Black Water Read online

‘It’s only a forest toilet outside I’m afraid, and a bak mandi, although I usually just wash with a bowl on the veranda in the mornings, to watch the sunrise. Kadek brings water from up the hill, there are streams that feed into the river.’

  She looked at the ceiling. ‘No fan?’

  He indicated a rusty desk fan that sat in the corner. ‘Only that, but the electricity is pretty poor. I have a couple of kerosene lamps if I need them.’

  ‘I love the smell of those.’

  Stay with me, he thought. Stay here tonight. We can share the food that Kadek has left. We can sit cross-legged on the bed, facing each other, and I will feed you rice balled up between my fingers.

  ‘You know I can’t stay the night,’ she said, as she turned.

  He thought of the possibility that he would be visited during the hours of darkness by a killing squad. This was ridiculous, this fantasy of his, that she was looking round the hut and imagining a life with him. They hardly knew each other. She knew nothing, nothing about the world and certainly nothing about him. A million babies. Who the fuck did she think she was? ‘I wasn’t going to invite you.’

  ‘Okay, there’s no need to be rude about it.’

  And suddenly, it was as if they were having a full-blown marital row, facing each other full on, speaking too loudly and too quickly; as if they had, all at once, reached the stage that couples who have known each other for many years eventually reach, where the arguments are always the same argument and the victor merely the one who is most vehement on that particular occasion.

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you today and I don’t know where your cynicism comes from,’ she said, ‘but most of the people who live in this country are lucky if they eat each day, and maybe we should . . .’

  At that point, without any conscious decision to escalate things between them, Harper shot out his hand and grasped her upper arm and spat, ‘How can you be afraid of some dog in the street, some starved dog you could kick aside, one foot, in your strappy sandals, and he would slink off? Some mangy little monkey, who would run away backwards just if you . . . if you . . . lifted your hand? Do dogs and monkeys have knives or guns? You think your Ni Wayan is so charming or your driver so kind because he takes you to the water temple? How can people like you be so stupid? Now? At this time? Don’t you know what’s going on in Jakarta and the other cities? People have been burnt to death in shopping malls, beaten to death in the streets. You live in this country. Don’t you even follow the news?’

  This speech poured out of him and all the while he continued to grasp her upper arm, just to ensure her attention he thought, but then he realised that instead of wrenching herself away and spitting back – something like of course I do – she had let the arm go limp in his grasp and cast her gaze to the ground. Francisca would have been yelling at him by now, jabbing her finger in his chest – for all her mild manners, she was snarly and argumentative enough when she chose. Rita was behaving quite differently. He saw the neutral look on her face and realised it was the look of a woman who had extensive experience of a man with a temper, a woman who knew how to become perfectly still.

  The scar on her belly, the absence of any mention of her past or a child dead or alive and her reaction to him now conjoined to form an image of her particular tragedy. It came to him in one piece: a man who hit her, a child taken away or left behind, the price she had to pay for her own freedom and sanity, perhaps – and he thought, oh no, and let her arm drop, expecting her to turn away or rub the arm but instead she stood motionless before him, still staring at the ground, as if she was waiting to see whether there was any more where that came from. He had done much worse than this, as well as witnessing worse and doing nothing – but watching this large, soft woman standing carefully in front of him, he could not have felt more ashamed.

  He took a step back, to indicate that he was not going to touch her again. Please look at me, he thought. If you look, you will see it in my face. I am not like him. I think men who hit women are scum, beneath contempt.

  She would not look at him and he did not want to speak until she raised her gaze. When she did, she did not look him in the face. Instead, she stared into the corner of the room behind him, then said very quietly, ‘John, what happened to you?’

  II

  Now It Is Clear Who Is Friend and Who Is Foe

  (1942–65)

  He had no memory of leaving the East Indies, going back to what his mother called the Homeland, back to Holland. It was 1946. He was three and a half years old and had only known life in a camp of one sort or another; the internment camp run by the Japanese on Sulawesi and then three displaced civilian camps run by the British and Dutch in the suburbs of Batavia.

