Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  He stood in the corridor and felt around the doorframe to his room, checking that the small piece of paper he always left in different positions between the door and the frame was still in place. So, he thought, as he located it, after all these months, I’m actually getting something done, maybe even meeting a General.

  Inside the room, he went over to the dial and turned on the air conditioning, then did what he always did, went to the bed, flopped on his back and closed his eyes; breathing, waiting for the clinking, clunking air-conditioning box to stir the air and quell his claustrophobia.

  It was Johnson who gave him the list, the last time he would see that strange blank of a man. The handover took place in a cemetery.

  Harper had his canvas holdall with him. He had checked out of Hotel Indonesia and bought a moped so small he had to bend his long legs high like a cricket. In the shimmering air, the stink of gas was intensified – whenever he kicked down on the ignition, he did so gingerly, as if the hot metal he was perched on might burst into flames. Considering how much danger there was on the streets, it would be damn stupid to be immolated by your own motorcycle.

  After delivering the list to Parno’s house, he was going straight to the airport – they were posting him to Bali so that he could take over from the operative there, who was being sent to check out the smaller islands. He would have to make a phone call before he left to ensure the road was safe – he might need to ditch the moped and go in an army jeep: an Indo in Western clothes on his own on a moped would be a little too intriguing for the militiamen who had set up checkpoints all the way along the road. Officially, the airport was still closed but there was rumoured to be a flight some time in the afternoon and he had enough dollars on him to bribe his way onto it if he ever got there. His instructions were clear. The Americans wanted him off Java when this job was done – that was the whole point of the embassy using a middleman. The next list would be someone else’s problem. He was just one of many middlemen.

  His holdall was slung diagonally across his chest and the strap was rubbing his shoulder where he was sweating through his thin shirt. He drove down the lane that ran alongside the cemetery wall – scrubby fields with bushes and trees on the other side. The lane was deserted at this hour. As he turned the corner along the path to the cemetery entrance, he saw a battered Borgward van parked at the far end, close to the junction with the main road. That would be Johnson’s minders.

  Harper bumped the moped into the cemetery, a little way down the path, so he could park it where he could keep an eye on it. On the far side, there was a small family group around a grave, some women with covered heads, but they took no notice of him. He dismounted and sat on a nearby bench, lit a cigarette and waited. The cemetery was walled on all sides – there was a gate in the middle of each side and the wall was no more than head height. The wall gave the illusion of seclusion from the rest of the city and here, amongst the graves and the palm trees lining the wide paths, he experienced a moment of calm, a chance to draw breath from the tension of journeying the streets.

  Johnson appeared in the gateway before Harper had finished his cigarette: he had a canvas bag slung over his shoulder and his bald head gleamed in the heat. He glanced around, saw the moped first, then Harper, acknowledged him with a brief nod as he walked towards him and sat down next to him on the bench. Harper offered his cigarette packet. Johnson declined by pulling a face. Harper wondered what Johnson’s vices were. He was suspicious of men who made a show of not drinking or smoking or womanising – the ones who wanted everyone to observe how clean-cut they were. What secret desires was Johnson suppressing beneath that shiny skull? What sort of heart beat beneath that shirt, cleaner and less crumpled than any shirt should be in this heat (apart from his bald head, the man didn’t even break a sweat)? Boys, perhaps? Maybe he liked to be whipped while wearing women’s underwear. Whatever it is, Harper thought, I bet he prays afterwards.

  Johnson reached into his bag and brought out a small leather case, like a satchel without a strap, and handed it over. ‘Don’t look inside.’ It was said genially enough. ‘You’re getting out this afternoon?’ Johnson added.

  ‘Yes,’ Harper said, ‘that’s the plan, depends on how long the handover takes, maybe tomorrow or the day after, it’ll be tight. You?’

