The Killing Sea (9 page)

What Sarah could
see of Calang, about a mile away on the other side of destroyed fields, filled her with fresh worry. Apart from one white building sticking up like a lone tooth, the town appeared to be mostly rubble. Several big tents had been pitched on one of the hills, and a ramshackle camp of makeshift huts hunkered on the adjoining hill.

Several hundred yards away, in a former rice field, an orange excavator lurched and clanked, its scoop bucket digging a large pit in the ground. The sight of that partially reassured Sarah. At least somebody was doing something.

The rice field lay beside an asphalt road, which had been cleared to this point, debris bulldozed
to the side. A dump truck barreled down the road from the town toward them, trailing a cloud of dust. In the corner of the rice field, a soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a white mask wrapped around his face stood in the shade of a big tree. Paper and plastic from the tsunami still clung to the tree's lowest branches.

“Maybe he knows where the doctor is,” Sarah said to Ruslan. “Could you ask?”

The dump truck turned off onto the rice field. Ruslan and Sarah waited until the dust cloud settled before approaching the soldier. His eyes were shadowed with fatigue, his green uniform streaked with filth. “
Salam
,” Ruslan said respectfully. The soldier grunted a reply, staring at Sarah with eyes too exhausted to show curiosity. Ruslan spoke to him in the local language. The soldier replied, nodding at the hill with the tents.

“The clinic is behind the big green tent,” Ruslan said.

Sarah closed her eyes. “Thank God,” she murmured.

Aisyah shrieked.

Startled, Sarah twirled around. Aisyah and the others were staring at the truck, which had backed up to the large pit. Its dump bed tilted. Dozens of corpses tumbled into the pit, a jumble of bodies,
arms and legs sticking out every which way. Smaller bodies of children settled into gaps. Several corpses were stuck on the lip of the truck's bed, blocked by a body in gray overalls that was hung up on something. The driver slammed the truck forward a few feet. This jolted the remaining bodies loose. The corpse in the overalls landed on the edge of the pit. The driver got out of the cab and pushed the body with his feet, rolling it over the side into the pit.

Sarah watched all this because she couldn't believe what she was seeing. Then she threw up on the side of the road. Aisyah did the same.

The dump truck growled back onto the road. The driver braked to a stop beside Sarah and said something around the roughly rolled cigarette smoldering in his lips.

“He's asking if we want a ride,” Ruslan interpreted quietly. He looked pale and shaken.

Sarah shuddered at the thought. “No thanks, we'll walk.”

Ruslan asked the driver a question, which the man answered with an indifferent shrug. He drove off with a wave of his cigarette, leaving a stinky smell of diesel exhaust and, underneath that, the sickly sweet smell of death.

“He told me they're burying the dead people before everyone else gets sick from disease,” Ruslan
said. He was quiet for several steps and then added, in a quieter and pained voice, “Nobody is saying the prayers of the dead for them. Nobody will even know who they are.”

“That's terrible,” Sarah murmured. She imagined a father running around frantically looking for his missing son.
Have you seen him, have you, where is he, he must be alive, I know he is alive, I must find him!
And his son one of the anonymous dead. Buried with a thousand others.

At least Sarah knew for sure her mother was dead. Knew where she was temporarily buried. How awful to be able to take comfort in knowing such things!

Ruslan swung his arms as though to loosen something off his back. “I thought maybe that dead man in the gray clothes was my father. My brain wanted to explode. But he was too big. Tattoos on his arms. And my father is in Ie Mameh.”

Imagine that, happy that someone else's dead father wasn't one's own. But Sarah knew that she would feel the same. Perfectly understandable.

They came to the foot of the first big hill. Down the road, in one section of the flattened town, Sarah could see men with scarves around their faces and plastic bags around their hands picking through the wreckage, hauling corpses to the dump truck.

On the hill two soldiers emerged from a guard
post of broken planks roughly nailed together, and sauntered down to the band. They spoke with Bapak and Ruslan. There were a few minutes of argument and confusion. It was clear from the soldiers' gesturing that the men in the band were to immediately go to work helping gather the corpses, while the women were to go up to the camp on the adjacent hill. On its upper slopes was a clutch of huts made of salvaged cardboard, plastic, plywood, tin. Ruslan argued politely and firmly, pointing to Peter. In the end, the twins weren't allowed to carry the stretcher to the clinic. Sarah and Ruslan had to do it themselves. One of the soldiers herded Aisyah and the other women away before Sarah even had a chance to thank them.

