.

He glanced to the left. There was no sign of Kadek as yet. He reached out an arm and drew her to him, positioning her so she faced outwards to look at the valley, then standing behind her with his arms wrapped round her, pressing her against the wooden rail. They stood like that for a while, then he lifted his hand, cleared her hair from where it was tangled with the shirt collar, kissed the back of her neck.

‘Thank you for telling me,’ she said, softly. ‘It was a gift, from you, I think.’

He didn’t reply. The previous night, he had told her about ’65: I was a young man; I was a courier; I delivered a list of names. The Americans drew up lists of thousands of Communists or suspected Communists and then they gave those lists to the Indonesian military command and those people were taken out of their homes with their families and they were tortured and killed. I was one of the people who facilitated that process. I was just doing my job, you could say, but unlike a lot of people, I had an opportunity to not do my job. I spent a night in a shack by the black water of a Jakarta canal and in the chaos of that time it would have been easy to lose the particular list I was carrying; I had been caught up in a riot, after all. I would have returned home a failure but nobody would have known that I had lost it deliberately, no real harm would have come to me. Maybe it would have made a difference; maybe not. But I didn’t throw the list into the canal. I delivered it as I had been told to do, and those people were almost certainly rounded up the following day, while I was sitting having a beer with a man called Abang and watching the Bali Beach Hotel being built and feeling grateful to be off Java.

‘You were a spy?’ she had asked.

‘No, spies work for governments. People like me get hired to do the jobs that governments don’t want to give their spies, or don’t want to get caught giving them. We work for anyone, mostly, we work for oil companies, mining companies, banks.’

‘Mercenaries, then.’

‘My firm would be
very
offended if you called them that. It’s a lot more sophisticated than that, well it is now, back then, it was the Wild West.’

He had not told her about his visit to Komang, or what had happened in the night that followed.

He had told her about going home to Holland afterwards and having a breakdown, about leaving his company and living in the countryside for a while. He had not told her that, four years later, he went back to work for the same firm, that he had worked for them at a desk job ever since. Once you were in, you were in. He was hardly going to retrain as a schoolteacher or dentist.

He had told her about his years in Los Angeles, the time with Poppa and Nina and Michael and his mother. He had told her that his little brother had drowned – he had not told her that Bud had only been floating in the pool of icy water because he had dared him to do it.

He had told her his mother had been an alcoholic: he had not told her she was still alive. He had told her about his short-lived marriage to Francisca but not how recent it was or that they had had a baby – and, somehow, all these half-truths had combined in his head to form something coherent, whole, something he could maintain, if he stayed with this woman – the trick was to forget that you were lying.

‘Why did you come back?’ she had asked.

People talked about the past as if it was a thing, an object:
the past
, like
the box
or
the house
or
the tree
– as if it was solid and singular. But the past wasn’t an object with boundaries but something fluid and continuous, like a river. Nobody had one past. In 1965 he remembered 1950 in a certain way, and now in 1998, he remembered 1965 differently from how it was and 1950 differently from how he had remembered it in 1965. It was like standing in a box of mirrors and turning to see your reflection multiplied back and forth at you in endless iterations – except, in his case, each reflection was slightly different.

The last time he had seen his mother was a year ago, the summer of 1997. He had called in on a Sunday morning – Francisca made him go. ‘I’m going to see Aunty Lies, I’m going all that way, the least you can do is call in on your mother.’ Francisca, his wife, had adopted his elderly mother and aunt – in Harper’s view, they were poor substitutes for the children he and Francisca had been unable to have. Children got less time-consuming the older they became: with the parental generation, it seemed to work the other way around.

His mother lived in a huge and gloomy house on Noorderstraat; a mausoleum, he thought, full of the relics of a dead husband, a long-dead marriage. All her life Anika had been short of money, until the point when she was beyond having use for it. Now she lived in a house she could have sold for a fortune, bought herself a new apartment and had plenty to spare, easily enough for the clothes and make-up and nights out she had craved all her life. But she was in no fit state to make that sort of choice by then. She put her clothes on anyhow, in whatever mismatched form came most readily to hand. Her make-up frequently migrated from the part of the face to which it had been applied. She rarely left her home. She smelled.

It was a light morning, the sun still pale, the air fresh. He trotted up the stone steps, lifted and dropped the heavy knocker, stepped back. His mother was easily alarmed if she thought someone was trying to shoulder their way into the house – she had slammed the door shut in his face before now. The door opened a few inches and he glimpsed a straggle of grey hair before Anika turned and ambled back inside, leaving the door ajar. Harper stepped over the threshold slowly, pushing at the door, then closing it behind him with a small shove that, however gentle, thudded with the resonance of fifty years of accumulated filial guilt. His mother had wandered back into the sitting room. It was eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning and, yes, she was drunk.

The hallway was dark but the sitting room darker still. It took a while for his eyes to adjust, then he saw the small figure of his mother, collapsed into the sagging chair in the corner, her tiny form swathed in a purple dress with a silver thread through it, once one of her favourites, and a huge green wool cardigan on top. She was barefoot and her gnarled ankles protruded from the bottom of the dress, like a wizened child dressed in adult’s clothing. She was only in her mid-seventies but at a glance seemed so shrunken, with thinning grey hair and bald patches, that she looked nearer ninety. Aunty Lies, ten years older, bulky, in a nursing home on account of her gout, was much more robust.

