Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  ‘You were a spy?’ she had asked.

  ‘No, spies work for governments. People like me get hired to do the jobs that governments don’t want to give their spies, or don’t want to get caught giving them. We work for anyone, mostly, we work for oil companies, mining companies, banks.’

  ‘Mercenaries, then.’

  ‘My firm would be very offended if you called them that. It’s a lot more sophisticated than that, well it is now, back then, it was the Wild West.’

  He had not told her about his visit to Komang, or what had happened in the night that followed.

  He had told her about going home to Holland afterwards and having a breakdown, about leaving his company and living in the countryside for a while. He had not told her that, four years later, he went back to work for the same firm, that he had worked for them at a desk job ever since. Once you were in, you were in. He was hardly going to retrain as a schoolteacher or dentist.

  He had told her about his years in Los Angeles, the time with Poppa and Nina and Michael and his mother. He had told her that his little brother had drowned – he had not told her that Bud had only been floating in the pool of icy water because he had dared him to do it.

  He had told her his mother had been an alcoholic: he had not told her she was still alive. He had told her about his short-lived marriage to Francisca but not how recent it was or that they had had a baby – and, somehow, all these half-truths had combined in his head to form something coherent, whole, something he could maintain, if he stayed with this woman – the trick was to forget that you were lying.

  ‘Why did you come back?’ she had asked.

  People talked about the past as if it was a thing, an object: the past, like the box or the house or the tree – as if it was solid and singular. But the past wasn’t an object with boundaries but something fluid and continuous, like a river. Nobody had one past. In 1965 he remembered 1950 in a certain way, and now in 1998, he remembered 1965 differently from how it was and 1950 differently from how he had remembered it in 1965. It was like standing in a box of mirrors and turning to see your reflection multiplied back and forth at you in endless iterations – except, in his case, each reflection was slightly different.

  The last time he had seen his mother was a year ago, the summer of 1997. He had called in on a Sunday morning – Francisca made him go. ‘I’m going to see Aunty Lies, I’m going all that way, the least you can do is call in on your mother.’ Francisca, his wife, had adopted his elderly mother and aunt – in Harper’s view, they were poor substitutes for the children he and Francisca had been unable to have. Children got less time-consuming the older they became: with the parental generation, it seemed to work the other way around.

  His mother lived in a huge and gloomy house on Noorderstraat; a mausoleum, he thought, full of the relics of a dead husband, a long-dead marriage. All her life Anika had been short of money, until the point when she was beyond having use for it. Now she lived in a house she could have sold for a fortune, bought herself a new apartment and had plenty to spare, easily enough for the clothes and make-up and nights out she had craved all her life. But she was in no fit state to make that sort of choice by then. She put her clothes on anyhow, in whatever mismatched form came most readily to hand. Her make-up frequently migrated from the part of the face to which it had been applied. She rarely left her home. She smelled.

  It was a light morning, the sun still pale, the air fresh. He trotted up the stone steps, lifted and dropped the heavy knocker, stepped back. His mother was easily alarmed if she thought someone was trying to shoulder their way into the house – she had slammed the door shut in his face before now. The door opened a few inches and he glimpsed a straggle of grey hair before Anika turned and ambled back inside, leaving the door ajar. Harper stepped over the threshold slowly, pushing at the door, then closing it behind him with a small shove that, however gentle, thudded with the resonance of fifty years of accumulated filial guilt. His mother had wandered back into the sitting room. It was eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning and, yes, she was drunk.

  The hallway was dark but the sitting room darker still. It took a while for his eyes to adjust, then he saw the small figure of his mother, collapsed into the sagging chair in the corner, her tiny form swathed in a purple dress with a silver thread through it, once one of her favourites, and a huge green wool cardigan on top. She was barefoot and her gnarled ankles protruded from the bottom of the dress, like a wizened child dressed in adult’s clothing. She was only in her mid-seventies but at a glance seemed so shrunken, with thinning grey hair and bald patches, that she looked nearer ninety. Aunty Lies, ten years older, bulky, in a nursing home on account of her gout, was much more robust.

  ‘Let’s open the shutters,’ Harper said, walking over to them. ‘It is summer, after all.’

  ‘Don’t forget to leave the cake, you know, on the table, don’t forget, last time you forgot.’ Harper realised that in that particular moment – it could change at any time – she thought he was one of the home helps he hired to visit his mother, cook meals she rarely ate, keep her company for a bit. Wine and cake. He wondered what a diet of wine and cake did to your digestive system. He decided not to dwell on the thought.

  The light from the tall windows illuminated the chaos of the room – the jars with rotting flowers glued into viscous brown liquid that sat in rows on top of the piano, the piles of yellowing newspapers on the sofa – she had yet to cancel her last husband’s subscription to a fishing magazine although he had been dead for nine years – the dirty plates and cutlery poking from beneath the chairs. Harper wondered briefly whether he should close the shutters again. His mother would forget to do it later and leave them open all night – but the thought of sitting in dusty darkness with her on a summer day made him feel as though he might suffocate.