  ‘They’re keeping me here till things are stabilised.’ Johnson sighed. ‘It’s bad out there.’ He was looking towards the cemetery gate but he meant out there in the world, in the backstreets of Jakarta, out in the towns and the villages in Central and East Java where people were being rounded up, anyone who was or who had ever been a Communist, anyone connected with anyone who was or who had ever been. Harper didn’t think about it. It wasn’t his job to think about it.

  It occurred to him that Johnson and Parno had a great deal in common. He wondered if Johnson was about to launch into a man-to-man chat with him in the same way Parno had, if the thought of the men and women kneeling next to ditches by the sides of the roads with their hands tied behind their backs was bothering his conscience in the same way the thought of them bothered Parno.

  Johnson rose from the bench. ‘Don’t fuck up,’ he said, then turned and walked down the path.

  Later, when he was being debriefed back in Holland, they asked him about Jakarta. They asked him about the things he had witnessed, how he had had to abandon the moped, the chaos and danger of getting across town and the delay in the handover and leaving Java. Two of them came to visit him at the Rest Home in the country, the big house with light, airy rooms that had floor-to-ceiling windows and views across the fields. They sat holding clipboards and filled in sheets of paper as they asked him for a detailed account of everything that had happened, first on Java, then on Bali. They understood, they said, that he didn’t feel up to writing the report himself.

  ‘Why did it take you two days to get to the airport?’ one said.

  He looked at them blankly, trying to keep the disdain from his face. ‘The purge had begun by then. Two days was a miracle. I was lucky to get there at all and even luckier to get on a plane.’

  Then they asked him about what had happened in the rice fields on Bali and he told them what they needed to know.

  ‘And why did you disappear, then?’ one of them said softly. ‘You were off the radar for weeks, then came home via California. Why not the usual route? Why not contact us and let us get you out via Karachi?’

  He had had to lie low in the highlands for two months, after what had happened at Komang’s house – and it was true, in all that time, he had made no effort to contact the Institute, not even to let them know he was still alive. ‘I had business in Los Angeles, personal business.’ They hadn’t pushed him on that one.

  The men from the Institute were mostly interested in the facts, what he had done when. The doctors were interested in the pictures. The doctors asked him about the severed heads he had seen by the side of the road as he passed through Balinese villages. They asked him about the charred corpses hanging from trees with signs around their necks that decorated crossroads everywhere in Jakarta. On his way to the airport, he had seen one such corpse being beaten by a young man holding a collapsible chair. The doctors, so urbane: each of them had an air of practicality that, at times, bordered on scepticism, especially that bearded one, what was his name? In the middle of Harper’s businesslike description of a row of shops that had human hands on strings dangling from the front of the overhanging roof, the bearded doctor had looked at him and said, ‘Hands on strings? How is that possible?’

  Later, Harper was to pretend that was what it was, the body parts; that was what was troubling him, that was where they had come from, the images that made him wake in the night, snapping from sleep to full consciousness in a split second, as he did for two years after his return home: lying there, his eyes wide open in the dark.

  He decided to take the backstreets to Pejompongan. The sun was high, the air close, a storm was brewing for later that day: the stink of sewage from the
canals stirred up by the monsoon rain and the burning rubbish from the backs of shops and houses, the humidity, all created a miasma that slowed traffic, slowed movement. Jakarta’s daily thunderstorm was gathering. If it broke before he made it out to Parno’s, his chances of getting to the airport later were slim, even in an army jeep.

  He had only been riding for fifteen minutes or so since he had left the cemetery, not exactly sure in which direction he was headed, following his nose down the twists and turns of side streets. At the end of a narrow road, he eased the moped to a halt and left the engine running while he lifted the edge of his shirt and wiped his face.

