Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  Francisca’s voice became calm and measured then, with that placating wheedle that annoyed him so much. She would wheedle for the first half hour of an argument, then snap. It was always a relief when she snapped. ‘I know it was hard for you too. I’m able to see that because in comparison with you, I’ve had an easy life, but the things that happened to your mother . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes, don’t you think I’ve had this conversation?’

  ‘She saw it, Nicolaas.’

  They stared at each other across the small kitchen. Malachi, their thin grey cat, slunk through the small gap in the kitchen door, which was ajar, walked across the room with her tail in the air, leapt up onto the counter-top and then looked at them both, unblinking, waiting to be picked up and dropped back down onto the floor.

  Francisca turned, reached out an absent-minded hand and stroked Malachi’s head. ‘She saw it, you know. I don’t think either of us can imagine what it must be like to see something so horrible at such a young age, how it must affect you.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘Aunty Lies told me today. I didn’t know whether to tell you or not. I was thinking about it all the way home. I don’t know why she started talking about it now but she did. I think maybe she was upset. You never go.’

  Francisca had always been much better at visiting Aunt Lies than Harper, or Anika for that matter.

  ‘I said something about how I wished that you and your mother got on a bit better, and we were talking about how angry you always are with your mother.’

  He thought, you know, sometimes I get really sick of women talking about me behind my back.

  ‘And she said how your mum had always told you the heroic version of your father being killed in order to protect you, so that you would remember him as a heroic soldier, holding out in battle in the hills. She thought it was important for a boy to feel that way about his father, particularly one who died in the war, you know, that time, all the boys who lost fathers, they all had to believe they were heroes, died saving comrades or something, not real, not how things really were.’ Francisca stopped stroking Malachi, bent and kissed the top of the cat’s head, picked her up and put her gently on the floor.

  Harper returned to chopping tomatoes. ‘Yes, well, Lies is forgetting she told me the real version. The end of the street, just because he was caught out after curfew. She told me when I was very young. And actually, I think it’s stupid to make out he was a hero. He was entitled to be terrified, in those circumstances, to try and save his own life and his wife’s life too, anyone was.’ He had always wondered why Aunt Lies had told him the real version of his father’s death. She had told him in great secrecy one day when his mother was out, and made him promise never to ask his mother about it.

  ‘She didn’t forget that actually. She remembered, she was halfway through telling you the whole story but you were only small and she stopped short. She remembered the whole conversation. What she didn’t go on to tell you was that your mother saw it.’

  ‘Saw what?’ he said, stupidly.

  They were facing each other now, him still holding the blunt knife and Francisca’s fine, narrow features stretched, open-eyed, in an expression that swam with pity, but whether the pity was for him or his mother or simply all the suffering in the world, he couldn’t surmise.

  ‘Oh Nicolaas, your mother saw your father beheaded. She heard a commotion at the end of the street. Pregnant with you, just a girl, imagine that. She ran down the street and she saw her husband beheaded in front of her. She had no one but him. And you wonder why she has been drunk half her life and spent the other half trying to steal other women’s husbands?’

  Harper turned violently then and stared down at the chopping board, so angry that he couldn’t speak. Malachi the cat had been winding round his legs while Francisca had been speaking but now slunk swiftly towards the door.

  Francisca returned to the salad. ‘You think anyone ever really recovers? Seeing something like that?’

  There was a moment then – he saw it briefly, like a narrowing shaft of light through a door that is swinging shut – when he could have told Francisca about some of the things he had seen when he was a young man, and some of the things he had done, but all he said was a soft, low, ‘No,’ and the door closed.

  Jan asked him again the following week. The economic crisis was precipitating unrest across the region, the office in Jakarta could use someone who had experience in analysis and that was what he had been doing the last thirty years, after all.

  This time, he didn’t even pause – he remembered that later; he didn’t ask for more details or wonder aloud what the package was. He just said, ‘Yes, sure. I’ll go.’

