Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  He hadn’t been into a kampong since the coup and counter-coup. He crossed the rise of a precarious bridge made of bamboo and old planks, towards the slum where tumbledown shacks lined the bank, overhanging the water in places as if they might fall in at any minute. The cement wall of the river was broken in one place and a soil bank led down to the water, where women were washing clothes. Laundry was strung up everywhere around the shacks: an inside-out way of living, he always thought, in these tiny little houses, everything done communally – privacy just one in a long list of things denied the poor.

  He strolled round a few squares of the kampong, nodding to the women sitting on steps with their children. In between the shacks and the dirt paths were small ditches intended to forestall the floodwater, with concrete slabs to allow people to cross into the shacks. The ditches were only half full now but as the daily downpours increased in intensity, the inhabitants would be first ankle-deep, then knee-deep in the brown water. A few people stared back at him, mildly, without hostility. Despite the city in ferment – the tortured Generals, the fear, the persistent tension in Merdeka Square and on the wide boulevards of central Jakarta, there seemed to be no changed atmosphere here. No one rose from a doorstep and went inside at his approach; people nodded and smiled.

  A coup only happened to the people it happened to, that was what struck him then: that was what the likes of Johnson forgot. The grand events were Johnson’s whole world, and his, to a certain extent, and yet to the people here, those events were a mere backdrop against the perpetual problem of where to find rice that day, how to pay for it, where to put your belongings when the river rose.

  At the end of his circuit, on his way back to the bridge, he came across a group of elderly people, milky-eyed and skeletal, who stretched out their hands but were either too weak to mutter entreaties or too pessimistic to think him worth the effort. He brushed past them. A man like him giving out coins would be the talk of the kampong. At the sound of calling and chattering behind him, he glanced back to see he had acquired a posse of small boys, jumping and smiling. He smiled back, shook his head. They followed him, nonetheless, until he reached the bridge. As he mounted it, he looked behind to see that they had stopped on the kampong side, as if the river was an invisible wall that they could not pass through, although they carried on jumping and smiling and calling.

  On the other side of the bridge he was immediately in the area of middle-class bungalows where this Parno man lived. He was hot and thirsty now, regretting his walk around. He hoped Parno would serve something cold.

  Only two minutes from the river, the streets were quiet. The bungalows were long and low with the same terracotta-tiled roof running the length of the blok. Parno’s building was at the end, tucked into a corner. As he approached it, he could hear the distant, hypnotic gongs of gamelan, fading – it was a sound that filled him with a strange calm. He must have heard it as a child, he thought. This had been a quirk of his few months on Java: new sights, new sounds, new smells, but so many of them tugged at something in him, some unconscious memory, or maybe he just felt as though they should.

  As he pushed through a little wrought-iron gate and stepped into the courtyard, the door swung open. A young man in a beige shirt, a civil service clerk, possibly, stood behind it, head bowed. As Harper stepped over the threshold, the young man held out his hand for his hat.

  He handed the young man the panama he wore when he wasn’t trying to ‘pass’, as Gregor would have put it, and turned to see that behind the door was a stuffed tiger fastened to a wooden plinth, a whole tiger, somewhat battered, in an unnatural position, sitting up with its teeth bared and glass eyes staring in the way that only glass eyes can, motionless but somehow not entirely inanimate.

  ‘Is there anything more sad than a stuffed tiger?’

  Harper turned to see a light-skinned mixed-race woman in a Western cocktail dress, oiled black hair drawn back from carved features and gold drop earrings hanging from her earlobes.

  ‘All that power, now just sand inside,’ she said, and turned away from him. He followed her into the room to their left. As they entered she turned to him and said, ‘My husband is here,’ then went through a door on the other side of the room.

  Pak Parno was seated behind a large desk wearing a batik shirt in purple and gold. He stayed seated as Harper walked towards the desk and gestured at his wife as she left the room. ‘My wife is very beautiful,’ he said casually. Harper watched Parno’s wife as she walked out of the room. From behind, she was as skinny as a garden rake; no arse to her at all. ‘She’s from a good family, too.’

