Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  As the local men saw Harper approach, they smiled but didn’t stay to speak to him, turning and wandering off. Wayan got to his feet, brushed at his trousers.

  They took lodgings in the home of a local elderly woman: Wayan had asked around and found them a house with some food in it. They ate with the family, cross-legged on the floor, the children rendered silent by their presence. They drank sweet tea, then retired. Harper and Wayan were sharing the day bed in the open area of the compound, partially screened by a large cloth hanging from a line while a black pig snuffled around their feet. The elderly lady handed them each a sarong and doused the single paraffin lamp hanging from the line. It was pitch dark.

  He was woken by a short shout – and was instantly, fully awake, the kind of sharp awakening a person has when something inside them has apprehended threat even though the conscious part of the brain is slow to catch up. It was completely black. He sat upright and then moved into a crouching position on the bed. Next to him, Wayan was awake too. He whispered the question, ‘Sir?’

  Harper held up his hand for Wayan to be silent even though it was too dark for him to see. He blinked a couple of times and, as his eyes adjusted, saw there was an orange gleam to the left of his vision, through the stone entranceway that led out of the compound and onto the street. ‘Stay here,’ he whispered, then rose from the day bed – he had slept fully dressed this time and with his money belt still strapped inside his shirt – and crept to the doorway.

  There was a large group of men in the street. Some of them had flaming torches, a couple were holding paraffin lamps aloft. Here and there, he could glimpse a disembodied face looming in the dark, appearing out of nowhere and disappearing again as the light swung away. Then the group was gone, melting into the dark. Harper stood for a minute, listening in the direction in which the group had departed: north, up the rise. There was the sudden, brief barking of dogs from a compound further up the hill, a whimper, then silence.

  They could take another route to Komang’s house: Abang had told him, ‘You can either approach through the village, that’s the short way, you can do it on foot, or you can ride on the moped on a track through the fields, but then you’ll have to leave Wayan with the moped in the middle of the fields and he won’t like that.’ Many Balinese thought spirits lived in the water, the Invisibles. Tonight, he thought, they are probably right.

  He stepped back into the compound and hissed to Wayan, ‘Start the moped.’ Abang had drawn a sketch of the paths and tracks around the village in Harper’s notebook and Harper’s visual memory was good, but he wasn’t sure whether he would be able to find his way in the dark.

  As he returned to the day bed to pick up his bag, he fumbled in his pocket for his cigarette lighter, flicking it and holding it up so that he could see Wayan’s face, both rictus and blank. ‘We should stay here, sir?’ he said.

  ‘We can’t,’ Harper replied. ‘It’s not safe.’ This was not true. He doubted very much the men would come for him and Wayan, they would be too anxious that his status was unconfirmed, that he might be too important to kill.

  Wayan would not start the moped for him unless he thought it was more dangerous to stay in the compound than go out into the night, so Harper repeated, ‘It’s not safe here, the men will come here. We have to go round a back route. I will direct you.’

  The noise of a moped engine: so ubiquitous in the day you hardly registered it, yet a cacophony in the dark. It would alert the men to the fact that someone else was on the move – but he and Wayan would be riding on a different path, a circuitous route. Wayan’s hand shook as he tried to turn the key and for a moment Harper wondered if he should have left the man behind and taken the moped on his own. Then the engine let loose with its small ascending growl, Wayan kicked the machine into life and Harper swung his leg over. ‘To the end of the road, then left,’ he said in a low voice, in Wayan’s ear. ‘Be careful, go slow, stay in the middle.’ They couldn’t afford to end up in a ditch in the dark.

  They turned left up the track that wound round the village. Gripping the seat with his knees, he held his cigarette lighter out and flicked it once in a while to illuminate the track, letting it die, then flick, die then flick. Each time, he saw no more than a few feet ahead, the mud track, the bushes either side, the shadow that the motorbike and its two riders cast, like that of a strange beast.