  He dropped the shirt and looked up – and it was then that he saw them, four young men at the end of the road, no more than fifty metres away, facing him, staring at him, in positions of aggressive query. One of them, a tall one on the left, was holding a club; another was holding what looked like a table leg. Behind their tableau, at the end of the street, people were running past, a group of young women, a mixed group of men and women, two men – all his age and younger, and from somewhere in the streets out of sight came the unmistakeable sound of panic, the murmur of a crowd in danger, the occasional pop of gunfire, a shout or a scream. In the second or two it took to absorb all this, he was also making a calculation: in the time it would take him to kick the moped into action and turn in the narrow dirt road, which was covered in loose scree – the scree would make it impossible to do it too quickly without the risk of falling off – the young men, poised, tipped forward, could reach him.

  And then it was happening. They were running at him – and he had no idea who they were or who they thought he was, only that they were a pack and if he hesitated for a second, they would be upon him.

  He was still taking the decision to abandon the moped as he swung his leg over and ran back down the alley, still thinking maybe he should stay on it while his long legs sped to and fro with the satisfying speed endowed by adrenaline – and despite the sudden and apparent danger, there was a kind of joy in that run. He had spent two years in the Dutch army, he was a trained man with a long stride, these were just boys. He was nearly back at the other end of the narrow road, nearly out into the crowded main street, when one of the boys was on his heels and must have grabbed at the holdall on his back because he was flying backwards, turning as he did, landing on his side in the dirt and in the same moment, a blow – it was so sudden and ferocious he could not tell what or who from – landed on the side of his head and slammed the other side of it into the dirt. There was a moment of blackness, and when that had passed, he was curled in a ball on the ground, his arms crossed over his head to protect it, and they were beating him with the clubs and kicking him and shouting.

  ‘Ampun-ampun!’ he shouted, and for another moment or two, they did not hear him and continued – one landed an excruciating blow in the middle of his back that made him snap back, reversing the arc of his body in one swift movement.

  Then they stopped and were shouting at each other, speaking with such speed he couldn’t understand what they were saying, and when he opened his eyes he saw that one of them, the tall one, had his arm across the chest of the one next to him, holding him back – they were having a ferocious argument of some sort. Harper rolled gingerly onto his knees but he knew that if he tried to rise, they would beat him to the ground. He tried to think of a whole sentence, brothers I am with you, I am your cousin, but his mouth wasn’t working. He lifted a hand and touched his chin, which was swollen and covered in dirt. He spat and there were strings of blood amidst the spittle.

  Then they were gone. They had run off down the alley, back the way they had come. As he watched them go, he saw one of them stop by the moped and lift it from where it lay on its side, the engine still grumbling. It was the smallest youth – thirteen or fourteen years of age, perhaps. He sat on the moped and tried to kick it into life and was shouting at the others to come back and help. Harper hauled himself to his feet and loped off in the other direction, the holdall bumping against his back. He didn’t look back.

  The main street was still busy with fleeing people but nobody stopped him as he walked against the tide, head down. When he glanced up, he was careful not to make eye contact with anyone. He glimpsed a huge pall of smoke rising from a few streets away. Any building with Communist associations was being set on fire, and sometimes just any building. There was the stink of burnt rubber from somewhere: then as he was looking at the smoke, a herd of young men similar to the ones who had attacked him ran down the street – they were slightly older than the others; students, he guessed, dressed in trousers with white shirts, waving objects in the air, sticks and batons, and shouting gleefully to each other, shoving each other. Driving behind them was an army jeep with six soldiers in the back, waving and smiling. It was a hunting party and their prey was PKI. Such a group became more than the sum of its parts. They wouldn’t care about any list.

  Harper moved closer to the wall but kept walking, looking at the ground. He could smell paraffin. Buildings set alight almost always meant people set alight too.

  The moped didn’t matter. He could find some other way of getting out to Parno’s. He had the holdall, covered in dirt and battered, but intact, and with the leather case still inside it, that was all that mattered. His bruises would heal. And he didn’t think his back was broken – but every time he moved his left leg, arrows of pain shot up his side, torn ligaments perhaps? With each stab of pain, a wave of nausea and dizziness gripped him.

  He needed to get off the streets. A man who looked as though he had barely escaped with his life from a beating was offering himself up to the next lot who wanted to finish the job.

