And then he realised that the small fingers digging into his arm had eased, some seconds ago, perhaps. The hand lost its grip, fell limp into the water with a tiny splash. He stayed motionless for a minute longer, to see if there were any more bubbles, then released her, took his hands away, but stayed kneeling. The woman lay still. The men around him remained motionless too, looking down.
Eventually, he looked around the group, got to his feet, unsteadily. He glanced at the older man who had been standing next to him and saw that the look on his face was one of shock. The man had seen not mercy in his actions but efficiency. The men’s desire to torture her was born in heat, and all men understood that actions done in heat were excusable because they were men and that was what men did — but his ruthlessness in drowning Komang’s wife seemed evil to them. Even though they would have taken her and done far worse to her than he had just done, they were, momentarily at least, afraid of him.
The men had stepped back but then the young one holding the torch moved forward, lifted Komang’s wife up by her shirt. Her body was limp, her arms hanging down, water dripping from the ends of her fingers, her face hidden by the fall of her hair.
A murmur came from the men. One of them called something out and two of them laughed. Their moment of shocked silence was over. Denied the opportunity to torture her, they would now decide what to do with the body — a poor substitute for the person but one that would do. She would probably be hanging from a tree in the centre of the village in the morning. They would dismember her, perhaps, as they had her husband, her children. If he stayed with them, joined in, he would be safe: they would not question his allegiance now.
The excitement in the men’s faces: the wide eyes, gritted teeth — you did not need to drink arak all day, like Benni’s men, to have such an expression on your face. He had seen that same excitement on the faces of boys at school in Los Angeles or Amsterdam, on the young men of the Institute during training exercises. He began stepping backwards, into the dark. His feet sounded loud and splashy in the water to him but the men were intent on their conversation. He was halfway back across the field, moving slowly and carefully away from the men and the trees, when he heard a shout. The tone was unmistakeably hostile to his absence. He dropped down then, into the muddy water, took a deep breath, and pushed his own face into the mud.
Dawn is a promise. That is the mystery of it. It is as if you emerge from the swamp of night cell by cell yet in an instant. You are lying in an irrigation ditch, lying 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 staying alive, knowing that each second of being alive may be your last because the men with flares and lanterns and machetes are only a few metres away and discovery is possible at any moment.
The birds announce it: the outlier birds, cheep, cheep, such a tiny, hopeful sound. The first hint of grey appears at the edges of the sky and, after a bit of tuning up, the whole chorus breaks out, the birds’ triumphant orchestra, the musical holler of it, because however black the night has been they are still there and they cry out. The sky is grey and lightening by the minute, and you turn in the ditch, stiff and frozen to the core. You are still afraid but now it is light enough to see across the rice field, growing greener by the minute in the dawn light, that the men with machetes have gone — and you are still alive.
*
It took him four months to get to Los Angeles. Wayan may have abandoned him, but he had at least dropped his bag where the moped had been parked. Harper found it as soon as he rose from the irrigation ditch at dawn, snatched it up then headed off at a trotting run, away from the village. There was some money in a secret pocket on the inside of the bag, and his documents: the notes in his money belt had spent a night being soaked in mud and were unusable even after he rinsed them in fresh water and dried them on a rock. That was a week later, when he allowed himself to stop in the same place for more than a few hours.
He made it to the coast eventually, at one point hiding out on Lovina Beach in Singaraja, in the cabin of a very alcoholic and somewhat demented old Dutchman whose brain was pickled enough to think Harper was his house servant. After three weeks there, he stole the old man’s moped — it hadn’t been ridden in years — got it working and travelled along the coast until he met with a group of hippie dropouts who had been camping for a year, smoking dope and sleeping with each other. He told them his name was Leaf and he was on the run from the CIA, which was possibly, by that time, partly true. The group was only camping for another fortnight and then planning on taking the long route back to San Francisco on freight ships crossing the Pacific. Eventually, he hit Humboldt Bay, where he could access his Bank of America account for enough cash for a flight to Los Angeles.
He managed to call Nina from a payphone before he got on the flight. When she answered the phone, for a moment or two, he could not speak. She said, ‘Hello. .? Hello. .? Who is this. .?’ Then there was a pause. ‘Hello. .?’ He could tell by the tone of that last hello that she was about to hang up so forced himself to say, to spit out almost, ‘Nina, it’s me.’ There was a shocked silence on the other end of the line.
At Los Angeles airport, he joined a line with three businessmen ahead of him and the occasional cab cruising to the kerb every five minutes or so. Eventually, it was his turn and he got into a battered vehicle driven by a fat white guy in a stained T-shirt who grunted when Harper gave him the address. There was something about the way the cab driver glanced in the rear-view mirror as he got in the back that he didn’t like. While on the move, he had let his hair grow and adopted a soft, scrubby beard: he looked like the kind of young man other men hated. As they cruised down the slipway, he took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit up, without offering one to the driver, who responded by fumbling for his own cigarettes on the dashboard. They both smoked their different brands in silence all the way.
‘Want me to exit at Crenshaw?’ the driver growled when they were on the Santa Monica Freeway, and Harper didn’t know what he meant so he just nodded. This stretch of the freeway was new, had cut the Heights in two by the look of it.
When they pulled up outside Poppa and Nina’s house, Harper saw the driver stare into the mirror again as he extracted a roll of bills from the side pocket of his holdall. He made a point of glancing at the notes rather than counting them out, then pushed a crumpled heap of them into the driver’s outstretched hand, enjoying the brief look of confusion on his face as he worked out that this particular hippy dropout wasn’t short of dough.
Harper stood on the pavement while the driver pulled away. After the sound of the engine and the smell of the cab’s exhaust fumes had dissipated, he took a minute or two to breathe: the quiet, sloping street, the houses in an ascending row with their wooden facades painted in different pastel colours, the huge old cactus that was still in the front garden. The sunlight seemed so delicate here, in comparison with where he had come from. Standing on the empty street with the elegant droop of the vine that still twisted round the porch support and his bag at his feet, he realised he had wanted this homecoming so badly that he could not bring himself to mount the steps and knock on the door — the pleasure of this moment was so intense. What could be better than the seconds before you set eyes on someone you know will be overjoyed to see you?
He could have stood there for some time — but a shape passed the window and all at once, Nina flung the screen door wide.