  After what seemed like a very long time, they had crested the rise and bumped slowly along another track until it narrowed and disappeared. This, if he had calculated correctly in the dark, was the edge of Komang’s far field. Harper whispered in Wayan’s ear, ‘Kill the engine.’

  There was an odd aural illusion then, as the engine died: he thought for a minute or two that there was total silence around them, only to find that as his hearing adjusted to the lack of engine sound, the night noises of the open fields rose up from the water, the click and sing of insects, the hum and shimmer of it.

  ‘Sir?’ asked Wayan and Harper put his hand on his shoulder to quiet him.

  For a few minutes, they listened. The darkness was complete out here and he dared not flick the lighter now they were out in the open. Perhaps when he skirted the trees on foot, he would be able to see if there was a little moonlight, enough for him to get his bearings. He estimated it would be another ten minutes or so to walk along the edge of the field and pass the treeline, using the route he had walked with Komang that afternoon – if his guesses about the path had been correct.

  He dismounted the moped, removed his bag from across his chest and gave it to Wayan, then said to him, ‘Turn the moped round but don’t restart the engine. Stay right here so I can find you. Don’t move from this spot, and don’t light a cigarette or use your lighter. Listen, Wayan, there is great danger, okay? So it’s important you listen to me, only listen to me and you will be okay. Stay here. Right here. I’ll be back in a short while.’

  Harper turned and set off before Wayan could argue with him. Wayan would be worried about the spirits of the night, how they could approach him from behind, or any direction, all at once perhaps, if he was not allowed to use a light. But there was no argument Harper could have advanced that would have allayed that particular fear, and there was no time. And as he skirted the edge of the field, his feet sinking a little deeper each time into the soft mud, he thought that perhaps Wayan was right: perhaps the group of men approaching Komang’s house now with paraffin lamps and machetes were spirits. Wasn’t it easier to think of them, or even yourself, in that way, rather than to look at your neighbour’s face in daylight and know the truth?

  The insects hummed and sang, his feet made sucking noises in the mud, but other than that, it was silent as he approached the end of the field. As the treeline ended, he knew he should be able to see across the next field to Komang’s house.

  He paused for a moment to listen – and then, sailing across the field through the black night, came a single, lengthy, agonised scream.

  He was frozen, a sick, light sensation overwhelming him, and then he was running forward, the mud clinging to the soles of his shoes, impeding the lifting of his feet by just fractions of a second but enough to feel as though his feet were being sucked at, pulled down.

  At the end of the treeline, he ducked down, although he knew there was no danger of the men looking his way, and in a crouching position, he ran back a little then crossed the next field, towards the patch of orange light he could see at the back of Komang’s house. From this distance, it was impossible to see what was happening. Where there was light at all, it was too bright and where it was dark, too dark. He could just make out a group of men, gathered close together and illuminated by a bare bulb hanging from the veranda and the orange light from their flares. Silhouetted against the glow from the house were black shapes, rising and falling. There were no more screams.

  Then there were shouts as the group of men broke apart and Harper thought he saw the flit and flicker of someone fleeing the house at running pace. He crept a littl
e closer, wading knee-deep in muddy water now. Some of the men were pointing in the direction in which the shape had fled.

  A child of around six, a girl with plaited hair, appeared on the veranda – perhaps the fleeing shape had been one of the older children making a terrified dash for it, and the girl had followed but not run. Go back, Harper thought desperately, staring at the girl through the dark, go back inside, but the men nearest the veranda had seen her and only then did the child seem to realise her own folly. She turned and ran back inside the house. The door slammed shut but the men were already swarming onto the veranda and Harper had no need to stay to see what would happen next.

  He made his way back across the rice field, knee-deep again, wretched at his own failure – he had been sent to do one simple thing, and he had failed. Had he been vehement enough, as he had sat on that veranda only a few hours ago, watching the golden light across the fields and drinking sweetened tea? Back towards the house, he heard the children’s screams, high and shrill.