  This observation seemed to amuse him and he chuckled to himself, rose and came round to Harper’s side of the desk, extending his hand. He was as rotund as Harper had expected, although not as short. ‘A wife is a great blessing, Mr Harper, although I understand you are as yet unmarried.’ He smiled broadly.

  Harper gave a small bow. ‘That is true.’

  ‘Perhaps you will find a nice Javanese wife.’

  Parno gestured to a three-piece suite arranged Western-style. They seated themselves and Parno’s wife returned with a silver tray on which were two heavy crystal glasses and a carafe. When she had placed it on the coffee table, she poured for them both, then turned to the mantelpiece above the fireplace where there was a cigar box.

  He knew this routine: whisky, cigars, a little manly talk. Parno was the kind of bureaucrat who prided himself on living a westernised lifestyle but a reasonably modest one – there would be no gold taps in the bathroom. It was his relative modesty that would allow him to do deals to the benefit of friends and relatives. You didn’t hand a man like Parno a briefcase full of cash; he would be insulted. You offered a job opportunity to his nephew. That way, he got to feel munificent, not corrupt. There were always ways of corrupting those who didn’t want to feel corrupt. In many ways, they were the easiest to corrupt of all.

  ‘So, Mr Harper,’ Parno said as they sipped their drinks. ‘What do you think? If it comes to a fight with Malaysia, what is your view?’ Parno had already done two things: let Harper know he knew some personal information about him and indicated that they would not be discussing recent events in Jakarta. He was sticking to a safe subject. Konfrontasi: the political classes here liked to discuss it in the same way the Brits discussed the weather, as a polite opener.

  Harper’s view was that the sabre-rattling across the Malacca Strait would come to nothing. ‘I wouldn’t like to say . . .’ he replied politely, raising his hands. ‘The British are famously stubborn. The only thing they really understand is when other people are stubborn to them in return.’

  ‘That is true, Mr Harper, very true.’

  He let Parno lead the conversation but hoped that the point would soon come when he would move things forward, and eventually, Parno leaned towards him and lowered his voice, a little melodramatically Harper thought, and said, ‘So, how soon can your friends provide us with the list?’

  He paused. He had learned a thing or two from Gregor. ‘The list is already prepared.’

  Parno’s face gave nothing away. ‘How many, Mr Harper?’

  ‘Eight hundred. Individuals, not families.’ The Americans had been working on the lists of Communists and their sympathisers for years – eventually the names would run to thousands, from the top down. Aiding the provision of such a list would ensure Parno a secure position in the new regime. He imagined that however calm the man’s exterior, he must be quite excited. But then Parno surprised him.

  ‘And how accurate, do you suppose, is this list?’

  Who would think a man like Parno would concern himself with accuracy? Surely it was quantity, not quality, that mattered here.

  ‘That isn’t my concern,’ Harper replied. Nor yours.

  Parno paused. His face became heavy. He was, after all, a man who allowed shadows to cross his heart, Harper thought. Perhaps I have misjudged him.

  ‘When?’

  ‘The end of next week.’


  ‘And who will bring it?’

  ‘I’ll bring the list myself. But the handover has to be personal, to the General. My employers want an assurance from me about that. I am here today to receive that assurance from you so we can proceed.’

  Parno raised his eyebrows very slightly. Officially, Harper had come as supplicant: unofficially, they both knew that the power in this conversation worked the other way around. Harper sensed in Parno a keenness that their transaction should be about more than the practicalities. He was a conviction bureaucrat, it would appear, not just a man on the make.

  ‘You’re an American. How did you learn Indonesian?’ Parno said.

  ‘I was born on Sulawesi, in forty-two.’ Harper offered. ‘Spent a bit of time here in Jakarta after the war, then my parents and I emigrated to the US. My father had relatives who sponsored us. Chicago.’