  He turned a corner: a side street, a small mosque on the corner, an administrative building next to it, at the end of it another corner, and at once he was in a quieter district, on the edge of a kampong but still adjacent to the main roads. Safe for a moment, he paused at the end of a street that was, when life was normal, a small, local market. It was closed and unnaturally deserted. The stalls were boarded with whatever might have been to hand: some with properly constructed wooden shutters or doors. Other families had made makeshift attempts to protect what little they had by nailing broken boards and bamboo poles in criss-cross patterns across the front. Yet others, who could not protect the open area of their stalls, had simply stripped every object from the shelves. In the back rooms, plastic buckets and wooden carvings and boxes of fruit would be piled high and, amongst them, he guessed, families cowering, waiting for things to become calm again. The stink of burnt rubber and paraffin drifted over this area too. Amidst the chaos, though, lives still had to be led, children calmed and fed. Somewhere further along the market street, someone was cooking: beneath the stench he could smell coconut oil and dried fish, smoke and spices.

  Without warning, rain dropped from the sky, falling in a sudden solid waterfall. He tipped his head back and opened his mouth to catch the water, letting the hard fat drops wash the dirt and blood from his face. He would have liked to stay there until he was soaked but couldn’t risk the rain seeping through the tough canvas of his holdall and into the leather case.

  At the end of the market street was a ragged shack, sloping and derelict. Through the empty porch area, there was a broken door that wasn’t even boarded – it opened easily, half on its hinges. Behind the door was a small square room of the sort a large family would sleep in, head to toe; a dirt floor, an empty wooden crate and a single broken plastic sandal in one corner – recently abandoned, he guessed. Given how overcrowded the kampong were, it was unusual to find anything empty. He wondered why the family had fled.

  At the other side of the room was a narrow open doorway for ventilation, with no covering. He went and looked out. The room backed onto a canal, not one of the grand ones built for the smarter areas of town or even the river that delineated Parno’s area from the kampong but a small, shallow one, little better than a drainage ditch. To the left, it stretched back along the l
ength of the market street: to the right, it bent away, the view blocked by other shacks. He wondered how many men, women and children had slept here unprotected from the mosquitoes, the bad odours from the still water, the diseases it harboured.

  As he stepped back, he felt his knees start to shake. It was kicking in. It had been an elementary part of training, both when he did his national service and at the Institute. One of the most dangerous parts of danger comes when you think you are safe again: that is the point where the adrenaline will drain away and you will feel hungry, thirsty and completely exhausted. He had thought he was just finding somewhere to shelter from the rain, but he realised he had crawled like a wounded animal into a hole.

  He pulled the holdall over his head, dropped to his knees. He was beginning to shiver. He opened the holdall and found the few balls of klepon, wrapped in paper, that he had taken from the hotel restaurant that morning. They were already collapsing and had leaked through the paper. He unwrapped them as best he could and crammed two of them into his mouth, the sweet stickiness of them dissolving into glue. He pulled out a cotton jacket and put it on: it was clean but could be sacrificed. There was the thin towel he had taken from his room, too small for his purposes but better than nothing. He put the towel down on the dirt floor and lay stretched out, tucking the holdall underneath his head as a pillow, closing his eyes.

  When he stirred again, it was dusk. Everything hurt. He moved his left leg, carefully, but it was so stiff he felt he might break a bone trying to shift it. His arms both ached – why his arms? He couldn’t even remember being struck there. When he arched his back, he could almost feel the vertebrae cracking. His head throbbed. The thought that he had to raise himself and complete his mission made him want to throw up. It was still raining. Darkness would fall soon. There was no chance he could make it to Parno’s now. He would have to shelter until dawn broke. The delay wouldn’t cause alarm at Parno’s end; with the streets in chaos, it was touch and go whether the General himself would have been there today, or at all. He might have got to Parno’s only to find he had to wait there for a week.