Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  Abang shook his head. ‘They’ve been doing that for some time. Anyone in the PKI or any of the other Communist groups is out of a job, in the government sector anyway, schools, civil service, they’ve all gone, family members too, any association will do. They are building up the lists, village by village. Two weeks I reckon, before it starts. They may not even wait for the army.’

  ‘The lists.’

  Abang lifted his beer bottle in a dry salute. ‘There’s always a list.’

  There was an unspoken acknowledgement between Abang and himself, Harper thought. There was always a list; often more than one. The army, the Islamists and the nationalists were all drawing up lists of Communists to kill. The Communists would have their own lists, and if the 30th September Movement had succeeded, Harper had no doubt that he and Abang and anyone else with European or American connections would have been on it. Their brown skin wouldn’t have saved them, not considering who they worked for, not now it was clear who was friend and who was foe.

  Blood sinks into sand really fast. The waiter arrived with their cocktails, some large red fruit-filled thing. He wished he had asked for something short and whisky-based instead of telling Rita to choose. He looked at the young women in bikinis lying just a few feet in front of them, then stared out beyond them at the sea. He could tell that Rita was watching him and sensing he had sunk into silence and after a moment or two of watchfulness, concluding it was best to leave him to it. She leaned forward for the cigarette packet that he had dropped onto the table as they sat down and he reached out and grabbed her hand, grasping it in his, pressing her soft fingers. They both looked at the hands.

  ‘Can we get a room?’ He could hear, in his own voice, a different tone from their previous encounters, something else mixed with the desire, a kind of need. He heard it without understanding it.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I said, remember, I need to be back tonight.’

  He released her hand. She shook it a little then reached for the packet and withdrew a cigarette but then sat holding it, as if she had thought better of lighting it. Her fingers were trembling. She hadn’t smoked in front of him before.

  He stood, took his lighter from his pocket and tossed it onto the table. ‘Why don’t you order some food?’ he said. The cocktails were strong and they would be drinking several.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To talk to the concierge.’

  He turned and walked back down the path to the main building. She had been right about one thing, it was a beautiful hotel. He couldn’t remember it from before. It was a low, discreet collection of Balinese bungalows set amidst gardens. You could come here as a wealthy Westerner and hide in decorous seclusion from whatever was going on in the outside world.

  He could have asked the waiter in the bar about what was happening on Java but the waiter would only have given him a polite answer, ‘Everything is fine, sir.’ The concierge would be a much better source of information.

  The deputy manager was on the desk. Harper straightened himself as he approached and spoke in English.

  ‘Can you help me? My company has closed our Jakarta office and I can’t get through. What’s the latest?’

  The concierge turned to the pile of newspapers on his desk and reached out a hand but Harper said, ‘I’ve got yesterday’s news. Put a call through to the concierge at the Mandarin or the Four Seasons, or the Grand Hyatt, any of them.’

  It took the man six calls to get through to someone he could talk to and at first, he only got bland answers: order would soon return, the army was in control, there was no need for anxiety.

  After a polite interval, Harper intervened. ‘Ask him if any more shopping precincts have been set on fire.’

  The man spoke into the phone, returned the answer, ‘No sir, no more commercial premises have been attacked.’

  ‘Are the Americans and Europeans still evacuating their nationals?’

  ‘I believe so, yes.’

  ‘And what about elsewhere, Surakarta and Medan?’ The conversation following this question took a little longer.

  ‘There are no further incidents, the army is in control, sir, there is no need for alarm.’

  ‘Ask him if there are still tanks parked on the Hotel Indonesia roundabout or Merdeka Square?’

  ‘My friend does not have that information, sir. The streets are clear. The banks and schools are closed only as a precaution.’

  ‘Is there a phone in the lobby I can use to make an international call?’

  The deputy manager took him over to a booth with a small stool in it and a wall phone.

  ‘Shall we charge this call to your room, sir?’

  ‘I’ll pay cash.’

  It was Hannah who picked up the phone, that was good. Hannah was his boss’s secretary and had worked for the company for years. Every now and then, they had a beer and exchanged notes on Jan’s peculiarities. Unlike some of their colleagues, they would never use this information against each other. ‘Good morning, Institute of International Economics.’ Hannah wasn’t particularly attractive but he loved her voice, slow and low, gravelly.

  ‘Hannah, lieveling, it’s your favourite brown guy. Ninety kilos of sheer muscle.’

  There was a slight delay on the line. ‘Well, hello stranger.’

  ‘Is Jan in?’

  After a pause, ‘No, I’ve only just got in, haven’t taken my coat off. How’s Jakarta? Sounds pretty bad.’

  ‘I’m not there any more, I’m on leave, enforced leave. Henrikson is running the show.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘Hasn’t there been talk?’

  ‘News to me, my friend. Why haven’t you been recalled?’

  It was exactly the same question he had asked himself.

  The pause before each of her answers implied she was being careful in what she said but he was fairly certain she wasn’t. All the same, it was odd that his predicament had not been discussed. Hannah knew everything that happened in the Asia Department and normally Jan would be sure everyone in the company knew it too. That was what the partners did if you messed up.

