Black Water

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 homemade 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 when 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.

‘The coloureds have had a terrible time over here,’ Anika said, ‘you know that too, the prejudice against them is just awful. You know what it’s like in the South, don’t you? Michael’s father is a lawyer, gets people out of jail. Imagine, a lawyer. You any idea how unusual that is? Mind you I can’t say there’s much sign of Michael himself following suit.’ She became still for a moment. Then brightened again. ‘He was in the army you know, Michael, he was a GI. He fought for our freedom, well, in France, not our Homeland but it was the same thing. Lots of his friends were killed. He was so brave. Anyway, I have another surprise for you.’

Harper had learned over the years that surprises from his mother were not always pleasant ones. He remembered her saying before they left the Homeland, ‘I have a surprise for you, baby boy, we’re going to live in America and you’re going to get a lot of new friends.’ They had been in America for eight months now, moved four times during that period to various tiny apartments, each one a little worse than the last. Sometimes she had worked for a bit, sometimes she had taken in typing and did it on a small but very heavy typewriter that he had had to lug from one boarding house to another. He had had two different schools with a long break between and the new friends had yet to materialise.

‘Maria isn’t coming tonight.’

He felt a clutch of fear. ‘Who’s going to look after me?’ Please let it not be the old man across the hallway who stank of beer and stared at him, stubble-faced and moist-lipped, whenever they passed him on the stairwell. Maria was a plump teenager downstairs who gave him some of her Junior Mints as long as he didn’t tell his mother that she hung out of the window and smoked while she was out. He had neglected to mention that his mother didn’t bother with the window when she smoked in case the Junior Mints dried up. He’d been wondering how many times Maria would have to babysit before he could drop a hint regarding Liquorice Laces.

‘I’m not leaving you tonight, you’re coming with me, you’re going to meet Michael, that’s why I warned you he was coloured and ironed your shirt this morning.’ She pointed to where his clean shirt was hanging on the front of the wardrobe door. ‘We are going on a bus and a trolley car. We are going to Michael’s house and we are going to meet his father, the lawyer, and his father’s, well, whatever she is, and then they are going to look after you while Michael takes me out. Now what do you think about that?’

It was a Saturday and he thought how he and his mother had been together all day — he had watched her iron the shirt on a towel spread out on the floor this morning and had asked her what she was doing. She had known this information at that time but had withheld it from him so that she could ‘surprise’ him. Why did adults do that? Was it something about wanting to prove they were in charge? He tried to process the list of events she had just outlined but it was too much information in one go. He was going out with his mother, that was good: he hated it when she went out without him. They were going on a trolley car together, that would be fun. He would have to put his new shirt on — that was bad. It was too big for him, he could see that just by looking at it. He was going to meet a coloured man and his parents. Would the parents be strict or nice? Would they give him any supper and if so, what would it consist of? Did they have a dog? He longed to play with a dog. His mother would leave him there, in a strange house. That was not good at all. For how long?

They caught a bus, then a Red Car, then waited for more than half an hour at another bus stop before Anika approached a man in a trilby hat who took them to a different stop around the corner and said, ‘You sure this address is right, young lady?’ as he looked at the piece of paper she had shown him, a crease of concern on his face. Anika patted her forehead with her embroidered hankie before tucking it back inside the edge of her glove and smiling up at the man, saying, ‘Why yes, sir, I’m quite sure, but thank you so much for your assistance.’ Harper wondered if that meant they were going to an area like the run-down tenement block where their boarding house was but instead, when they got off the final bus, they found themselves in the middle of a grid of streets with individual houses, the pastel-coloured paint on them a little shabby-looking, it was true, but big places with steps leading up to verandas and porches.

Black people sat on the porches, some elderly women in chairs, talking, knitting or shelling peas. Girls played skipping games in front of the houses. Nobody paid Harper or his mother any attention as they walked up the hill, but for one old lady who watched them as they passed with her fingers still flicking over her embroidery job as though they worked all on their own whether she paid attention or not.

Harper and Anika held hands as they walked up the steep incline to number 2246, set back a little and with a huge cactus plant growing in the front. A vine of some sort corkscrewed around the porch support. The front door was freshly painted in a shiny cream colour. ‘Well. .’ his mother murmured approvingly.

