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 happened 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.