  It was only when a man’s shout came from behind him, sounding closer than it should be, that Harper turned and saw the silhouettes of men at the edge of his field. He had been spotted.

  Caution was pointless then. He began to crash through the water, lifting his feet higher and higher with each step. How had he been spotted, out here in the dark? They must be scouting around for the figure that had fled the house. He rounded the treeline and then forced himself to pause for a moment behind a tree trunk, his back pressed up against it while he steadied his breath. He could hear the men moving across the field of water towards him, see the sway of one, two, three paraffin lanterns, but they were moving slowly, spread out, hunting him. They thought he was hiding in the water and they didn’t want to step past him. That was what he should have done but panic had made him run further than they thought.

  Slowly, he crept back along the treeline, which was solid enough to hide his movements, although he could still see the glimmer of their lanterns, flickering now and then through the trees. He was only five minutes away from safety now. At the rate they were moving, he would be back at the top of the rise before they had reached the trees. By the time they heard the small roar of the motorcycle engine and worked out where it was coming from, he and Wayan would be halfway down the track that led back into town, then away altogether.

  He was three, maybe four minutes from where he had left Wayan, approaching silently – he could not risk calling out – when he heard it. It was a tiny roar, sudden in the night, both distant and near. Wayan’s nerve had cracked and he had kicked down on the starter pedal and brought the moped to life. No. And as he lifted his feet to run towards Wayan, he saw the red tail light of the motorcycle, descending the sloping path as that poor man, having waited as long as he was able to without going mad, fled the horrors that were happening around him.

  One single red light, that was all that was visible, leaving him behind as it descended, dropping into the earth, it seemed, as if the earth closed up over it as it dived into safety, and in that moment, Harper knew that he was more alone than he had ever been, unprotected, no weapon, in a rice field in the middle of nowhere, with a gang of men with machetes in pursuit, their blood up, the killers of children with nothing left to lose.

  When the men from the Institute said to him, ‘And how did you survive the night, do you think? How come you were spared?’ he paused for a long while, then replied, slowly, as if they were a little stupid, ‘I hid. I hid in an irrigation ditch.’ He was leaning back in an easy chair. He had one leg bent and the ankle resting on the other knee. At no point in the interview did he sit up straight or lean forward.

  One of the men from the Institute wrote it down on his clipboard but the other did not move. He was sitting in his chair with his arms crossed. He had round, steel-rimmed glasses that made his eyes glint and he looked at Harper and said calmly, in a non-judgemental tone of voice, ‘That’s a lie, isn’t it, Nicolaas?’ He had no evidence either way, of course. He was just smarter than the other one. He could read a pause.

  ‘No,’ Harper replied, looking straight at the man, which he could do with impunity because he had, much later that night, hidden in a ditch. ‘It isn’t. That’s what I did.’ It wasn’t a lie, as such, just not the whole truth. Later that night, he had found a place to hide an hour or two before dawn, an irrigation ditch. There had been two moments: the red tail light disappearing, and the grey light of breaking dawn – the space between those two moments, and what had happened in that space, how he had saved his own skin, that was none of their concern.

  Dawn is a promise. Daylight comes softly – so softly, in fact, it is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when it comes. There . . . ? And, there . . . ? It is infinitesimally slow yet comes at once: that is the mystery of it. You are lying in an irrigation ditch, stretched flat in order to submerge yourself as much as possible, with only half your face turned upwards so that you can breathe, keeping your breath as shallow as possible while still keeping yourself alive, knowing that each second of being alive may be your last because the men with flares and machetes are only a few metres away and discovery is possible at any moment. Your muscles cramp repeatedly in water that isn’t freezing but has frozen your limbs nonetheless. Your shoulder is pressed against a stone – but even shifting a little to relieve that pain might create a small ripple that would be spotted. Mud has soaked your clothing and an insect of some sort is inside your trouser leg, burrowing for a new home, but the worst of the pain is in your neck, as you hold your head turned to one side in order to breathe. Worst of all is what your mind is doing. It is thinking so hard about what you must do and not do in order to avoid being discovered that it is as if you are screaming aloud. You cannot believe the clamour of your thoughts will not betray you, bring the men to you; now, and now. And it goes on for hours.