  ‘Are you sure? He hasn’t said anything?’

  ‘Not a word. I was wondering why I hadn’t heard from you though. The office is still closed, Henrikson’s calling in from Le Méridien. I thought you were with him. I was wondering why you hadn’t called. The news reports, it’s calmer, but . . .’

  ‘I know, still in the balance, looks like. What’s the word your end?’ The pause this time was a little longer than the mechanical one on the line. Hannah was hesitating about how much to tell him. ‘C’mon, I’m going crazy stuck on an island, being kept out of the loop. You’ve no idea how hard it is to get news here.’

  The pause shortened again. ‘More of the same. The Americans have got all non-essential personnel out but they’ve left staff in place. British the same. Things are much calmer on the streets but nobody’s taking chances. Most of our existing clients are out now but we’ve got a whole load of new ones, people still panicking. Chinese families still fleeing in droves. Everyone’s waiting to see if Habibie can stabilise things but who knows.’ So Hannah’s opinion on the way things could be heading wasn’t so different from his own.

  ‘Beijing made any pronouncements?’

  ‘No, they’re sitting on the fence. There’s demonstrations outside the Indonesian Embassy there, though.’

  He emerged from the booth and pulled his wallet from his pocket as he went over to the reception desk. The deputy manager had gone but a young woman took payment for the call.

  As he turned back to walk through the gardens, he stopped, patted his pockets and regretted that his cigarettes were sitting on the low table next to Rita. He was right, he knew it: things could go either way, but the oddest thing of all was that his suspension wasn’t official. As far as his colleagues were concerned, he was still out in the field.

  As he walked back along the tiled path, back to the beach, Harper thought, the rest of the day is
spoiled now. He had brought the real world into the bubble he and Rita had been in during their encounters so far. He had liked the bubble: the enclosed space of a room in a guesthouse, the car – they could exist as long as they had a wall of some sort around them. They existed best of all beneath the fine gauze of a mosquito net.

  As he sat down next to her, she said, ‘I’ve ordered.’

  Summoned by her words, a plate of satay with a sticky coating arrived, some rice cakes and a bowl of water spinach.

  They ate in silence. ‘This satay is really good, spicy,’ he said at one point but it was such an obviously small-talk remark, she ignored him. She ate the satay and the spinach but only picked at the rice.

  After they had eaten, they walked along the beach. They talked about whether it was worth going for a drive around Sanur and decided it was mostly hideous and touristy. It grew greyer; the light was dull as they returned to the bar – as though the sky’s heaviness matched his mood.

  Without discussion, they sat down in the same seats and both ordered soft drinks: she had watermelon juice and he a Coke, then they sat in silence, looking out at the sea where the waves crested apricot, the beach almost empty. He noticed a long trail of ants that were processing up the leg of the small table between them and clustering around a speck of satay sauce. The table hadn’t been wiped down properly while they were on their walk and he considered calling the waiter over.

  In front of them on the sand was a pair of loungers in a reclining position. Between them was a standard lamp with a wooden stem and white lightshade of the sort you would find in any domestic sitting room. Even though they were still some way from dusk, a white-coated member of the hotel staff approached and turned the lamp on, and only then did Harper notice the cable that led from its base to the bottom of a nearby coconut palm. There was an electricity feed in the palm tree, a socket in its trunk. He glanced at Rita and saw she had noticed too and was also amused by how that small patch of beach had been transformed into a lounge. They smiled at each other. He wished he hadn’t made the call to Amsterdam, or asked about Jakarta. He wished he was no more than what Rita thought him to be.

  *

  As they walked back to the car, Rita perfectly happy, he felt annoyed with himself, and so did what most people do when they are upset about their own behaviour – he got upset with the person he was with. In the middle of a conversation about her work training secondary-school teachers, he interrupted with, ‘Of course all the good stuff here was built by the Dutch. The irrigation ditches in the fields used to be wood and bamboo but they went rotten. There’s a stone aqueduct in the highlands above town, you know, transformed the villages. You should go and see it.’

  Why was he provoking her? He didn’t even believe it was true.

  ‘You mean the aqueduct above Keliki,’ she replied, her voice light. ‘I’ve seen it, of course, irrigation is everything. Only us Westerners take water for granted.’

  ‘Yes but the point I’m making is that if the Dutch hadn’t . . .’

  ‘Oh, c’mon,’ she responded.

  When he unlocked the car door for her and opened it, she slid herself down diagonally without looking at him.

  He jammed the key in the ignition. She worked in education, so what? How about looking a little deeper? What about that caesarean scar on her abdomen, where was that child? He imagined a boy, a small boy, dying young perhaps – whatever it was, some common but excruciating tragedy that had led her to flee cold northern Europe and end up here, in a country so hot and full of flowers that sweat smelled sweet, deep greens and monsoon rains and slowly swaying people – the sort of country a white woman could run to because it was beautiful – because yeah, that’s right, I’ll go and live somewhere with lots of frangipani then I can convince myself the world isn’t ugly after all. He thought this last thought in a high-pitched voice in his head, a mockery of a female voice, of optimism of any sort.

