Black Water (31 page)

Harper was still and silent then, turned a little, let Poppa stroke his head. He could tell Poppa what he had done, that he had killed a woman, drowned her with his bare hands in an irrigation ditch. What would Poppa think of him then? The
son
he had raised when he had no reason to other than he was a good person? All those other people who came – he could just imagine the string of visitors Poppa must be getting after all the people he had worked for, over the years. He had expected to find the house full when he came; Nina must have got rid of them for his visit. Didn’t he, Harper, deserve and need absolution more than any of them? All those people who had used and needed Poppa over the years, when Poppa should have belonged to him, to them: and they were still using him, coming to his deathbed wanting something. He realised that in the five years he had lived with this family, he had always wanted more of Poppa, always resented how much he had cared for other people, his standing in the community. He was a big man in every sense of the word but there had never been enough of him to go around.

Poor Poppa, always expected to have the answer, to be wise – but even as he thought this, and felt guilty for it, Harper could not prevent himself from craving it. Say the right thing, he pleaded, in his head.

Surely Poppa had intuited that all was not right with him? Surely now, he would ask Harper what was wrong, and fix it.

‘What was it all for, Nicolaas?’ Poppa said.

‘What do you mean?’ Harper asked, lifting his head.

‘All that work. Young folk, smashing things, just wanting to be heard I guess.’

Harper looked at his grandfather, then rubbed the back of his hand across his face and drew breath. Poppa was dying. It wasn’t about him.

‘All that work,’ Poppa repeated with a sigh. Nina had warned him of this downstairs, that Poppa had started to question his life, as any man in his position was entitled to do. She said he didn’t even raise a smile about the Voting Rights Act.

He couldn’t bear the thought that Poppa might be hard on himself: plenty of men had cause for that, not him. ‘C’mon Poppa . . . You worked so hard.’

‘Maybe if I’d worked a little less hard, I’d have taken better care of my own family.’

Was that really what Poppa thought? Here this man lay, a man who had worked so tirelessly for what he believed was right, and yet that very passion and tirelessness meant he could only see all the things that were still wrong. Harper thought of all the people he had met who were self-serving: the people in his line of work, who cared nothing for how their actions affected others as long as they earned a good living in an exciting way; the clean evil of the men with machetes and sickles for whom politics was no more than an excuse; himself – yes, himself. How many of those people would lie on their deathbeds excoriating themselves for what they had done or failed to do? The most evil would be the least self-questioning of all. And yet here, on this bed in this room smelling of antiseptic, lay a man who had worked all his life to do the right thing: a man who had done so much that he couldn’t forgive himself for not doing enough.

Harper rested his hand on top of Poppa’s where it lay on the bed sheet, lightly, because he didn’t know if his skin would be sensitive – it felt as though it should be. It was hot and papery, the veins standing out in ropes. To see this man on his deathbed: it catapulted him backward and forward at once.

Poppa had his eyes closed now and for a few moments, Harper wondered if he had fallen asleep, then the hand beneath his moved, turned and grasped at Harper’s with surprising strength, although he did not open his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was suddenly clear.

‘When I die, Nicolaas, you’re going to be the only one who saw what happened. I’m so sorry, son, so sorry to leave you with that.’

It was the only time Poppa had ever mentioned what happened to Bud, their joint complicity that day, their failure to save him.

‘Can I ask you something?’ Harper said then.

‘Sure, ask away.’

‘When Anika asked for me back, why didn’t you try and stop her? Why didn’t you fight it?’

Poppa looked at him then and the expression on his face was, if anything, amused rather than hurt. ‘Is that what you think, son? We didn’t fight? Oh, we fought. I was used to fighting.’ He coughed again. ‘Your mother wanted you back because of what happened to Bud. It happened when I was looking after you, too. It was my fault. You think there was a court in the land that would stop a child being sent back to his mother after that?’ More coughing. ‘We didn’t tell you any of that because we didn’t want you to go back to your mother hating her. We wanted to give you a chance.’

He thought, then, of the occasional card or letter he had sent to Nina and Poppa from Holland, during his teenage years.
I am well. It has been raining here all week. My favourite lesson at school is Geography. The maps are very interesting.
Staying in touch had never been his strong point.

Poppa had his eyes closed. Gradually, his breathing steadied, became slow and regular. On the branches of a tree outside the window, a bird was singing, out of sight.

Downstairs, Nina was wiping at the stovetop, more furiously than was strictly necessary. Harper saw how neat and clean the kitchen was – much tidier than he remembered it. He imagined Nina scrubbing the whole house, all of the time, in her impotent fury at Poppa’s suffering.

