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.