Michael was sitting on the top step but rose as they approached — and kept on rising. He was immensely tall it seemed, with rangy shoulders and close-cut hair. He was dressed in baggy pants with an immaculate crease and a shirt buttoned up to the neck with long points to the collar. A jacket was folded neatly over the veranda balcony.

Harper and his mother stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at Michael, the tall man standing above them. Harper’s mother lifted her hand to shield her eyes from the sun — she had lost her sunglasses the previous week and had cried bitterly that she couldn’t possibly afford another pair, not with a child to feed.

Michael looked down at Harper’s mother and then he smiled, and it was the slowest smile that Harper had ever seen, beginning with the corners of his mouth rising, as they normally did when people smiled, and then suddenly the whole of his face lifted and his eyes shone and he seemed like the nicest man in the world — less handsome, perhaps, than when his face was in repose, but a whole lot nicer. Harper glanced up at his mother who was staring up at Michael and smiling too. In their locked gazes he glimpsed a future where, yes, they lived in California and were Americans and had a house and a dog.

‘Hey, May-on-naise. .’ said Michael, and shifted his gaze to Harper. ‘So this is the little guy, the one I’ve been hearing so much about?’

‘Nicolaas,’ murmured his mother.

‘Pleased to meet you, sir,’ said Harper, extending his hand upwards, as high and as firm as if he was reaching for cookies on a top shelf.

Inside the house, in a narrow hallway with another cactus-type plant in a pot, they met Michael’s parents. Michael’s father turned out to be an older version of his son — more portly, a little stooped, steel-rimmed glasses. There was a woman called Nina in a plain beige dress with hair swept up in a bun. Her status in the house wasn’t immediately apparent — he was just told to call her Nina.

Michael’s father did not give slow smiles like his son. He regarded Harper from his great height with a stern and steady gaze.

After the introductions were over, Anika knelt in front of Harper and smoothed his hair and said, ‘Now, Nicolaas, you are to be very, very good, the best you’ve ever been, do you understand?’

Michael had shrugged on his jacket and turned to the mirror to shake out his sleeves and check his cuffs.

‘You’re going already?’ Harper said quietly.

His mother gave a false little laugh. ‘Of course, Michael is taking me to, well, a place where they do music, it’s a kind of supper club. Now, you’ll be very well looked after.’ She hadn’t mentioned supper for him. And there was no sign of a dog. What kind of house this size didn’t have a dog?

The woman called Nina took him by the hand and they and Michael’s father saw his mother and Michael off from the front step. As the two of them walked back down the incline, a black woman holding a little girl by the hand and walking on the other side of the street stared at Anika and Michael with a hot look and Anika lifted her chin, set her shoulders back and slipped her hand into the crook of Michael’s arm.

As they stepped back inside the house, Michael’s father said to him in a grave voice, ‘Now young man, in the kitchen. There is something you and I have to discuss.’

Nina dropped Harper’s hand and went into the sitting room and he and Michael’s father walked together through to a small kitchen with windows that overlooked a short, steep backyard. Miraculously, at the bottom of the backyard, with a collar and a long rope lead that was tied to a stake, was a large white dog.

Nina had disappeared. Harper looked about him. Michael’s father instructed him to sit at the kitchen table while he remained standing, his large arms folded and held high up above his chest.

‘Now young man,’ he repeated.

‘Yes, sir,’ Harper replied.

Michael’s father lifted his finger. ‘For the rest of this evening, or in fact for as long as you and I turn out to be acquainted, you will call me Poppa, you understand that?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Good. Well, there is something I need explaining to me right away before you and I can be friends. Your name is Nicolaas.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Poppa.’

‘Yes, Poppa.’

‘Good, now is it true, can it be true, that your name is Nicolaas but when they gave it you they gave you an extra a?’

Harper pulled both lips inwards, the same way he would as if he was making an mmm. . sound, and looked at the ceiling. Then he said, ‘I believe they did, sir.’

‘You believe they did?’

‘Yes, sir, they must have done.’

Michael’s father shook his head from side to side, very slowly. ‘I thought as much. Well young man, there are only two rules in this house, one is that you always call me Poppa and drop that sir business and the other is,’ he turned and opened the fridge door, ‘that when Nina is out of the room, anybody who has an extra a gets to choose what flavour syrup we put in the milkshake. That understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He looked back. ‘Any questions?’

Harper hesitated.