‘I’m afraid we have some folks coming round for supper later,’ she said. ‘Neighbours who moved in a couple of years ago, they’re nice people. I told them our grandson was coming and hoped they’d take the hint but they said they’re dying to meet you.’

‘You shouldn’t be cooking supper for anyone,’ Harper said, ‘you have enough to do.’

‘Oh, they bring their own supper. You know how people are round here. Remember all that food they brought round after we lost Bud? I had to bring the dog in the house for the first time in his life and feed it to him in secret.’

They shared a smile.

‘Your room is just the same. Want to take a look?’

‘Maybe later. I want to know what I can do for you and Poppa while I’m here.’

She straightened up from where she had been wiping, shook the cloth over the sink, folded it once and laid it over the side. ‘Like mending things? We have people lining up to do that.’

‘Why can’t he realise what a good man he was?’

‘Because he was, I guess, too good to realise it. Neighbours won’t stay long. How about you?’

‘I could eat something.’

‘Wasn’t talking about tonight.’

He went over to her then, put his arms around her and held her against him, her small stout frame against his tall wiry one. He felt the jolting of her body against him as she wept a little. He guessed that nobody had held her for a while.

Later, he would go up to his room and, before the neighbours came, he would shave off his beard and then sit on the back porch while Nina trimmed his hair with a pair of sharpened kitchen scissors and he would think about what he was going to say to Gregor at the Institute, how he was going to explain going off the radar for four months, and Nina would say, ‘Sit still and look straight ahead now, Nic, or I’m going to take a slice off your ear.’

Dusk gathered, as if the valley was filling with smoke; deepening towards dark. He was sitting on the veranda, drinking whisky. For most of the afternoon, he had still expected Kadek, bringing something for dinner that he would place inside the hut, on the desk, coming back outside to the veranda and saying, with his customary politeness, ‘Mr Harper, would you like me to light the lamps?’

Dusk gathered and grew. Kadek did not come with food. He did not come to light the lamps. Harper sat on the veranda for a while, drinking and smoking, then went back inside the hut and turned on the unreliable bedside lamp while he found the matches, lit the paraffin lamps himself, turned off the bedside lamp. He closed the shutters and pulled the door to behind him as he returned to the veranda, hanging one of the lamps from a hook on the inside of the roof. No sign of Kadek and it was too late for him to come now. So, Harper thought, tonight, then? It occurred to him to wonder, again, how implicated Kadek was. He had always wondered if, when Kadek said each morning, ‘I hope you passed a peaceful night?’ there was an element of derision in the question. But if Kadek was part of it, then he would not be risking warning Harper by failing to turn up for his duties. He would be here, as exquisitely polite as ever, keen to make sure that Harper was unaware. No, he thought, if it was tonight, then Kadek had been approached in the town earlier that day by a young man or woman he didn’t know, who came up to him and said merely this: ‘Don’t go to the
bule
’s house tonight.’ And after a momentary glance at the young man or woman’s face, Kadek would have gone home. Or perhaps Johan’s arrival was all the sign that Kadek needed. The Angel of Death didn’t come roaring into town in red and black with a pitchfork in his hand, after all, not in the world that Harper worked in. He came smiling, in casual slacks and an open-necked shirt, reaching out his hand. He came carrying a briefcase. Or he turned up one evening, as the light was turning golden on the green fields, and one of the children came running into the house to tell you that there was a stranger standing outside in the yard.

If I was running the Institute, and I wanted a man to be unsuspecting, Harper thought as he sipped his whisky, I would give the man a large cheque, to lull him into a false sense of security and to provide a paper trail of my good intentions in the event of any investigation. I would hire local youths through a chain of command – each link knowing no more than the link either side of him – so that, ultimately, the act would be untraceable to me. That’s what the men in suits did. The men in suits, on both sides of the equation, always kept their own hands clean. And he knew then that Abang had sent him up country to visit Komang that day not in order to warn him to escape with his family, but to give his murderers the signal that the time had come. He had not been sent to save Komang. He had been sent to kill him.

And when Johan stood on Harper’s veranda yesterday, that was what was familiar about him. Harper had seen his own reflection.

The world is different now
, Rita had said to him. They thought the world was different then.

There’s a form of John in every language, isn’t there?
There certainly is.

His head was thick with whisky by the time he went back inside the hut. He pulled off his shirt and trousers and slung them over the back of the chair, flung back the sheets. There was no point in running. If he was right, they would find him; if he was wrong, then he would be sacrificing the possibility of happiness with Rita for nothing. There was only one way to find out if he was being paranoid or not. Two more nights in the hut: if they didn’t come in that time, then he had been wrong about everything. It was that simple: two nights.