  ‘Ah, great pity, great misfortune not to be Javanese.’ Parno was chuckling again. The Javanese thought the only island worth being born on was Java: on other islands, the Javanese got blamed for everything. ‘Your parents did well to get out, considering what the Dutch did to us after.’ There was some none-too-subtle point-scoring in this remark: Parno would be wondering why Harper’s parents hadn’t stayed and fought for independence but it would have been risky for Harper to invent a cover story like that. Parno had probably fought himself, been imprisoned. If Harper claimed his parents had too, Parno would want to know all the details of what they had done, where they had done it and with whom.

  ‘You know how backward Dutch thinking is? A few of them get locked up by the Japanese and afterwards they think that means it’s justified to take our lands all over again . . .’ There was genuine hatred in Parno’s tone, as there so often was when Indonesian conversation turned to the Dutch. Harper’s cover story never went near his Dutch roots. He would have had a bullet to the back of the head down some alleyway long before now if it had. Parno tossed back his whisky. ‘They got off pretty lightly.’

  Harper wondered if his father felt he was getting off lightly as he was forced to kneel on the dusty ground by a screaming Japanese soldier – or his mother, for that matter, who had been a starving young widow when she gave birth to him in a flooded shack full of cockroaches.

  ‘But tell me something . . .’

  If he uses the phrase we are both men of the world, Harper thought to himself, I will get up and leave right now.

  ‘Tell me, is it true that there are people still out there hunting Nazis, after all these years? There is always something bad happening in the world. And yet there are men hunting down those Germans all over the world twenty years later, is that true? Even in South America, I believe?’

  ‘I believe so,’ Harper said.

  Parno shook his head. ‘The Jews, you can bet they won’t ever forget. Hasn’t it been proved half those stories were made up?’

  ‘Well,’ said Harper, mildly, ‘the documented evidence is that it was pretty bad.’

  A look of scorn crossed Parno’s face. ‘Why is it Westerners think a Jew child being murdered is worse than a child of ours, ha?’ He lifted his fingers and rubbed them together.

  Harper looked at Parno’s face, which was a mask of certainty – and then it came to him what this conversation was really about. Parno was thinking of what would happen to the people whose names were on that list, them and their children. That was what was behind all this; the man had a conscience and he, Harper, was supposed to relieve it in order that they should get the deal done. Perhaps he should mention another name to Parno: Stalin. Maybe they could talk about what might happen in the Soviet Bloc now they’d kicked out Khrushchev. Perhaps if they discussed the people trying to scramble over the bloody great wall that had sliced Berlin in half, then Parno wouldn’t feel so bad about handing over a list of Commies to the military. While he was at it, Parno could usefully dwell on what would have happened to him and his family if the Communists had pulled off their coup – whatever his official post, his connections to the Generals would be well known; the army and the civil service were full of PKI informants from top to bottom. It was easy to have moral qualms about people who were going to be arrested when you were on the side that was in power. Such qualms were a luxury allowed only to the winners. If Parno was in a football stadium now, on his knees with his hands tied behind his back, would he be worrying about the health of the youth in the red bandana who had the pistol pressed against his temple? He’d be lucky if a pistol was how they did it.

  He felt weary. He hadn’t eaten much that day, it was too sweltering, and the whisky – quite good whisky – was swimming in his head, and he had smoked a cigar even though he didn’t particularly like them. Parno wanted to inveigle him into a discussion that would make himself feel better: he felt like grabbing Parno by the lapels and bringing his face up to his, nose to nose, holding him there and saying, don’t you understand, it’s not my job to make you feel better and it’s not your job to feel bad in the first place? It isn’t our job to think or feel anything. Haven’t you got it?

  They talked for a little more, then he began yawning conspicuously. He knew it might cause offence but the afternoon was getting late. He didn’t want to end up here as dusk fell, curfew – the last thing he wanted was to be stuck here for the night.

