‘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.
‘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.’