The collection of tents had been hastily erected on the dusty slope between stands of scraggly trees and brush. One stiff wind would probably blow the tents away. Sarah noticed a big green tent with a wooden sign out front that had a military-looking shield painted on it. Stern black letters announced the tent to be a command post of some kind. A man in civilian clothes, his hair cut flat to his scalp, stood in front of the flap door, brooding over the ruined town. He swung his hooded gaze to Ruslan and Sarah, carrying the stretcher. Ruslan, at the front, picked up his pace.

When they turned the corner, Sarah whispered, “Who was that?”

“I don't know,” Ruslan said shortly.

The brown clinic tent, with Red Cross and Red Crescent signs painted on the thin canvas, tilted to one side as though a breeze had already tried to snatch it. The front desk at the clear plastic doorway looked as though it had been scavenged from a grade school. Behind it sat a young man in army trousers and a dirty T-shirt. He shook his head and said something. Sarah guessed he was saying that there was no more room.

Ruslan spoke quickly. Sarah caught the word “tourist” and
tamu
, a local word that she knew meant “guest.”

The man sighed and waved them inside.

“We'll have to find room for Peter,” Ruslan said to Sarah.

Two dozen cots and another dozen makeshift ones crammed the hot tent. Patients lay on them in dull apathy. Many had broken bones, but only several of these bones had been set with plaster. The other limbs had been set with sticks and tape, or simply wrapped in cloth. A number of patients were children, like Peter, and like him, many were feverish and coughing. Ruslan found a space in the back of the tent beneath an open flap that caught a draft of breeze. They put down the stretcher.

Peter moaned and opened his eyes. “Where are
we? It's hot.” After a racking cough, he peered up at the slope of canvas above him, propped up by large aluminum poles. “What's that? Why's there something over my head?”

Sarah knelt by him. “It's a tent, silly. We're in a clinic. And here comes a nurse.”

The dark circles under the nurse's eyes looked like they were etched onto her cheekbones. She asked for Peter's name and age, which she wrote down with a pencil stub in a ragged notebook. She took his temperature with an old-fashioned mercury thermometer and felt his pulse, which she noted.

“Where's the doctor?” Sarah asked.

The nurse shook her head in irritation. Ruslan repeated the question in the local language. The nurse snapped at him. Ruslan said to Sarah, “He's worked for forty-eight straight hours and he's having a rest. He'll be here soon.”

The nurse gave Ruslan an enamel basin half-filled with murky water and a cloth. Sarah dipped the cloth and washed Peter's dirty chest, his ribs starting to stand out like toothpicks. She was losing weight herself. Before, her shorts had pinched a little. Now they hung on her hips. On the trek early that morning she'd found some rope and had made a belt for them. Maybe when she got home she could write a diet book. Take one tsunami. Add coconuts.

She could hear her mother.
Nothing to joke about.

True.

She washed Peter's cheeks and became aware of Ruslan's gaze. He was watching her with an odd intensity that flustered her. “What?” she said lightly. “Am I drooling or something?”

“Peter is very lucky to have a sister like you.”

She could feel pink spots blossom on her cheeks. The last time she'd felt this pleased was when her dad had complimented her on her parallel parking. He'd been teaching her in the family car. Just a month ago. Back in her other life, before the ocean had destroyed it. What had he said?
A girl who can parallel park like that can go places in life. Why, just think, you could even be a garage's chief parking attendant.
She had given him a mock scowl and punched his shoulder. And was smiling now at the memory.

But the truth about her and Peter was unavoidable. Her smile died. “I really haven't been such a great sister. We could fight. I could be mean.” She looked at Ruslan, at his soft black eyes. They drew something out of her she'd never ever spoken about, not even to her dad. “My mother loved Peter a lot more than me.”

Ruslan shook his head. “I never had a mother,
but still, I think mothers are mothers. They love their children all the same.”

“In theory. Not in reality. My mother never wanted me. I was a mistake. A pregnancy at the wrong time.” Sarah dipped the cloth into the bowl. “My mother's last thing, the last thing she did, just as the tsunami was starting to come in, she slapped me across the face and yelled at me to help Peter instead of my dad with his broken leg.”

She could still feel the blow. Could see her mother's icy look. She squeezed the cloth hard. Emotions whirled in her like a slot machine gone crazy. Then they came to an instant stop, but all mixed up and unreadable. Tears sprang to her eyes. “Peter would have been okay,” she said. The words came out hot and hard, burning her throat. “He was running. I could have helped Mom get Dad up the hill in time. We would all have been okay.”

She hurled the cloth, not seeing the man sidling toward them through the cots. The cloth smacked him in the face. He picked it off and dropped it to the side. It was the man from the green tent. His yellowed eyes were as cold as dirty ice cubes. He pointed a finger at her. “You,” he said, the simple English word heavily accented. “Come with me.”