‘Don’t be shy, young man, rule number three. I just made that up on the spot on account of how it suddenly seemed to be necessary. Speak up. I didn’t get where I am without speaking up, believe me, but that’s an awfully long story and it can wait until after milkshake.’

‘Later, perhaps, after milkshake, after the story, would it be possible for me to go and visit the dog?’

*

Later, after he and the dog had made friends, there was a supper consisting of some sort of stew. The stew was placed on the table alongside dishes of vegetables and Harper folded his hands in his lap politely, waiting to be served, but his hosts put their elbows on the table, knitted their fingers and lowered their heads.

‘Dear Lord,’ Poppa began, ‘thank you for the gift of good food, for family and nourishment, and please Lord bless your servant Wesley A. Brown and send him Godspeed for all his sailings on those High Seas of yours and thank you of course for new guests who come into our home. Amen.’

‘Amen,’ said Nina, already lifting her head and reaching for the serving spoon.

Harper sat staring at her for a minute, until she beckoned with her fingers, the spoon lifted in the other hand, ‘Come now, young man, don’t be shy, hand that plate over.’

The stew had lumps of meat in a dark brown gravy with a strong smell that, at first, made Harper’s stomach turn. But when he put one of the lumps of meat in his mouth, it was not chewy like the meat they had had occasionally in Holland but fell apart in his mouth in soft moist pieces. Harper wondered if the strong smell and the taste of what he was chewing was what they called, over here, flavor. Throughout the meal, Poppa questioned him about his life in Holland and how it had been, coming to America that was, until Nina said gently, ‘Michael Senior. .’

‘My apologies, Nicolaas, it’s a lawyer’s habit, asking people everything about their lives, drives Nina here a little crazy.’

‘Spreads himself thin, sometimes,’ Nina said looking down into her stew and giving a soft shake of her head. ‘Always, in fact.’

‘I have the same name as my son, that’s quite common here,’ Poppa said. ‘Stick to Poppa, it makes things easier.’

‘Michael Junior is certainly a chip off the block,’ said Nina, as she ladled a second helping onto Harper’s plate, saving him the embarrassment of asking for more. ‘In some respects, that is.’ She slipped the serving spoon into the dish of mashed orange vegetable on the table and looked at Harper and Harper felt confident enough to shake his head.

‘Is he like you too?’ Harper asked politely, congratulating himself on the grown-upness of the question.

Nina glanced at Poppa and Poppa said, ‘We’re not a usual household here, Nicolaas. Michael Junior’s mother died when he was around your age. Nina came into our lives about a year later, and she’s been the best wife and mother we could have hoped for.’

‘Even though, legally speaking, I’m neither,’ Nina said with a smile that seemed resigned but not particularly unhappy. ‘Well, not quite yet.’

‘Soon, though. .’ said Poppa firmly, looking over his glasses at her and beaming, before turning to Harper and adding, ‘Nina’s mother was from Salvador. She’s Catholic,’ as if that explained everything.

‘And we weren’t too sure about the father side of things when I was growing up,’ added Nina, with a half-laugh that implied this was something else that was openly discussed, amusing even.

Harper looked from one of them to the other, amazed. This, then was the house he had come into — a house where people joked about not having fathers, where, for once, he wasn’t the odd one out because he was too brown or not brown enough and had been born in an internment camp in a country the other side of the world, a country so distant he only had his mother’s word for it that it actually existed.

‘The damn Japs cut my father’s head off,’ Harper announced cheerfully, keen to impress upon them that no unconventional domestic arrangements could prove shocking to him.

A start passed between Poppa and Nina, as if they had given each other the small electric shock you get from shaking hands with someone when you’ve walked towards them across a cheap carpet. Nina raised her eyebrows at Poppa and Poppa coughed into his napkin before saying, ‘Yes, we heard that story, Nicolaas, Michael Junior told us a bit about you and your mother, and what you both endured in the Pacific.’ He coughed again. ‘But I should say, we don’t allow profanity at the kitchen table.’

After the meal, they helped Nina clear the table, then she washed up while Poppa and he went through to the sitting room so that Poppa could show Harper certificates with his name on them that were framed and ranged along one wall. Harper began to wonder when his mother might return and it seemed Poppa and Nina might be wondering the same thing as twice during their conversations Poppa went into the kitchen and closed the door behind him and he heard the murmur of their voices. It was dark by now.