  His mother told him about it though, the journey, the perilous weeks at sea. They shared a narrow, windowless cabin with another woman and her two daughters – the daughters slept on a mat on the floor between the bunks; the youngest girl had whooping cough and gasped for breath all night. Harper slept on his mother’s bunk. She pushed him against the wall and lay on the outside, to keep him away from the whooping girl. Like all the children, he had had his head shaved before embarkation to stop the lice and scabies spreading and at night, his scalp scratched his mother’s arm. ‘You’re prickling my arm,’ she would whisper to him in the dark, and they would both giggle together, then lie awake listening to the whooping child. ‘Still, at least you don’t have diseases,’ she would say, after a while, stroking his stubble.

  He remembered none of this himself, but later, when they had moved to Los Angeles and he had acquired an American stepfather and a baby half-brother, his mother would take him on one side and talk about their life together in the camp and the long journey back to Holland. She liked to do this when she had had a fight with his stepfather because it was something only she and Harper shared. ‘Weeks and weeks on end,’ she would say, ‘just you and me, baby boy, on a boat crammed full of people who were running out on their lives so far. You slept in my arms every night, you and your prickly head.’ At this, she would throw a glance at her new husband, or at the doorway through which he had recently departed, as if to say, this important thing happened before you, it excludes you, and don’t you forget it.

  He and his mother spent only eighteen months in Holland before emigrating to America – long enough to find out that she was not eligible for an army widow’s pension even though his father had been decapitated by the Japanese while in the service of the Dutch Colonial Army. Harper’s father had been half Dutch, half Indonesian, an Indo, which made Harper – or Nicolaas, as he was called back then – an Indo too. You needed to be all white to be white but only a small bit brown to be brown. ‘Your papa wasn’t Dutch enough for you and me to get the money, baby boy,’ his mother said, ‘but he was Dutch enough for the damn Japs to cut his head off.’ She said that kind of thing when she had been drinking. The damn Japs had cut his father’s head off and put his mother in a camp and as he had been inside his mother at the time, he’d had no choice but to go along.

  He had no memory of the camp either – no direct memory, in any case. But his mother talked about it a lot when she was drunk or angry or both, which meant she talked about it for a substantial proportion of his early childhood. She told him the same stories often enough for them to form pictures in his head – they became his own memories even though he remained outside them, as if he had been there, watching his mother’s life before he was born. ‘It was 1942, baby boy, but the Japs made us call it 2602, can you imagine? They even said the sun rose when it did in Tokyo. You got beaten if they caught you speaking Dutch.’ In the pictures in his head he saw himself as a brave toddler, asking for food in Dutch, a massive Japanese soldier taking a stick to his back. Making up memories from the seeds of his mother’s stories was, after all, a lot more interesting than actually having them. Through these stories, he could remember what it was like for her to be pregnant with him in an internment camp, standing in a queue with her mess tin and homem
ade wooden spoon waiting for her tiny portion of all there was to eat, grey tapioca cooked over camp fires in huge vats. ‘You grew anyway,’ she said. ‘That’s how it works, the baby inside takes all the goodness it needs from the mother and the mother starves and gets sick.’ He saw his mother dressed in a tattered dress and wooden clogs, her taut belly as round as a basketball, matchstick arms and legs, cheeks hollow, hair falling out, and him curled up inside her, feeding off her, eating away at her internal organs. ‘And then, when I was at my biggest, when you were taking your time deciding you were ready, it was getting close to the rainy season. Man, that was the worst. I thought I would die. I thought I would just melt like an ice cream. My waters broke the same day the skies opened and the monsoon began. Water ran down my legs, baby boy, and down the sides of the buildings at the same time, and then it started pouring in through the roof where there were holes in the palm leaves. The road outside the shack flooded – I won’t call it a clinic or anything, it was just a shack with six bamboo bunk beds. They put the sickest on the lowest bunk so it would be easier to take the corpse away when they died. It was the filthiest place you can imagine, cockroaches and leeches, and I was screaming and screaming as I squeezed you out and outside there was a river where the dirt road had been and then pretty soon a river inside as it was only a dirt floor. Seriously, I thought I would die, and you would die with me, and the water would wash the shack away and we’d both be carried away on that river and after what I’d been through that seemed like it would be a pretty good thing to happen to both of us.’ Harper saw himself as a newborn baby, lying on his back on top of a brown river, waving his arms as he bobbed and floated and was carried away.

