Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  The dirt floor of the shack was slightly raised from the street, otherwise he would have woken in a mud bath. When he went to the opening in the back, the rain was still falling onto the brown water of the canal, but it was easing. It would stop soon, then there would be a little dull light before darkness fell and the huge yellow moon of Jakarta rose in the sky: it always stayed low it seemed, like a mother keeping a close eye on her children.

  He went back into the shack, ate the rest of the klepon, then sat on his backside and did a slow inventory of his body, starting with his left foot and working his way up each of his legs in turn, checking for swelling and bruising. He kept a tiny round mirror in his toilet bag, half of a woman’s powder compact that he had detached from the other half after one of his short-lived liaisons had left it behind at his apartment in Amsterdam. He remembered snapping it in two, after she’d gone, tossing the powder half into a wastepaper basket and thinking, a tiny mirror, that could be useful. He cleaned it with the edge of his shirt, which made it more dirty, spat on it, cleaned it again, and then, in the indistinct smear of his own spittle, examined his face. His chin was misshapen. There was a long graze on one side, near his hairline – but he didn’t look nearly as bad as he felt. He probed his left cheekbone in an exploratory manner, decided it wasn’t smashed. He would wash his face properly the next morning, when dawn broke, in the canal. There was a clean shirt in the holdall. He would change into that before he set out.

  Once his inventory of himself was done, he checked through each of his belongings, then, perhaps because he was feeling scornful about Johnson and Parno and all those men he dealt with who did most of their business sitting in the safety of houses or offices, he did something unprofessional. He pulled the leather case out of the canvas holdall and unzipped it, and took out the list of names.

  He had expected it to be handwritten – you wouldn’t think there were any typists left holed up in the American Embassy with its rolls of barbed wire outside. Instead, the list was typed on lined paper torn from a large notepad, the sort of very thin paper where the dot on the ‘i’ key had made pinprick holes. There were around thirty sheets, held together on the left-hand side by two small bulldog clips. He unfastened them and held up one of the sheets of paper: the tiny holes in it created minuscule white beams. There were twenty-five to thirty names on each sheet. The names were on the left, then underneath them was a one-word note. Member for a PKI party member. Official for someone they thought was higher up in the party. The names didn’t appear to be in any sort of order. The officials might be conviction Communists, Harper thought, but most of the members were probably peasants and workers who thought it might get them a few hours off corvée labour. A couple of names had PRIORITY typed in capitals underneath – they would be the ones the military really wanted. Priority could mean, to be shot immediately, or to be kept alive for questioning. After the names were numbers in brackets, (4) or (2) or (9). Sometimes, there was just a question mark, (?).

  In the middle of the page was a list of addresses or sometimes just the single word for a street or district. After the addresses, there was a third column that had handwritten annotations in fine pencil. Harper peered at them but couldn’t decipher the tight scrawl. Eight hundred names, on this list alone: eight hundred people.

  It was only after he had clipped the sheaf of paper back into place, brushed at a little dirt that had transferred onto it from his hands and replaced it in the leather case, that he realised what the numbers in brackets probably meant: family members, wives, children, cousins or servants, anyone else in the household who might be of interest.

  He stood and walked towards the opening, the leather case still in his hands. Outside, the rain had stopped and darkness had fallen. The moon would rise soon.

  He crouched down on his haunches and rested his back, wincing as he did, against the precarious wall of the shack. He wrapped his arms around the leather case and clutched it to his chest. He closed his eyes.

  The sheaf of paper he was holding against his heart, his beating heart, the list of names: he was holding death. He was death.

  He kept his eyes closed. It was still unnaturally quiet for early evening in Jakarta but around him, he could hear people stirring in the shacks; a woman called out and then was silent, a baby or toddler let out a half-hearted, old-sounding cry.

  He thought of Parno, waiting in his bungalow, with his wife and his stuffed tiger. He thought of the people on the list, who were somewhere eating a meal or sleeping or talking to their children. He thought of the secretary who had typed it, the one whose fingers had come down so firmly on the clacketty typewriter that the ‘i’ key had made those holes in the paper. He thought of a room full of men in suits, all seated around a big oval table, with coffee and ashtrays on it, clipboards, an expensive watch that the man in charge had detached from his wrist and placed in front of him in order to keep an eye on the time because he didn’t quite trust the wall clock, which was no way near as expensive as his watch. He thought of a soldier, somewhere in a barrack, here in Jakarta, cleaning a gun. Someone, somewhere, was checking the oil on the engine of the jeep that would transport that soldier to the addresses now in Harper’s possession.

  He opened his eyes. The moon had risen. Its glow lit the surface of the canal. If he leaned out over the water, he would be able to see a version of himself, reflected.

  Of all the people he had just thought of, he was, as far as he knew, the only one in possession of the list. Perhaps there was a copy somewhere, perhaps there wasn’t. It would be egotistical to think of himself as the sole possessor of it, surely? He was nothing more than a courier. He wasn’t going to kill anyone. But put all the people he had just thought about – and him – together, and collectively they were going to kill all eight hundred people on this list, and their families: (4) or (2) or (9).