The man wore
civilian clothes, the neatest and cleanest trousers and shirt that Ruslan had seen in days, but his flat-cut hair and flatter gaze told Ruslan who he was. Military intelligence. He had the bearing of a senior officer.

Ruslan and Sarah followed him to the big green tent. In a stifling corner of the tent, the man ordered Sarah to sit on the single stool in front of a plywood sheet that served as his desk. Ruslan stood to the side.

“I'm sorry,” Sarah said. “I didn't mean to hit you. I didn't see you.”

“No problem,” the intelligence officer said in English. He seemed to be softening up to her. In
fact, all he wanted to know was why a Westerner would be in the clinic. Ruslan interpreted for the both of them, relaying the officer's questions, giving him Sarah's answers.

“My dad's still on Tiger Island,” Sarah said. “Can you organize a search party for him?”

The man extracted a half-smoked cigarette from his shirt pocket. He held it up. “More precious than gold right now,” he told Ruslan, speaking in Acehnese, although he wasn't from the province. The refined features of his face suggested he was a Javanese. He lit the cigarette with a lighter and took a deep and reverent swallow of smoke. He carefully pinched out the cigarette and tucked it back into his shirt pocket. “She wants a rescue party? Does she know how many people are missing? We don't have enough people to bury the dead, let alone go searching for the missing.”

Ruslan nodded and turned to translate for Sarah. She looked at him with expectant eyes. “He will try,” Ruslan said. “He will do his best.”

She exhaled in relief. “Thank you.” She reached over the plywood desk to shake the officer's hand. “Thank you so much. My dad is pretty tall—” She stopped and snorted. “God, what am I saying? You won't be able to miss him. The only tall white man on the island, hobbling around on a broken leg. He
can start fires with just sticks, like a real caveman, so look for smoke and stuff. I'd like to go with you, but I should stay with my brother. Um, can I go back to Peter now?”

The officer shooed her away with a friendly gesture.

After she'd darted out of the tent, the man said to Ruslan, “So I will try, will I?”

“Shouldn't you?”

“How? Phone lines, power lines, radio, everything down, all the roads cut. We're our own world here.” He shook his head and chuckled without humor. “Typical Western arrogance. Think we ought to drop everything to go look for one of their own. Do Westerners deserve something special that we don't?”

Ruslan looked down at the plywood, warped from water. “She's alone with her sick brother and is very brave.”

A grunt, then in a softer voice, “Those blue eyes. I knew several people in Lamno and the hill villages around there with blue eyes. Portuguese ancestors. Every once in a while a kid's born with blue eyes.”

“May I go now?”

“Your mother had blue eyes. Not as blue as this girl Sarah, but blue enough.”

Ruslan forced himself to keep his head bent. He manufactured a puzzled frown before lifting his gaze to the man's coldly amused one. “What are you talking about?”

“Not that I ever met her. Your father told me. We had a few talks, your father and I.”

The man was military intelligence. He must have been one of the officers who'd interrogated his father over the years. Still, it was safest to play dumb. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Yusuf the mechanic. I suppose you're on your way to Ie Mameh to join him, are you? Come up all the way from Meulaboh?”

“I'm helping Sarah,” Ruslan said stiffly.

The man's half smile disappeared. “You'll have to do body-gathering detail before you can get your rations. Commandant's regulations. That's me. Temporary commandant, like everything around here. The officers had the best quarters, the ones on the beach. They all drowned. Many of the enlisted men, too. I'll assign you to the central sector. By the gasoline pumps.” He called over one of the soldiers and told him to take Ruslan down to his assigned sector. As Ruslan left the tent, the temporary commandant called out, “Make sure you do a good job. Lots of smashed-up cars around that area. Remember to look inside them. Don't
want to miss anybody.” That amused half smile was back on his face, back in his voice.

 

The bulldozer had cleared a road all the way to the ruined Pertamina fuel station. A private in charge of the corpse-gathering detail told Ruslan to find a rag to cover his mouth and plastic bags to put on his hands. A bearded man in a filthy robe worked with this particular crew. Even clerics weren't being spared this gruesome task.

The stink of death clogged the air. Ruslan breathed shallowly through his mouth. He found a clean cloth, the flag of a local sports club somehow still flying on a short pole. Plastic bags were everywhere in the rubble. He picked out two of the cleanest ones. As he did so, he kept glancing up at the range of distant green hills. He'd have to sneak out of town sometime in the night. The cleric would know where Ie Mameh was—they were always going off and preaching at various towns and villages.

The cleric and a man who had the pudgy appearance of a wealthy merchant slung a body onto the back of the truck. Ruslan joined them. He murmured to the cleric, “Excuse me, sir, do you know where Ie Mameh is? I know it's up in the hills there, but I don't know where exactly.”