  They drove in silence.

  They continued to drive in silence for an hour, the ribbon development along the road thinning little between villages: the open shacks with people sitting on the steps selling wooden tools and carvings and beads. They were most of the way back to town when Rita spoke and when she did, all at once with no preamble, it was obvious that throughout that hour of driving she had been continuing the debate between them to herself in just the same way he had. It was the worst kind of arguing: the silent kind.

  ‘How many killed in the Holocaust?’ she came out with. ‘How many? Six million, right? Everyone knows that. Even you know that.’

  Thanks for that ‘even’, he thought. Thanks a lot.

  ‘Want to take a guess on how many of that six million were babies? Go on, take a guess. Of course the total dead was fifty million, in total I mean, everybody on all sides I mean, biggest category probably Russian soldiers but let’s stick with the babies shall we, the babies gassed and burned, out of six million people who just happened to be Jewish, no, how many babies?’

  He conjured the image of a family being rounded up by the Gestapo. He watched the image in his head, like a flash of archive news footage in black and white, a sturdy father in a long black coat, a mother white-faced with fear, six or eight children, perhaps? A baby, clutched in the arms of the eldest daughter because the mother had her hands full helping the smaller children into the back of a truck with its tailgate down. The father and the eldest boy were lifting up suitcases and then turning to assist a group of elderly people who were waiting patiently behind the family. A young soldier stood next to them, holding a rifle. One baby, perhaps, in a group of twelve or fourteen?

  ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ he said, allowing – and that was a mistake – the hint of a sigh to enter his voice. Six million divided by fourteen. Did she really want him to do that particular calculation? Why was she bringing this up anyway?

  ‘Guess,’ she insisted.

  ‘I don’t know, three hundred, four hundred thousand. Are you serious?’

  ‘One million,’ Rita replied. ‘In the war on our continent in the middle of the century we happen to live in right now, the continent of the Renaissance and mass industrialisation and the vote and penicillin, we killed one million babies. Not out of ignorant prejudice at all, it was perfectly knowing and industrial. We put all that progress we’re so proud of to very good use. In living memory.’

  Harper allowed a silence to speak the phrase, and your point is?

  The village street was busy and he had slowed the car to a crawl because there was a man on a bicycle just ahead and to his left. The bicycle had two wooden cages of squashed chickens with dirty-white feathers slung either side of the saddle, held together by string. The man was standing up on the pedals as he cycled in his sarong and as they drew level, he glanced over his shoulder, slowed, then wobbled and fell against the side of the car. The cage scraped against the car door, sending the poor skinny chickens into a constrained flurry of panic.

  ‘Fuck!’ He braked more savagely than he needed to. He was flung against the steering wheel then back in his seat, momentarily winded.

  Rita was wearing her seatbelt. She jerked forward a few inches before it caught her and pushed her back again. She sat while he recovered his breath, then said in a low, conciliatory voice, ‘A million of them, John, in living memory, and with industrial efficiency. Do you really think Europeans are in any position to lecture any other culture about barbarism?’

  He drove straight through town and out the other side. She did not question where he was going. The road remained good for twenty minutes after town and then he turned the car off onto the poor, potted track. He wouldn’t be able to drive right up to the hut. The track ran beneath, and then they would have to cut up on foot along a narrow path that joined the one down to the river.

  When he parked the car, she was still silent, so to break the tension he said, ‘Here’s where I am staying.’ He was about to ask, politely, if she wanted to see it or go back to town but before he could, she had opened
her door. He had parked on a steep camber and she had to lever both hands against the doorframe to clamber out.

  The hut loomed above them, a dark shape visible through the trees at the top of the steep path, about to disappear into dusk. She paused for a moment, turned to the valley. He thought, she feels it too, the singing stillness, alive with so much that is invisible

  After a while, she said, ‘The villages are like this too. A short drive, and suddenly . . .’ She was feeling the isolation of the place – and yet, for him, bringing her here had made it much less isolated. That was all you needed, one person, newer than you, to make a strange thing feel owned.

  They looked at each other in a moment of truce. He gestured up the path.

  As she walked ahead of him, he watched the slow side-to-side movement of her hips and wanted, very badly, to put his hands on them. He wanted no more talk.

  On the veranda, he stood for a moment, looking around for any sign of Kadek, but he rarely came late afternoon or evening unless by prior arrangement. There would be a basic meal left on the desk, under a banana leaf.

  The ornate doors were kept padlocked – not that that would make much difference to a determined intruder, or intruders. He took the small silver key from his trouser pocket, unlocked the padlock and placed it on the veranda table, pushed back both of the narrow doors and gestured for her to go in. She stepped over the threshold.

  They were silent while she wandered around the hut, casting her gaze slowly over each object and item of furniture, looking round and seeing how it all added up to a kind of comfortable barrenness. He remembered what Francisca had said the first time she came to his bachelor flat in Amsterdam, many years ago. ‘You know, you should have tidied up, don’t you know what a woman thinks when they see a man’s habitat, is this the kind of life I would lead with this man?’ What was Rita gleaning about him from the few objects in the room?