  When he told Francisca that he was going to Indonesia and he didn’t know how long he would be gone, she stared at him for a while, then said in a voice scarcely above a whisper, ‘You can’t run from the sadness inside you all your life, Nicolaas. Don’t you realise you just take it with you?’

  Later that night, when the debate had become more shrieky, she jabbed him in the middle of the chest with her finger and snapped, ‘So you’re running out on everything, on me, your mother, your responsibilities, well go then, let’s see how happy you are when the only responsibility you have is to stare at your reflection in the mirror.’

  That night, as he lay on the sofa with the soft bulk of the spare blanket over him, thick and woollen and pale blue, he thought, I’ll sign the house over to her, that’s only fair. How soon can I start packing? Not tomorrow, that would be unkind. I’ll leave it to the weekend.

  In the departure lounge at Schiphol airport, he stared at the other passengers and tried not to enjoy it too much: that feeling, transience, as if three decades of settled life had been nothing more than the waiting room between one journey and the next. My life can be divided into threes, he thought. There was the first part of his life, before 1965, with its disrupted phases, its ocean crossings: Indonesia, Los Angeles, Holland. There was what came after ’65, the quiet decades, three of them, mostly sat behind a desk in Amsterdam. Then there was this third and final phase; his return. Indonesia was the three-legged stool on which his life was balanced.

  Then, with one brief change of planes at Singapore, he was hauling his briefcase from the overhead locker and arching his back to ease its stiffness, shuffling behind an elderly woman in the aeroplane aisle and descending the steel steps of the plane onto the tarmac of Jakarta Soekarno-Hatta airport. Then shall a boat fly in the sky. The ancient prophecy had come true.

  The Jakarta office had offered to pick him up but he said he’d get a cab from the rank at the airport: he wanted to arrive alone, to absorb his first impressions. As they hit the flyover, the driver began to drift inattentively from lane to lane at speed, and he remembered what it was like, the feeling that he was in a place where anything could happen at any moment. He stared out of the window with a small engine of adrenaline in his stomach. This was fun. The six-lane highways were still there, cutting a swathe through the city – pedestrian walkways had been built over them, that was an improvement, although they looked a little on the rickety side. And everywhere, the skyscrapers, the international banks, the hotels – yes, thirty years of human rights suppression had brought the foreign investment flooding in. He wondered what had happened to the huge expanses of kampong, crammed together, the rivulets of small canals and irrigation ditches, shacks and market places – later, he would discover they were just intersected by the freeways, squeezed between the twenty-eight or thirty-two or forty-seven storeys of the steel and glass buildings that stood like knives pointing upwards in the new Central Business District, stretching high to the white and clouded, dust-filled, sagging sky.

  Each building seemed an oddity, as his car sped by. They passed one block where every floor had a balcony jutting out at a different angle and each balcony and roof above it had greenery in profusion, creepers and climbers and palms. He supposed it was intended to beautify the concrete beneath, but inste
ad it looked as though the building was a remnant in a post-apocalyptic landscape where the humans had all fled, a jungle was reclaiming the city and it would not be surprising if pumas stalked the streets.

  Then they were pulling up at the hotel he was booked into for the first few days of his stay, while an apartment was got ready, and a liveried doorman opened his door with a white-gloved hand, bestowing a smile. A porter hastened to lift his bag from the boot and as he got out of the car he was momentarily dazzled by the light striking the silent spin of the glass revolving door that swept him through to an air-conditioned lobby. Inside, a young woman glided towards him with a tray on which there was a damp towel rolled tightly in a cylinder shape and a perspiring glass of mango juice. He thought of the airless guesthouse he had stayed in as a young man, thirty years ago, and reflected that there were a few benefits to being middle-aged and a desk-based senior economic analyst rather than a young undercover operative.