  And then, softly, it comes. It comes with the birds: the outlier birds, cheep, cheep, such a tiny, hopeful sound. The first hint of grey appears at the edges of the sky – you think it does, you can’t be sure – and, then, after a bit of tuning up, the whole chorus breaks out, the birds’ triumphant orchestra, the musical holler of it all, because however black the night has been they are still there and they cry out and then comes distant cock-crowing, dog-barking, and all at once, yes, the sky is grey and lightening by the minute, and you turn in the ditch, stiff and frozen to the core, and lever yourself up slowly on one elbow, in pain, covered in mud, and you are still afraid but now it is light enough to see across the rice field, growing greener by the minute. The men with machetes have gone and, unbelievably – there are no words to describe it – you are still alive.

  III

  Black Water

  (1998)

  He was sitting on the veranda of his hut, smoking, and watching dawn break across the valley above the Ayung River. The steep wall of palm trees emerged from the dark, grey at first, then lighter and lighter but still monochrome, then magically green. The call of birds in the trees; the humming stillness of the air; it was there. It had always been there. And here was the thing both mysterious and obvious, he thought: the relentlessness of dawn, the fact that whatever had occurred in the hours of darkness, the light came and illuminated it all.

  After they had killed him, it would be silent inside the hut. His corpse would lie in the pitch black for a while. There he would be; motionless, unbreathing, alone. As dawn broke, the scene inside the hut would become colourised. The light would reveal that his skin had been rendered ashen by death. There would be a pool of blood, already oxidising, dark against the wooden floor – or more livid, perhaps, if he was lying on the white sheets of his bed. He thought of Kadek arriving that morning, finding the shutters smashed and heavy doors ajar and entering, slowly and carefully, surveying the scene. They would mutilate him, the boys. They would feel the need to kill him more than once. A gaping neck, limbs detached: he didn’t want Kadek to have images like that in his head. Kadek wasn’t even born when the massacres happene
d in 1965.

  It was the pictures, the pictures in your head – you never escaped them. He knew that now.

  He finished the kretek and held the stub for a while between his fingers, then rose and took the two steps to the edge of the veranda, leaning his elbows on it and looking out over the valley.

  ‘Smoking first thing?’

  Rita stood in the doorway behind him, dressed only in her underwear and one of his shirts, unbuttoned to her waist and crumpled. Her face was pale and tired, a little puffy from sleep. She smiled and stepped over the threshold.

  He glanced to the left. There was no sign of Kadek as yet. He reached out an arm and drew her to him, positioning her so she faced outwards to look at the valley, then standing behind her with his arms wrapped round her, pressing her against the wooden rail. They stood like that for a while, then he lifted his hand, cleared her hair from where it was tangled with the shirt collar, kissed the back of her neck.

  ‘Thank you for telling me,’ she said, softly. ‘It was a gift, from you, I think.’

  He didn’t reply. The previous night, he had told her about ’65: I was a young man; I was a courier; I delivered a list of names. The Americans drew up lists of thousands of Communists or suspected Communists and then they gave those lists to the Indonesian military command and those people were taken out of their homes with their families and they were tortured and killed. I was one of the people who facilitated that process. I was just doing my job, you could say, but unlike a lot of people, I had an opportunity to not do my job. I spent a night in a shack by the black water of a Jakarta canal and in the chaos of that time it would have been easy to lose the particular list I was carrying; I had been caught up in a riot, after all. I would have returned home a failure but nobody would have known that I had lost it deliberately, no real harm would have come to me. Maybe it would have made a difference; maybe not. But I didn’t throw the list into the canal. I delivered it as I had been told to do, and those people were almost certainly rounded up the following day, while I was sitting having a beer with a man called Abang and watching the Bali Beach Hotel being built and feeling grateful to be off Java.