  ‘Shall I make you a cup of coffee, Ma?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t come here with your moaning and crying,’ his mother muttered, and Harper guessed that now she was referring to the occasion, many years ago, when the wife of one of her married lovers had turned up on the doorstep with two children and wept and begged Anika to leave their family alone. Anika had slammed the door in her face, then turned to Harper – fifteen years old, standing in the hallway – and said, ‘You should hear what he says about her, she nags at him all the time. She deserves to lose her husband if she behaves like that.’

  He thought about going into the kitchen but the state it would be in would be even more depressing than the sitting room and his mother wouldn’t drink the coffee anyway. He sat and talked to her for a while but it became clear she wasn’t coherent and it would be a brief visit. Perhaps that was why he asked, that day.

  ‘Ma, do you remember Bud?’

  Anika didn’t answer. She moistened her lips, clutching at the small glass tumbler that looked like it had recently held some sticky liqueur.

  ‘Bud, Ma,’ he repeated. ‘He was christened Joseph but we all called him Bud. Michael’s son.’ He wasn’t going to help her out by adding, your son too.

  ‘Michael . . .’ she said slowly, savouring the word, the ghost of a smile on her face. ‘Michael . . .’ She roused herself in her chair, using her elbows on the armrests to lever herself more upright, smiling openly now, looking at him, then lifting a bony finger.

  ‘You know, baby boy,’ she said. She hadn’t called him baby boy in a while. ‘The only one I ever really loved was Michael.’

  Harper looked at her.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said, a little indignantly, suddenly lucid and seeing him, seeing his look. She pushed a few strands of grey hair back from her face, then patted at it, as if it was still bouffant. ‘He was the one, the one for me. Michael. Handsomest man ever, and so tall.’ Her face darkened again. ‘I was broken-hearted when he ran out on me. The Tatum Pole Boogie, now that was something. You think these old farmer types ever even heard anything like that?’ She waved her hand towards the window to encompass the various men since Michae
l, or the whole male population of Amsterdam, perhaps – possibly the European continent.

  ‘California . . .’ she said in a singsong voice. ‘Now that was where we should have stayed. We only came back for your education. We should have stayed. I was happy there.’

  Harper closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again to fix an expression on his face that would hide his despair. Was it possible that his mother, in her alcohol-induced dementia, had rewritten the history of their lives so comprehensively that she really believed they had come back to the Netherlands for his welfare? The thing about your mother is, Poppa had said, nothing is ever her fault. And he knew then that it was truer than it had ever been, that his mother, in her relentless quest for love, had gone crashing around the world wreaking havoc in other people’s lives and never once paused to consider that any other person had a right to happiness but herself. That included her own son. He was fifty-four years old. Maybe it was time to divorce his mother.

  Bud had been a tall, solid boy, a little tank, Nina used to say. He liked sucking lemons, of all things. Nina would slice one in two for him and put one half face-down on a saucer to stop it drying out, then give him the other to chew on. He would wander around all day with it pressed against his mouth, eyes twinkling. ‘Nicolaath,’ he would say – he had a slight lisp as a toddler, he had already grown out of it when he died – ‘Nicolaath, why don’t you like lemonth?’ When he said this, he would beam, as if the existence of lemonth meant that all was right with the world.

  ‘But Bud, Ma, do you remember Bud?’

  His mother stared at him, pursing her lips, frown lines two deep tracks on her brow, tipping her head to one side with a slightly coquettish air, rifling her memories of husbands and ex-husbands and other women’s husbands . . . And he knew that the only thing he wanted to do was to run away from her as far and as fast as possible, and to be on the other side of the world when she died.

  He walked slowly back down Noorderstraat after his visit to his mother – not because he was reluctant to leave her behind, alone in the mausoleum, but because he was unwilling to arrive back home. Francisca wouldn’t be there until later but once he got back, there was a small job he had promised he would do while she was out: fix the top drawer of the chest of drawers. It was sticking: it annoyed her every morning. ‘When will you fix this thing?’

  The summer air was still light, not too hot, the sky still pale and fresh. It occurred to him that the most enjoyable part of this Sunday would be the walk from one obligation to another – that neither his mother’s large dark house or his wife’s small bright one held any sense of comfort for him, that the place he felt most at home was in the transition between the two.

  His boss had been asking him for some time how he would feel about returning to Indonesia, given his background knowledge of the archipelago. They had just widened the currency trading band from eight per cent to twelve per cent: the rupiah was heading down and given what was happening elsewhere in the region, their clients were getting twitchy. He had been prevaricating – he hadn’t discussed the possibility with Francisca – and at one point his boss had said, ‘Is it because of what happened before, in sixty-five?’

  ‘No,’ he said, with a small smile. ‘That was thirty-two years ago.’

  He liked his current boss; Gregor was long gone, Jan was solid and decent, had said to him once, ‘You know, I’m horrified what we exposed young operatives to back then, wouldn’t happen now, not on my watch.’