As he settled down, bunching up the pillow beneath his head with one arm, he thought, I wonder if, however ready you are, when the moment actually comes, you cannot help but fight. Even Poppa, he thought, ravaged with cancer, in pain: at the end, he fought, I’m sure he did. It would have been difficult for Nina to watch that fight, with its single possible outcome. He could just imagine the old man, skinny but large-boned in his bed, coughing ferociously, determined to hang on to those last scraps of life, the breath heaving inside him. And Bud. There must have been a split second when Bud realised what was happening to him – not while he was floating in the water, or even when he began to turn, but somewhere between hearing Harper scream his name and plummeting into the cascade of the fall. What would the mind of a five-year-old compute in that moment: would he have understood, or would the panic have been so raw, so unformed, that it was simply fear in its most concentrated form? Komang’s wife: she would have understood. She fought, long beyond the point that Harper would have thought her capable of fighting. Perhaps every human being fought, in his or her final moments – fought inside their head, even if they were immobile, no matter what the tortures of remaining alive.

He lay awake, his eyes wide open in the dark, thinking all these thoughts and in the next minute thinking that he must not let paranoia take a grip of him again, not ever. He was completely certain he would never be able to sleep. That was the last thing he thought, three clear monosyllables.
I won’t sleep
.

He dreamt of Rita. She was standing far away from him, on a road, looking out over a field. Then the field was a cliff, then she fell, and he woke with a start. The hut was dark and silent and he fell asleep again, immediately, dreamt of her again. This time, he dreamt she was being cut at by people he couldn’t see, the way they had the corpulent I Gede Puger, the fat man famous for corruption. They had sliced the fat from his body, it was said, before they shot him in the head. He was standing on a bridge. Then she was beside him. They were cutting her but she didn’t mind. He woke in panic, flailing, and realised dawn had already come and Kadek was on the veranda.

As he opened the doors, Kadek bowed good morning. ‘I am sorry I did not come yesterday Mr Harper but my wife was sick.’

‘I am sorry to hear that, Kadek, please pass on my good wishes.’

He could see, as he looked out over the valley, that it had not rained in the night: a dry night then, not a night to hide your tracks, not a night when the thunder of rain on the roof of the hut would have hidden any sounds on the veranda.

He splashed his face with the water Kadek had brought, lit a cigarette, sat on the veranda and listened to Kadek inside the hut tidying up, making the bed, smoothing the bed sheets with a swift motion of his hand so that they made a sound like the slowly flapping wing of some great bird, an albatross perhaps. So, that was why they hadn’t come. They were waiting for rain. He wondered how much they would be paid. How much was he worth?

He wondered how Kadek lived: well, he hoped, if he was employed by a Western company, in a large compound with his extended family. He imagined Kadek’s wife as young and pretty, two or three children, perhaps. Such lives were good lives as long as nothing went wrong – that was what he often thought when he passed through the villages; the slow pace of life, the communal living, the family ties. As long as there was enough food, and no one fell sick . . . he stared out at Gunung Agung, the holy mountain, floating above the trees . . . as long as the volcano didn’t erupt or a tidal wave sweep away your fishing boat or pestilence destroy the rice harvest . . . as long as there wasn’t a war or a devaluation of the rupiah or a coup. Rita and others like her could romanticise such lives, such islands, all they liked, but the people who lived here walked a tightrope every day of their lives.

After a few minutes, Kadek stepped over the threshold onto the veranda and, without speaking, placed a china cup of coffee next to his elbow. Kadek had intuited by his silence that it had not been a good night, he thought. Wearily, he relived his dream, sipping at the hot black coffee. He wondered if it really had been as long a dream as it had felt at the time, or if he had only remembered it as long. He had heard somewhere, back in Holland, that dreams occur in the second we rise from unconsciousness, in a flash – and that even if we think we have been dreaming for hours, it is only what we remember in a flash, time compressed. This thought had always fascinated him. Perhaps it was true of conscious memory too: decades could be remembered compressed into a moment, after all.

However horrible and odd the dream, it was at least a comfort that he had dreamt of Rita. He thought he would be pleased to dream of her in whatever form she might take: and surely that was something, whatever happened. How short a time he had known her and yet how large she loomed in his mind. Those who haunt us are not the most beautiful or most dear, he thought, far from it, merely those who arrive at a time in our lives when we are ready to be haunted.

Kadek came back out onto the veranda and said something. He was aware of Kadek’s voice sounding in his ear, a small burst of noise to his left, but he did not register the words. Then Kadek said again, ‘Mr Harper . . .’