  He and his mother had not been carried away by a flood. They had stayed in the shack with the palm-leaf roof and she had nursed him until she had fallen ill with an infection and nearly died, apparently, had come within an inch of it, ‘As any girl would giving birth in those circumstances, baby boy,’ and when he was badly behaved she liked to remind him how close to killing her he had come, just by arriving into the world. The ways in which he had nearly killed his mother seemed impressively various.

  You had to bow to the Japanese soldiers whenever you saw them. You had to bow so low your nose was lower than your waist and you had to stay that way for a good few seconds and if you tried to straighten up too quickly, they hit you with a cane across the shoulders. ‘Happened to me once when I had you in my arms, just ’cos I didn’t bow quick enough on account of holding a baby. When he hit me my knees gave way but I managed to get a hand out in time to stop my fall before I fell on you. You were such a skinny little thing, you’d have snapped like a twig. Plenty of babies born in that camp didn’t make it, you know, that’s why you’ll always be my miracle.’ The emphasis on the words ‘my’ and ‘miracle’ was always the same. His mother, it seemed, had kept him alive by the sheer force of her love, all on her own. Perhaps that was where the mothers of those other babies, the ones that had died, had gone wrong. Maybe they just hadn’t loved their babies enough.

  There were competing stories about how his father had actually met his end. His mother always said that his father had disappeared into the hills to fight for the Dutch army, and that he had been decapitated during the course of a fierce battle when eight gallant officers and men had held out against a whole hundred Japs. After their return to Holland, his aunt Lies, his mother’s elder sister, who featured in their lives both before and after Los Angeles, told him that his father had tried to save himself and his pregnant wife from the camps by hiding his uniform beneath the floorboards but then he had been caught out on the streets after curfew without a Rising Sun armband on. He had been beheaded right on the street corner, at the end of their road. Aunty Lies told him never to raise the subject with his mother – which seemed a little unfair as his mother brought it up herself often enough when she’d been drinking – but he obeyed the injunction, understanding you couldn’t really ask for more details of the two accounts when decapitation was the common theme.

  They had lost all their belongings in the war so there were no photographs, no family records. Later, he wondered if his parents had really been married or if he had even had a father at all. The evidence for his father’s existence came only through stories that seemed to have a suspiciously mythic quality in both competing versions.

  *

  Some nights in Los Angeles, in the small bedroom he shared with his baby half-brother, he would dream about his father’s head. In the dreams, it would be sitting on a shelf when he opened the linen closet in the hallway, just there on a pile of towels or, once, on one of his mother’s dresses stretched across the cupboard shelf like a picnic blanket. They were not frightening dreams; the head was always smiling and friendly and would talk to him. When he woke, he muddled through to consciousness with the warm and comforted feeling that lingers after a benign reverie and, for a moment, he would feel regretful upon realising it wasn’t true.

  Later, when Harper had been sent back to Holland, after what happened, he would use his father’s decapitation as playground capital, when the white boys picked on him. He would save it up, then announce it, and ask them what had happened to their fathers in the war. Everybody had war stories, of course, often involving dead or missing fathers, mothers starved or bombed, older siblings who had perished before they could be known, but other people’s stories, however tragic, were rarely as good for bragging purposes as decapitation.