  He had not thought about Jan’s suggestion too much at the time. He was an old man now; he had his commitment to Francisca. The Asia Department was huge in comparison with the sixties and in the intervening three decades the company had gone from a score of operatives plus back-up staff to hundreds of employees in Amsterdam alone – that was before you counted the offices in most capital cities in the world. There were plenty of other people they could send. Now though, as he walked back home, it came to him clear and clean. If he went to Indonesia, he would get away from . . . everything.

  He did a small inventory of his life. It was 1997 and he was fifty-four years old: fifty-five later that year: a middle-aged man, married with no children, who had had a disrupted childhood and a dramatic youth but had spent the last three decades behind a desk. His mother hardly knew who he was any more. His marriage was not in a good state: he had known it for some time but this was the first occasion he thought it out loud to himself. Interesting, that, how you could know something and yet take so long to acknowledge it in so many words.

  As he walked, he also acknowledged to himself that he had known it wasn’t a good idea at the time. He had married for the novelty value: it was one of the few mistakes he hadn’t made yet, after all. And still, they had tried for the baby, and then after the baby had died, they had had their grief to nurse instead, to wean and to raise, until it became old enough for them to have a little more time to themselves. That was four years ago. The grief should be a bit less dependent by now, he thought, play on its own sometimes, sleep through the night. Why was it still giving them broken nights? What were they getting wrong?

  As he walked back to the small house he shared with his wife, he thought about Jan’s offer to send him back to Indonesia. Francisca, brave and delicate and throwing herself into caring for his elderly relatives in the absence of a child to care for; their pleasant home, very much to her taste; their occasional dinners with friends, all Francisca’s; his one-sided conversations with his mother . . . that was the inventory, that was the sum of it.

  After they had lost the baby, his mother had gone through a short period of sobriety and, despite her dislike of Francisca, the two of them had come to some kind of accommodation. It was an accommodation that filled Harper with disgust. His mother’s love of tragedy was well established. When Francisca had been his pretty, happy girlfriend, then wife, Anika couldn’t have been less interested. Then Francisca became a weeping stick with a lost child and all at once his mother couldn’t wait to claim her as her daughter-in-law, to have a piece of all that drama. They even went shopping together a couple of times, met up for hot chocolate, until his mother’s relapse back into drunkenness.

  Francisca’s response was, as ever, less cynical. ‘Oh Nicolaas,’ she sighed to him, when he expressed his exasperation at his mother’s sudden interest in their lives, ‘hasn’t it occurred to you, she lost her granddaughter? It was probably her only chance at a grandchild. Of course she has a right to grieve with us.’ His frank opinion was that Francisca was being far too generous.

  *

  Francisca returned from visiting Aunt Lies at the end of the afternoon and they cooked pasta together in the kitchen, him slicing garlic and tomatoes, her making the salad. They made companionable conversation about the relative states of health of the two old women and Francisca said, ‘You know, for some reason Aunty Lies got on to how your father first came to the house, in Leiden, and how crazy your mother was, how handsome he was, this army officer, it was really sweet. I didn’t know the rest of the family never spoke to her again, because she went back to Indonesia with him. Imagine. Her stepfather gave permission then cut her off without a penny. Crazy, huh? Did you know all that?’

  ‘Yeah . . .’ he murmured, rinsing a tomato beneath the tap and placing it on a wooden chopping board.

  ‘You’ve never talked about it much, don’t you think that’s a bit . . . well . . .’

  He had his back to her. He rolled his eyes, knowing she couldn’t see him do it, and brought the knife down on the tomato, which was pale, unripe. The knife was blunt and the skin resisted the pressure of the blade, then parted. ‘I hope she didn’t tell you he was the love of Anika’s life and she’s never recovered. Anika was saying the same thing about Michael this morning. Michael was the love of her life, apparently. Next week, she’ll be saying it about Jan.’ Jan Aaltink was the barrel-chested farmer Anika had married on her return to the Netherlands in 1952, the second of four stepfathers she offered her son over the d
ecades.

  Francisca didn’t reply. She was standing over the salad bowl and turning lettuce over with her fine, pale hands. Harper knew that silence – it was the one that descended when Francisca was deciding how to phrase a criticism in the most non-confrontational manner possible. ‘Why are you so hard on your mother?’ she said eventually. ‘It was a brave thing to do, don’t you think? Marrying a mixed-race officer, in that day and age, going to the other side of the world with him, then a war breaking out, stuck there. Don’t you think you could forgive her for once? Everything she went through?’

  He wasn’t in the mood for this. He slammed the knife down on its side on the chopping board, exhaling with a derisive ugh sound, turning.

  ‘Okay okay!’ Francisca said quickly, lifting her hands.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard about everything she went through all my life, over and over again, I’ve heard about how awful it was, giving birth to me in the camp, her endless suffering . . . Everyone, everywhere, has always let her down . . .’ He glared at Francisca. ‘Funny, though, I’ve never once heard her say anything about how it might have been quite hard for me, her behaviour.’