  Those people were going to be killed anyway. The list might speed things up a bit, that’s all – and think of all the people who would have been killed if the Communists had succeeded in taking power. A man like him wasn’t a policy-maker. The big decisions could only be made by people who had all the facts. He, Harper, only knew a tiny percentage of the story – you had to look at the big picture, after all. He had been hired to pick up a leather case and deliver it somewhere else. If he hadn’t been hired to do that job, then someone else would have been.

  He stared at the surface of the canal, flat and black as oil, glossy in the moonlight, and it came to him that he did, after all, have a choice. He could stand up and with one swing of his arm, using hardly any force at all, toss the leather case into the water in front of him, where it would float for no more than a second. In the chaos of Jakarta, it was easy for a man to fail in what he set out to do. In the time it would take for another list to be drawn up or copied, another handover to be arranged, perhaps a handful of people would be warned and disappear, escape to the country – who knew?

  Further down the canal, there came the laughter of some girls. They would have slipped out under the cover of darkness to protect their modesty, now the mobs had quietened and the smell of burning had been dampened by the rain. They would be bathing and washing their hair in the black water where everyone urinated and rubbish was thrown, where the canal was opaque enough to hide all manner of secrets.

  He stared at the water. The only secret the canal would hide that night would be that he had realised he had a choice. He went back inside the shack. He put the leather case back into his holdall and then bunched the holdall up so that it formed a pillow. He laid his head on it and slept for some time, opening his eyes later while it was still dark, then lying there, waiting for dawn.

  Two days later, handover done, he was having a beer with Abang by the Bali Beach Hotel and thinking that it was the best beer of his life. Blood sinks into sand really fast.

  Afterwards, Abang drove him to his bungalow in Denpasar, only ten minutes from the centre of town but in a wide, tree-lined street behind some of the old buildin
gs, now closed and boarded. Few people were out and about: two elderly men, shirtless and wiry, in bamboo hats and sarongs, digging at something in one of the ditches by the side of the road; a woman walking with a huge cloth bundle balanced on her head, her compact figure swaying a little with the effort, her hands loose by her side. As they drove past, he glanced back, to see if she was beautiful, but she was older than she looked from behind. Denpasar struck him as unnaturally quiet.

  Abang had stayed with a family in the Chinese district for a bit – it was a good way of finding out what was happening on the ground, he said, but it got too dangerous after a while. ‘The British have this phrase, you know this one? A bird in a coal mine. The little yellow birds.’

  ‘Canary. Canary in a coal mine.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  Abang made a point of moving lodgings every three months. People forgot their suspicions about you once you moved – even if they remembered you, your absence rendered you innocuous.

  The bungalow was set back from the road, hidden behind a head-height wall in its turn obscured by tall bushes. The doors in the narrow stone entranceway were thick carved wood – the hinges creaked as they pushed their way through. Never oil the hinges, always scatter gravel beneath your doors and windows: these were the ways you made yourself secure without anyone knowing that was what you were doing. As they crossed the small lush garden and approached the front porch, he saw there was a young woman kneeling on the step preparing an offering. She smiled at Abang and Abang smiled back, then said something to her in a language Harper didn’t know. The young woman bent over the offering, eyes closed, for a moment, then rose from the step and, in a bowed position, backed away down the path.

  Inside, the bungalow was clean and plain. Abang extended his arm and Harper sat on a low, wooden two-seater with woven cushions. Abang went out back and returned with two bottles of beer – he handed one to Harper, they gestured cheers! at each other, then Abang went over to an old filing cabinet against one wall that had a wide, shallow bowl on top full of incense sticks and limp petals with curled brown edges. He tilted the bowl and from underneath it withdrew a thin notebook, which he tossed over to Harper. ‘Back inside page.’

  There was a name and the description of a village, a diagram sketched lightly in pencil.

  ‘That’s the village, Komang lives just outside it,’ Abang said, walking over to and sitting next to him. He pointed at the page. ‘He’s our contact in the district. He’s very well connected with the neighbouring villages, sits on the Irrigation Committee and his cousin is Big Man in the next village. His brother-in-law is a civil servant over in Klungkung Town.’

  ‘Why’s he working for us? What’s in it for him?’ Harper asked.

  Abang shrugged. ‘Decent type, family man, worried about PKI land grabs. The peasants are worried too because they are loyal to the old landowners. They don’t really get the idea of parcelling up the land even though they are going to get some. Komang isn’t a peasant though, far from it, and he should have been fine, he has status, but trouble is, his brother joined the PKI last year, it’s widely known. Once the round-ups of Communists start here, that whole family is in trouble.’

  ‘Can’t we get a message to the military? Leave him alone?’

  Abang shook his head. ‘Doesn’t work like that here. It’ll be the local militia comes for him. Once that lot get going, they work pretty much on their own initiative.’

  ‘Ah.’ Harper took his own small, leather-bound notebook from his back pocket and a stub of pencil and, holding Abang’s notebook open with one hand on one knee and his own on the other, began to copy down the details in the tiny, illegible scrawl he had developed for himself, a personal mix of English, Dutch, Indonesian, some Javanese he knew and a few words and abbreviations of his personal invention. If his notebook fell into the wrong hands – well, good luck to the man who had to try and decipher it.