Bits of leaves and dirt stuck to the cleric's beard. He peered at Ruslan as though looking at another Ruslan underneath the outer one. “What do you want there with those rebels, boy? Has not God punished us for our warmongering?”

“Get to work!” the private shouted at them.

This area was still richly veined with bodies. Ruslan's gaze wandered past crumpled adults to the small, fly-covered form of a toddler upon a wash of fine gray sand. He would retrieve her first. As he bent to pick her up, he noticed that crabs had eaten her eyes.

He threw up.

The private laughed.

Ruslan wiped his mouth, glowering at the private. “Why don't you help?”

“Let's make sure you're completely emptied out,” the private said, and slammed the butt of his rifle into Ruslan's stomach.

Ruslan doubled over, gasping for breath.

The merchant whispered, “You dumb boy, don't you know not to talk back to them?”

Another soldier, one with an additional stripe, had seen the private's assault. He said quietly to Ruslan, “My men are just as traumatized as anyone. They've lost many comrades.”

After that, Ruslan kept silent. He and the
others gathered bodies, carting them off to the truck to be unceremoniously dumped on top of other corpses. His mind retreated to a corner, and his senses became dulled to the crabs and flies, the greenish abdomens, the mottled skin that often slipped in his grasp, the rising smell, the stirrings of maggots.

Whenever he or another found a holy Qur'an, pages damply plastered together, the book would be put on a high place in the sun, upon a hedge, a remnant of wall. Beside a pile of sodden fabric that might once have been curtains, Ruslan spotted a drawing pad, open to a sketch of a horse. A heavy, childish hand, much erasing, no talent, but done with enthusiasm. Beside the book was a box of crayons. He put the drawing and the box on top of an overturned car, wondering as he did so if he would ever draw again in his life. Art seemed such an insignificant thing, a part of his life that had been swept away for good.

Make sure you look inside the cars,
the intelligence officer had said. Ruslan peered inside the overturned sedan. Empty.

A minute later he found a brass plaque engraved with the Bismillah, the graceful Arabic proclaiming Allah's compassion and mercy. He picked up the plaque and studied it before propping it beside a
Qur'an. The slaughter made no sense, but who was he to question God, who was not only the Merciful and Compassionate, but also the Destroyer and the Killer?

Together with a young man who might have been a schoolteacher, Ruslan hauled the body of a man in business clothes to the truck. Who had this man been? Had he been a liar and a thief? A good and faithful Muslim? A loving husband and father? A wife beater?

“A cubic meter of water weighs one ton,” the young man said as though he were in a classroom. “A column of water one meter square and twenty meters high weighs twenty tons. If the water came in at forty kilometers an hour, the force would be…” He droned on and on, calculating the mathematics of death.

The corpse gatherers entered one of the few buildings that still had a second floor, although much of the roof had collapsed. A woman was trapped in a small prayer room on the second floor. Perhaps she'd been praying and giving thanks for surviving the earthquake, reciting from the gilded Qur'an near her hand. A gold band glinted on her soft and well-manicured finger. Perhaps she'd been a new bride. Ruslan lifted the roof beam that had fallen across her head, soft black hair poking out
from underneath her headdress. Her eyes were partially open. Light blue irises peered unseeingly at him. She looked fresher than the other bodies he'd gathered, her skin firm and taut.

And even a bit warm to the touch.

A horrible understanding dawned—she had just recently died. Perhaps only minutes ago.

He squeezed his eyes shut and took several deep breaths. When he opened his eyes, the Qur'an by her hand swam into focus. He picked it up, weighed it for a second, and then hurled it to the ground.

The others near him stopped and stared. The schoolteacher stepped back, as though God were about to fling a bolt down from the heavens.

“Now, young brother,” the merchant said, his voice uncertain.

“Why?” Ruslan said.

The merchant sighed. “An ancient question, old as man's first sorrow. Who can understand? The one thing we know for certain is that we are slaves to God's will. All we can do is submit and strive to become better Muslims.”

Ruslan was aware of his scowl but unable to erase it.

“Do you think me a sermonizing hypocrite, young brother?” the merchant said. “I lost my wife and one of my children.”

Shame drove Ruslan's scowl away. Without another word he and the merchant lifted the woman onto a mat and others carried her to the waiting dump truck.

He was thinking about that woman, and regretting that no one would be saying the prayer of the dead for her, when he turned a corner that the bulldozer had recently plowed, pushing off a chain of cars blocking the way.

And there, on its side ten feet in front of him, its blue and white sides badly battered and its windows smashed, was an ancient Ford.

His father's car.