Eventually, Nina came in and clapped her hands and said in a happy-sounding voice that he was going to stay the night. By then he was too tired to have the polite and grown-up conversation that would be necessary in order to extract more details and so allowed himself to be led upstairs to a small room with a narrow single bed against one wall and a table with a huge sewing machine and a basket full of large folded material that looked like curtains. Nina brought him a glass of milk and a T-shirt belonging to Michael Junior to sleep in and told him where the bathroom was. When she went out, she left the door ajar and the landing light on.

‘You know where Poppa and I are, right downstairs, need anything, you holler.’

He was tired enough to fall asleep quickly, despite the strangeness of this arrangement, but later he woke and the landing light was still on and he could hear raised voices downstairs. He slipped his feet down and padded silently to his bedroom door. He couldn’t see anything but heard several voices in the hallway and could feel the chill of night air. One of the voices sounded like his mother’s but a little odd, high-pitched. Should he run down to her? Poppa was speaking to Michael then, and the two men had a brief, angry-sounding exchange. He caught the words, ‘You think this is alright? This!’ Then the front door slammed again and there was silence. He padded back to his bed and pulled the quilt over him and lay listening for a while but there were no further sounds.

The next time he woke, it was pitch dark. He lay for a moment, confused about where he was, particularly about how comfortable the small bed he was lying on was in comparison to his cot at the end of his mother’s bed. A telephone was ringing, somewhere. There was a certain amount of rustling on the landing outside his room. He fell asleep again.

In the morning, he woke up to full light through thin green curtains, birdsong. The house was quiet.

Nina was in the kitchen. On the table, a place for one was laid. Outside, the dog, who had turned out to be called Jimmy, was running up and down the garden. The sun was high and bright.

Nina smiled and gestured to the table. ‘I ate breakfast a while back but Poppa’s sleeping late so we’ll go to church this evening. He had to work in the night. It happens.’

Harper hovered by the table, assuming the place set was for Poppa’s late breakfast, until Nina indicated with her hand that he should sit. As she poured a glass of milk for him, she said, ‘I expect you are wondering what those youngsters are up to.’ Harper nodded. Nina smiled reassuringly, but he had the feeling she wasn’t too sure of her own answer. ‘They had a good time last night. They’ll be over later.’

He had just finished a breakfast of eggs and a bread roll when Poppa came thumping down the stairs. He burst into the kitchen, fully dressed, grabbed a roll from the basket on the table, said, ‘Morning, Nicolaas,’ and turned to go.

‘At least have a coffee!’ wailed Nina, as Poppa rushed back out without bidding either of them goodbye. The front door slammed.

‘When they call, he goes,’ Nina said, shaking her head. ‘There’s always someone in trouble somewhere.’

Harper never returned to the boarding house. That Sunday, his mother and Michael came over with a small suitcase with stiff clasps that contained his clothes, two books which he had to give straight back to them as they belonged to the local library and a new ball that Michael had bought him as a present. He was told he would be staying with Nina and Poppa for a few days while his mother and Michael ‘sorted out a few things’. The few days turned into a fortnight. Then it was announced to him, with some degree of fanfare, that Anika and Michael were going to get married. They were all going to live together in the big house with Jimmy the dog. The room with the sewing machine was going to become Harper’s official bedroom and he could choose which colour it was painted as long as it was blue or white. It was the first time he had ever had his own room.

The household had its own engagement party, the five of them, standing a little awkwardly in the sitting room together, while Poppa came through from the kitchen holding a bottle of something he called ‘homemade elder wine’ to pour into the glasses Nina fetched from the cabinet in the corner. It was the only time Harper ever saw Nina and Poppa take alcohol and he sensed even then that it was something of a momentous gesture.

Poppa held up his glass and said, ‘This is to welcome Anika, and Nicolaas to our family. .’ he paused, ‘and also to celebrate the fact that this is legally possible since only just over a year ago, God bless the wisdom of the California Supreme Court!’ He turned to Nicolaas and looked down at him and said knowingly, ‘Perez v. Sharp.’ Michael groaned aloud, took Anika’s hand and squeezed it, and Nina frowned at them and Poppa lifted his finger in admonition while continuing, ‘And henceforth, this state, the first since Ohio, is no longer going to violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, amen!’