  When he looked up, he saw that Abang had gone to the open door that led out to the front porch and was leaning against the doorpost, looking out, silhouetted in the light from the garden, a bulky man with something of a paunch, a half-distracted air. He gave the impression of solidity, trustworthiness – even geniality in different circumstances, Harper thought: a favourite-uncle type. Abang lit a kretek and then stood staring out towards the street, smoking. Harper had a feeling he was thinking about the young woman who had beaten such a hasty retreat as they arrived, wondering what would happen to her once he had left, perhaps? Then Abang glanced back and caught Harper looking at him.

  ‘Sorry.’ He patted a pocket.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Harper said. ‘In a bit.’

  Abang drew on the cigarette. ‘I’m not sorry to be getting out of Denpasar before it all kicks off here, you know.’

  ‘I’ll be up country by then.’

  ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t count on it being much better up there, you know. Once you’ve warned Komang, it’s up to you, take whichever route you like, scout out the highlands, observe and take notes, just make sure you don’t stay more than two nights in any one place. I would say you’ll be here for a few weeks at least, unless Amsterdam in its wisdom changes its mind. What are your contact arrangements?’

  ‘I’ll have to come back to Denpasar. They know I’ll be out of contact for a bit.’

  ‘Good one,’ Abang inclined his head.

  It was every operative’s favourite kind of job; freedom of movement and using his own initiative.

  Abang smiled. ‘You’re not a romantic, are you?’

  Harper looked at him, a query.

  ‘I mean, you’re not the kind of person who is taken in by the landscape? Sorry, of course you’re not.’ He tipped his head back and exhaled smoke in a sharp, upward stream. ‘You’re not like Joosten and the others.’

  What Abang meant was, you’re not a fool. You won’t think that because a field is green and has a pretty woman with sleek black hair bending to harvest it that that means you can let your guard down. You’re not so stupid as to believe – like all those operatives back home – that ugly things can’t happen in beautiful places. What Abang meant was, you’re not white.

  ‘No,’ said Harper, bending his head back to the notebooks, ‘I’m not.’

  The next morning, he woke after sunrise on the low day bed in the corner of Abang’s sitting room. From the back porch, there was a clanking sound and the tuneful murmur of Abang singing a low, indistinguishable song.

  He had slept deeply: the light striped through the shutter slats in bright white. He threw back the sarong Abang had given him, sitting and stretching: both arms, bending them at the elbows, arching his back, then circling his head first one way then the other. He looked down at his torso, examining a livid bruise on his ribcage – the swelling had gone down and the deep red edge of it was spreading into purple and yellow tracery, like lace. His cock rested small and limp against his left thigh and he thought, not for the first time, it could have been a lot worse. On more than one occasion in the years to come, as an older man, he was to remember the speed of his recovery after the Jakarta incident and how much he had taken it for granted: the easy belief he had back then in his own powers of survival, the rapidity with which bruises faded and the confidence, the elasticity of youth.

  He stood and wrapped the sarong round his waist, pulled on the T-shirt he had left at the end of the day bed. He hadn’t told Abang about the beating. He was planning on not mentioning that in his reports. Gregor’s first question would be, why didn’t you take better evasive action if there was a riot going on? Whatever happened to any operative in the field, Gregor always liked to let them, and everyone else, know that it was their own fault.

  Abang was frying rice in a wok on the stone stove at the far end of the porch. As Harper wandered out, running both hands through his hair and scratching at his scalp, Abang saluted him with the wooden spatula, then scraped the rice onto two tin plates. He took the cloth from his shoulder and used it to pick up one of the plates and han
d it to Harper.

  ‘Here, adik,’ he said with a smile. ‘Careful, it’s hot.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He sat down on the step, the plate balanced on his knees on top of the cloth, and began to eat, pinching the rice with his fingers. Abang took the skillet out into the garden and turned it upside down, banging it with the wooden spatula so that the scraps would fall in the yard for the two chickens pecking in the dirt. Then he brought his own plate over and sat down next to Harper. In the small scrubby garden beyond the yard, through some bushes, Harper could see a vast and muddy pig lying asleep on its side in a makeshift wooden corral, motionless but for the long hairy curve of its stomach inflating and deflating.

  ‘Your pig?’ he asked, nodding at it.

  Abang shook his head. ‘Next door’s pig. Can’t believe it’s still alive, not much longer I don’t think. Want to know how much I had to pay, for that bag of rice, I mean?’ He tossed his head backwards to wherever the bag of rice was hidden. ‘A thousand rupiah, last me a couple of weeks maybe, just me, no family, although I’m a big eater, it’s true. I guess a local family would spin it out the month.’

  Harper nodded, balling the rice neatly before lifting it to his mouth. Abang had thrown in some lime leaves and chopped chilli with seeds: all it needed was a bit of fried fish, an egg on top, perhaps. Didn’t Abang’s chickens lay eggs? Still, he wasn’t going to complain: in comparison with the claustrophobic Hotel Indonesia and the burnt-rubber smell of Jakarta, this was like being on holiday with an old friend.