  Parno said, ‘You are welcome to stay, have dinner with us, stay the night.’

  ‘Regrettably, I must decline. I am expected elsewhere.’

  Parno smiled broadly, as if they were old friends. ‘My wife will be disappointed. Say goodbye to her at least,’ he said, clapping him on the shoulder as they rose.

  They went out into the hallway: across it was another sitting room. Through the doorway, they could see Parno’s wife, waiting in a chair. Her forearms were resting along the arms of the chair in a pose that he guessed she had adopted when she heard the door to the sitting room open. She looked at them but did not rise. Her gaze was as glassy as that of the tiger. He looked back at her but she showed no sign of recognising him as the man she had greeted just over an hour ago. She opened her mouth, and from her wide, glossy lips, a small but dense cloud of white smoke came, an exhaled haze. Then he saw that between two fingers of her right hand, a hand-rolled cigarette of some sort was resting, drooping a little, the ash at its tip in a perilous downward curve.

  Her vulnerability at that moment inspired a brief flush of desire, but he had indicated he wanted to leave and, in any case, needed to report back as soon as possible. He and Parno had arranged a handover. He bowed to her, a little, and turned back to the ornate wooden hallway, where Parno was smiling broadly and pointing at the stuffed tiger, on top of whose head Parno’s wife had rested his slightly battered panama hat.

  He took another betjak back and got it to drop him on the other side of the Hotel Indonesia roundabout. The traffic had picked up again and he walked alongside the slow procession of cars wheeling round the roundabout and past the ruined bulk of the British Embassy, now boarded up and deserted, the graffiti on the walls, CRUSH BRITISH IMPERIALISTS, scrawled and faded. He wondered how long it would be before that was scrubbed off and the embassy reopened, now the military were back in power.

  In the lobby, two German businessmen were smoking and talking loudly – from their gestures he guessed they were arguing about whether or not it was safe to leave the hotel that evening.

  As he walked down the corridor to his room, where, he knew, the air that was waiting for him would taste as though it had been breathed in and out again by a hundred previous occupants, he thought of Parno’s wife and wondered, briefly, if he should try ordering up a working girl, like so many of the journalists and businessmen did. In the bar downstairs, they bragged about which antibiotics they preferred. But then he thought of the glassy, stuffed-tiger look in those girls’ eyes, looks that were undisguised by their toothy smiles and chatter, and what was the point of having something that was handed to you on a plate? The whole point was the chase, wasn’t it? The act was fifteen minutes,
tops. Prostitutes were for middle-aged men, fat men, men who couldn’t get a woman any other way. Surely it was demeaning to pay? He’d rather sort himself out: at least you didn’t have to worry about making stilted conversation with the handkerchief.

  He could go down to the bar, perhaps, but at this time of the evening it would be rammed with journalists. They had become unbearable recently, full of self-congratulation: they were the right men in the right place at the right time, war heroes for just being in Jakarta even though they had spent the days of the coup stuck in the hotel like Harper and the worst hardship that had befallen them was the temporary failure of the air conditioning. Luckily for them, the hotel had its own generator and things had been fixed in a jiffy. Crisis over. Now it looked like the situation might stabilise here, they were all desperate to get to Vietnam, talked gleamingly of how dangerous it was, as if there weren’t enough danger in Jakarta still, as if the Indonesians being rounded up on the streets and loaded into trucks weren’t newsworthy in comparison with the next large political event elsewhere. He pitied their wives when they got back home. He would rather spend an evening with Parno than with the hacks, any day. For all his vanities and prejudices, Parno was at least a man living in his own country and making his decisions, good or bad, within that context. Parno would rise or fall by those decisions. While Parno was facing the consequences of his chosen allegiances, one way or another, the hacks would be in another bar somewhere in another international hotel, visiting another country’s tragedy. In fact, weren’t all men repellent, really? That was why they went to prostitutes. It wasn’t just physical relief they were after – it was relief from the company of their own kind, from themselves.