‘Yes?’ Harper did not turn his head.

‘Your breakfast. It is on the table but I could bring it to you?’

Harper turned his head, at last, and said, ‘Oh, thank you, leave it, thank you.’

Kadek bowed.

He sat on the veranda for a while, then rose, slowly, wearily, from his seat, went and leaned his elbows on the rail, looking out over the valley. If he fulfilled his fantasy of the villa in the rice fields, building those bookshelves for Rita, how long would it be before he started sleeping badly again, crying out or disturbing her as he rose from the bed in the middle of the night? She would say,
what is it?
He would tell her, eventually, and so hand some of his memories to her. It would be like presenting her with a severed head wrapped in a bed sheet. Better to stay away than do that to her. He must strike a bargain with himself, and make it firm – once he left here, if he left here, he would put it behind him. Could he do that? Wasn’t that the problem, always, not making a choice – but knowing whether you had a choice or not?

He became aware of Kadek standing next to him. The man had materialised soundlessly at his elbow. What was it now?

Kadek looked at him and said, ‘It is all done now, Mr Harper.’

As they stood facing each other, it was as if all pretences had fallen away, and Kadek was saying,
you know the place you have come to now, all is finished
.

Then Kadek said, ‘Will you be requiring a meal later today or perhaps you will eat in the town?’

‘You don’t need to come later, thank you.’

‘Tomorrow morning, or will you be leaving before breakfast?’

Of course, Kadek had been informed of his departure. Perhaps Johan had gone to see him after his coffee with Harper in the smart restaurant, or perhaps there had been a phone call from whoever employed Kadek directly, probably an operative or an office in Denpasar.

‘No, no, thank you, I won’t require anything else . . .’ Harper said. He hadn’t realised this was the last time he would see him. He had assumed Kadek would be there on his final morning.

‘And what of your transport requirements, Mr Harper?’

Again, this was something Harper had not considered. It didn’t seem appropriate to enquire about buying the little battered car now. Kadek was clearly done with him.

‘I will take the car into town in the morning, then leave it parked outside the Museum. I’ll leave the keys at the entrance desk.’

Kadek bowed a little, said, ‘It has been a pleasure to work for you, Mr Harper.’ He straightened, gave a smile then, the smile of an equal, bidding goodbye.

Their goodbye was so peremptory, he could not think of a gesture. ‘Thank you, thank you, yes, it’s been a pleasure for me too.’

And then, as if the thought had only just come to him, Kadek added, ‘Would you like me to fold and pack your clothes?’

‘No thank you, I can do that myself, later today.’ He had what, six shirts, three pairs of trousers, some T-shirts, his old boots, two pairs of shoes? He had a nice watch. He had an expensive leather bag with a zip that Francisca had bought him that was intended for toiletries. He used it for pens and pencils and disposable cigarette lighters and kept some of his cash folded and tucked into the lining where he had unpicked a seam. He had his notebook. He would tear out the pages, one by one, and burn them in the ashtray. That would take an hour or so.

And then, before he could think to extend his hand, thank Kadek again or mention a tip, Kadek had gone, leaving him alone on the veranda. Ostensibly, Harper had dismissed him, but Harper knew that it was he who had been dismissed.

As Harper settled down in his bed that night, his final night in the hut, he left the bedside lamp on for a while and watched the shadows of the insects dance against the thick mosquito net like his own
wayang
show. He understood that the whole of his life had been built upon the lie of logic. It was logic that relieved you of choice. If I don’t do this job, someone else will. If my company doesn’t invest in this mad and murderous regime, another will. If I don’t kill this woman, then the men around me will and more slowly. All true: but there would always be one bad thing that was simply too bad to be justified in this way. If he had not drowned Komang’s wife in the rice field then she would have been tortured to death over a period of several hours. But he had not drowned her to save her from being tortured. He had drowned her to show the men he was on their side. He had done it to save his own skin.

He lay, watching the insects dance. He thought of the pictures he had carried around in his head for so many years: Bud, disappearing over the fall; Komang’s wife, the way her wet hair lay across his wrist as he pressed her face down; the moon over Jakarta that night, the yellow moon as he crouched by a canal and clutched a death list to his chest. And now, this moment now, watching the insects flick and flutter. What was any life but such moments, strung together, like beads on a necklace? Rita didn’t wear any jewellery, just small gold stud earrings and a watch with a leather strap. An image came of her sitting in the bar on the night they met, her easy laugh, and the way that when she did it, she lifted a hand to place her fingers, briefly, against the bare flush of her throat. Moments like that: it was all a string of moments.