‘Let’s open the shutters,’ Harper said, walking over to them. ‘It is summer, after all.’

‘Don’t forget to leave the cake, you know, on the table, don’t forget, last time you forgot.’ Harper realised that in that particular moment – it could change at any time – she thought he was one of the home helps he hired to visit his mother, cook meals she rarely ate, keep her company for a bit. Wine and cake. He wondered what a diet of wine and cake did to your digestive system. He decided not to dwell on the thought.

The light from the tall windows illuminated the chaos of the room – the jars with rotting flowers glued into viscous brown liquid that sat in rows on top of the piano, the piles of yellowing newspapers on the sofa – she had yet to cancel her last husband’s subscription to a fishing magazine although he had been dead for nine years – the dirty plates and cutlery poking from beneath the chairs. Harper wondered briefly whether he should close the shutters again. His mother would forget to do it later and leave them open all night – but the thought of sitting in dusty darkness with her on a summer day made him feel as though he might suffocate.

‘Shall I make you a cup of coffee, Ma?’ he asked.

‘Don’t come
here
with your moaning and crying,’ his mother muttered, and Harper guessed that now she was referring to the occasion, many years ago, when the wife of one of her married lovers had turned up on the doorstep with two children and wept and begged Anika to leave their family alone. Anika had slammed the door in her face, then turned to Harper – fifteen years old, standing in the hallway – and said, ‘You should hear what he says about her, she nags at him all the time. She deserves to lose her husband if she behaves like that.’

He thought about going into the kitchen but the state it would be in would be even more depressing than the sitting room and his mother wouldn’t drink the coffee anyway. He sat and talked to her for a while but it became clear she wasn’t coherent and it would be a brief visit. Perhaps that was why he asked, that day.

‘Ma, do you remember Bud?’

Anika didn’t answer. She moistened her lips, clutching at the small glass tumbler that looked like it had recently held some sticky liqueur.

‘Bud, Ma,’ he repeated. ‘He was christened Joseph but we all called him Bud. Michael’s son.’ He wasn’t going to help her out by adding,
your son too
.

‘Michael . . .’ she said slowly, savouring the word, the ghost of a smile on her face. ‘Michael . . .’ She roused herself in her chair, using her elbows on the armrests to lever herself more upright, smiling openly now, looking at him, then lifting a bony finger.

‘You know, baby boy,’ she said. She hadn’t called him baby boy in a while. ‘The only one I ever
really
loved was Michael.’

Harper looked at her.

‘It’s true,’ she said, a little indignantly, suddenly lucid and seeing him, seeing his look. She pushed a few strands of grey hair back from her face, then patted at it, as if it was still bouffant. ‘He was the one, the one for me. Michael. Handsomest man ever, and so tall.’ Her face darkened again. ‘I was broken-hearted when he ran out on me. The Tatum Pole Boogie, now
that
was something. You think these old farmer types ever even
heard
anything like that?’ She waved her hand towards the window to encompass the various men since Michael, or the whole male population of Amsterdam, perhaps – possibly the European continent.

‘California . . .’ she said in a singsong voice. ‘Now that was where we should have stayed. We only came back for your education. We should have stayed. I was happy there.’

Harper closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again to fix an expression on his face that would hide his despair. Was it possible that his mother, in her alcohol-induced dementia, had rewritten the history of their lives so comprehensively that she really believed they had come back to the Netherlands for
his
welfare?
The thing about your mother is
, Poppa had said,
nothing is ever her fault
. And he knew then that it was truer than it had ever been, that his mother, in her relentless quest for love, had gone crashing around the world wreaking havoc in other people’s lives and never once paused to consider that any other person had a right to happiness but herself. That included her own son. He was fifty-four years old. Maybe it was time to divorce his mother.

Bud had been a tall, solid boy, a little tank, Nina used to say. He liked sucking lemons, of all things. Nina would slice one in two for him and put one half face-down on a saucer to stop it drying out, then give him the other to chew on. He would wander around all day with it pressed against his mouth, eyes twinkling. ‘Nicolaath,’ he would say – he had a slight lisp as a toddler, he had already grown out of it when he died – ‘Nicolaath, why don’t you like lemonth?’ When he said this, he would beam, as if the existence of
lemonth
meant that all was right with the world.

‘But Bud, Ma, do you remember Bud?’

His mother stared at him, pursing her lips, frown lines two deep tracks on her brow, tipping her head to one side with a slightly coquettish air, rifling her memories of husbands and ex-husbands and other women’s husbands . . . And he knew that the only thing he wanted to do was to run away from her as far and as fast as possible, and to be on the other side of the world when she died.

He walked slowly back down Noorderstraat after his visit to his mother – not because he was reluctant to leave her behind, alone in the mausoleum, but because he was unwilling to arrive back home. Francisca wouldn’t be there until later but once he got back, there was a small job he had promised he would do while she was out: fix the top drawer of the chest of drawers. It was sticking: it annoyed her every morning. ‘When will you fix this thing?’