  Sometimes it would be the heroic fighting-in-the-hills version. At other times he would claim to have witnessed it himself, in which case the streetcorner version worked a whole lot better. His accounts became so detailed, he believed for a while that he had indeed been there. In that version, his father always had time for a few last words for his beloved son before the sword swooped down. In that version, it was quick and clean.

  *

  Peach-coloured lipstick: that was how he learned of his stepfather-to-be. He and his mother were in her bedroom in the tiny apartment on the top floor of the building behind the laundromat – he couldn’t remember the name of the street, just that there was a hot-dog stand on the corner called Hair of the Pup. They went there when his mother was pretending it was treat time but in fact there was no money for dinner. The hot dogs were pink sponges with skins so fine they were porous: if you squeezed the bun, liquid fat ran out like water.

  Technically, the room they were sitting in was their bedroom rather than hers as he slept on a cot at the bottom of her bed, so poorly sprung and sagging that it slung him in a crescent-moon shape a few inches above the floor. His mother was sitting at the vanity unit in the corner next to the window. She was wearing a floral dress with a white collar and was carefully sculpting waves of her hair around her face with a fine-toothed comb and the occasional tsk of hairspray. When she had finished, she patted the waves gently, testing them, then opened a small drawer on the unit and dabbled her fingers amongst the lipsticks inside. She frowned. Selection made, she leaned across the vanity unit into the scalloped mirror, unwinding the lipstick slowly from a golden tube. Harper watched the lipstick emerge. He was six years old and his mother’s rituals still had that power.

  ‘Hey Mom, is your lipstick called “orange”?’ They had spoken English together since arriving in California. His mother had insisted, had started teaching it to him every day even when they were still in the refugee camp in what used to be Batavia but was now called something else. English was the most important language in the world, she told him, and he could forget his street Malay and Javanese, they were good for nothing. His English wasn’t bad now, although he still lapsed into Dutch from time to time. After spending his early years in the camp, his language development had been slow – Aunt Lies had said, when she first met him, ‘Anika, does he speak at all or is he, you know, backwards?’ Funnily enough, his language skills had caught up ferociously when there were no guards with bamboo canes around.

  ‘Don’t call me Mom like a Yank kid whe
n we’re alone, only in front of Americans. Call me Moeder. It’s all about who’s around when you’re talking, always remember that. Who are you speaking to and what do you want them to think about you?’ She paused with the lipstick held up to her mouth. ‘How do you think my accent is coming along?’ She smiled into the mirror. ‘I was awful young when I had you, baby boy. Why, I was just a little girl.’ She nodded approval at her own reflection. Nothing was more important than fitting in, she often said, although what you did inside your own head was entirely your own business. Her reflection smiled at him from the mirror and he smiled back at it.

  He watched as she leaned forward, applied the lipstick in smooth arcs, rubbed her lips together, smiled at herself the way she smiled when she first met someone, frowned, turned to him.

  ‘This lipstick is called Peach Dream,’ she said. ‘Do I look like a dream?’

  ‘Klaar,’ he replied.

  ‘Clearly,’ she corrected him. ‘But that’s a bit formal. Of course would be better. Of and course. Say it for me now.’

  ‘Of and course.’

  ‘Two words, you noodle!’

  ‘Of course it is!’

  She laughed obligingly. ‘Very good, Nicolaas. Now, there is something I got to tell you about my new beau. I don’t want you to be shocked.’

  This evening, a summer evening in 1949, was the evening he was to meet Michael, the man who would become his stepfather.

  ‘He’s black.’ Anika had turned back to the mirror and was adjusting the wide straps of her dress, pulling them down a little over her shoulders, turning a little in the mirror.

  ‘Black?’

  ‘You know, coloured, a negro, neger, as they say back home. You know what black is, don’t you?’

  Before coming to America, Harper had believed black to be him. He had been black in Holland, that had been made very clear to him on a daily basis, in the streets, the shops, the school playground. Neger was one of the more polite things he had been called.