  The Institute’s Jakarta office was in a modern slab of a building in Setiabudi. He got a cab there to start off with, when he was staying at the hotel, but at the end of his first week he moved to an apartment that was walking distance from the office. He spent a lot of time in the apartment at first: it was a relief to be in a calm white box; silent, entirely his. His job was to acclimatise, read a lot of reports, make contact with the local clients and with government officials: he would be befriending civil servants rather than gangsters this time around. President Soeharto, Father of Development, had been in power for thirty-two years, but there was no sign that he, or the many relatives of his who held one office or another, would be vacating their seats any time soon.

  He didn’t rush to prowl the streets in the way he had done on his last visit. He was an old man now. Instead of running with the youths or hanging out in expat bars talking to journalists, he worked at the Institute’s office or stayed at home in the white apartment, where a cleaner came daily and the brown leather sofa was cracked but pliant. For the first few weeks, he spent almost every evening there, doing his homework, watching the news and studying reports of how the Asian economic crash had come about. He brushed up his Indonesian, which came back to him with pleasing clarity. He continued to plough his way through a Dutch study of Prelambang Jayabaya: ancient prophecies had their uses at a time like this, in a country like this. He learned the Pancasila principles, which the politicians quoted endlessly. He took the paperwork part of his job very seriously. That was what he was, now.

  Two weeks after his arrival, one Saturday, when he was reading on the brown leather sofa in the white apartment with the air conditioning on full, the telephone rang. It was Francisca. It was breakfast time in Amsterdam and he guessed, as soon as she spoke, that she had not slept well.

  ‘Hi . . .’ she said, her voice still slurred with sleep. He pictured her standing in the kitchen in her lemon-yellow robe, waiting for the coffee to brew – she drank it black and piping hot, pouring small amounts each time into her favourite blue demitasse. He felt certain she had decided to call him on impulse.

  ‘Hi . . .’ he replied, thinking of her thin frame and the belt on the robe pulled tight, the tumble of curls on her head. He felt the tug of familiarity. He had liked to hold her head against his chest in bed – or was it simply that she had liked to rest her head on him and he had put his hand there, on the back of her head, instinctively, because it was expected? All he knew was that in that moment, he felt the allure of that – the picture and feeling of it seemed suddenly clear across the thousands of miles that separated them. A relationship as long as theirs could not help but have a half-life, however certain they both were that it was over.

  ‘How’s it going . . . ?’ she asked, softly, and they talked of nothing for a while. She had woken lonely and had rung to comfort herself with the sound of his voice. ‘How’s work?’ she asked, but he could hear her moving around the kitchen and knew she wasn’t really listening to what he was saying any more than she had done when they were together, any more than he had done to her. That was what it was like, after a few years: you could conduct a relationship on automatic pilot, thank God.

  ‘Local firms are really suffering now,’ he said, just making conversation. ‘The devaluation’s showing up in their balance sheets, can’t get rid of their own currency fast enough, buying what few dollars they can while they can buy any. It’s bad.’

  ‘Mmmm . . .’ replied Francisca. She had, over the years, perfected the art of the non-committal, encouraging noise that kept him talking while her mind was elsewhere. ‘Always is, though, isn’t it?’ He heard her take a sip of coffee.

  ‘This one’s different,’ he replied. ‘Nobody can buy anything imported any more, think what that means.’

  ‘Mmmm, really?’

  Francisca worked as a personnel manager for a medium-sized clothing import business out at Muiderpoort. She knew plenty about how currency rates affected businesses, but he had never been able to persuade her to debate the wider picture with him. It had always annoyed him that a woman as intelligent as her didn’t take more interest in global affairs, but then people who lived in countries with hard currencies couldn’t grasp it: the idea that your job, your home, your life could be as vulnerable to currency changes as they would be to a tidal wave that engulfed your house in water.

  ‘It’s Christmas soon. I miss you,’ she said then, a catch in her throat, and he knew that was a lie, and that he didn’t miss her either. It was just the ghosts of their former selves on the phone to each other, mimicking the past.

  It wasn’t Christmas in Jakarta, and by January, you needed more than eleven thousand rupiah to buy yourself one single dollar.

  Each morning, Harper rose with the dawn and set off early – the hot walk to the office was infinitely preferable to the claustrophobia of being stuck in a car. It was either wet or dusty, rarely sunny. The anti-government or pro-government protest demos were mostly further north, on the Hotel Indonesia roundabout or Merdeka Square. The old Hotel Indonesia was showing its age and era; it had been declared a national heritage site. Sixties architecture wasn’t chic and modern these days but a relic in need of preservation. What it really needed was a big multinational to come in and modernise and restore it, but who was going to do that now, with everything so unstable?

  There was a six-lane dual carriageway just before his office. Before he crossed it, he would stop by a food stall on the corner, outside a blue shopping mall, and eat standing up, then buy all the newspapers from the stand next to it. He was often first in at their unlovely, grey stone building, sandwiched between two much more glamorous, gleaming towers. He would unlock, open the shutters in his office, the only one that had any natural light. There were six local staff now – the three Harper worked with were a man the same age as him, Wahid, and two young women who acted mostly as translators and administrators, well-educated young people who were hoping that if they worked all hours then one day this Western firm might actually start paying them properly. Wahid reminded Harper a little of his old colleague from before, Abang, a phlegmatic type, did his job, fed his family, rarely passed judgement. What had happened to Abang? He must be in his seventies now, or dead.

  Amber and Wahid would arrive not long after him and Amber would make them all coffee while Harper spread the papers across his desk and turned his computer on to this thing called email that he still didn’t like, messages that took forever to fill the screen, line by line. It was, in his opinion, a lot less efficient than picking up the phone.

  The local client base still worked mostly by phone and every day Amber was fielding more and more calls from companies wanting to know what was going to happen, what should they do? In February, the government announced a twenty-five-day ban on all street protest. Such bans always led to an increase in whatever activity they were trying to prevent. Amsterdam started to get twitchy: well, the clients started getting twitchy and that communicated itself to Harper and his team via Amsterdam. Harper advised that the large-scale compan
ies, the important international clients, should sit tight. This kind of instability had been going on and off for years – Soeharto would never allow chaos on his watch.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Jan in Amsterdam kept asking. ‘Our credibility is at stake here. If things are going to go belly up out there, our clients want to be warned, they don’t want to get caught out.’ Nobody knew what was going to happen in Jakarta well in advance, least of all people who lived in Jakarta.

  Then in May, something did happen: a protest at Trisakti University, four students shot dead. Later, they would call it the Trisakti Incident – but it wasn’t an incident when it happened, it was the army shooters getting trigger-happy after months of unrest and, possibly, just the beginning. Jakarta exploded.

  That was when Amsterdam sent in Henrikson.

  When it all kicked off, Harper was in his apartment, watching the riots on a small TV sheltered by the doors of a walnut cabinet opposite the brown leather sofa. He had been at home writing a report all day and only turned on the television that evening. The commentary complained of forces conspiring against the people as the camera showed a street where young men were aiming sideways kicks at shop fronts, flying it seemed, their bodies at improbable horizontals, and then suddenly, at the front of the screen, two women were laughing and rushing toward the camera, carrying something heavy between them. Harper sat upright, thinking for a moment they were carrying a human torso, then realised that they were struggling with a huge, frozen joint of meat, heavy enough to bend them double and threatening to slip from their grasp as they ran. They passed behind the cameraman and beyond them was revealed a man who lifted something and shook it in the air triumphantly. It looked like a plastic mop handle. Beyond him, there were the hurrying figures of a crowd criss-crossing the street, each person carrying something, and, dimly, beyond them, black smoke pouring out of a shop. This was what happened when you made people’s lives harder and harder: eventually, things got so hard there was nothing to lose. Why fear retribution when your life is a punishment already?