‘Amen!’ said Nina, much more loudly than she did at mealtimes, and even Michael and Anika murmured it, and Harper piped it too, raising his glass of orange juice and cheering along with the others. He didn’t really understand why they should toast the Supreme Court of the State of California but he did understand that the unusual collection of people that was his new family was somehow heroic, just for existing, and that the figurehead of this heroism was Poppa, who looked, as he lowered his glass, both delighted and exhausted. Nina was standing the other side of Poppa and he heard Poppa say then, from the corner of his mouth, ‘You’re next, baby. You in big trouble now.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ Nina replied, and a small laugh ran around the group.

‘Are you getting married too?’ he asked Poppa, looking up at him.

Poppa rested his large hand on the top of Harper’s head and said gently, ‘Yes son, we are, not immediately though, it’s been a long wait, but this time around it’s Michael and your mother. Nina and I get our turn later in the year.’

Harper was silent for a minute then. There were five of them in their group, and four of them were paired off. Poppa bent down, his hand on Harper’s shoulder, and it was the first of many occasions when Poppa seemed to know exactly the right thing to say. ‘I guess you might be feeling like the one left out at the moment, but all you have to do is wait a while. No one is the odd one out for long.’ Harper looked up at him, and as Poppa straightened, he gave him an enormous wink.

Harper’s baby brother was born some months later. He was called — after some heated debate in the household — Joseph, although from the beginning, they all called him Bud.

It was Poppa and Nina who brought Bud home. Anika was in hospital for three weeks after the birth, with complications, Nina said. Michael was with her a lot. Harper was not allowed to visit her in hospital but she would be home soon, he was told. It was nothing to worry about. Sometimes ladies got sad after a baby, it was normal.

Poppa lifted Bud in his carrycot onto the kitchen table and Harper went over to have a look. He had been hoping his newborn brother would look up at him and smile and clutch his finger in his fist like babies were supposed to do, but Bud was tightly swaddled and only his fat little head was visible, moving very slightly from side to side as he began to stir from sleep. Looking down at this thing, slug-shaped in its blanket, Harper was suddenly overcome with a feeling he had never felt before, a wave of some strong emotion so sudden and welling within him that he felt dizzy and gripped the sides of the carrycot. He stared down at the baby and the baby opened his eyes and his dark-eyed gaze roved around loosely, ill-focused and helpless. Then baby Bud yawned and Harper and Poppa and Nina all looked at each other and smiled and exhaled at the same time.

Nina came and stood next to him and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘He’s all yours, Nicolaas, he’s your baby brother.’ And Harper realised that, for the first time in his life, he was no longer the newest addition to any group or family. Poppa and Nina would die one day because they were old and his mother and Michael would die too because they were the next oldest and he had always thought that when that happened, when his mother died, he would be alone, but here was a baby that belonged to him and he would die first, not the baby, because he was older than the baby.

Baby Bud screwed his face up in an expression that in an older child or adult might have meant a sneeze was coming but in a newborn baby, Harper quickly learned, was preparatory to a cry.

‘Milk time,’ Nina said, ‘you’d better help me, Nicolaas, it’s going to be your job sometimes, you know.’ A bottle was boiling in a pan of water on the stovetop. A pile of diapers was neatly folded on the counter beside it. Not being the youngest any more was going to make Harper a certain amount of work.

He had a new school now — he went on the bus each day that stopped at the bottom of the hill. It was black kids mostly and on his second day, two of the boys in his class shoved him up against a wall in the corridor and demanded to know what he thought about Pearl Harbor, but the school secretary came along and said to the boys, hissing beneath her breath, ‘Shame on you. Nicolaas isn’t Japanese, he was locked up by them and has come to America to live with his grandfather.’ The boys had stepped back and looked at him. ‘Locked up?’ said one, impressed: but Harper hadn’t noticed that bit. His insides were swelling with pride at the word grandfather.

At the end of the school day, he would run up the hill to see his baby brother. Nina was usually in the kitchen when he got home. Harper would sit on a chair at the table and Nina would give him a drink of milk and he would demand a full account of Bud’s day.

When he looked back on those few years in California from the perspective of adulthood, it was hard sometimes to remember that early part, the happy part: five years of routine and certainty for him — what happened at the end of those five years was so overwhelming and calamitous that it collapsed time, concertinaed those years into no more than a few images. It made it seem as though that early, happy period for him had been no more than the prelude to the inevitable.

Poppa’s work was something that Harper only ever comprehended glancingly. What it meant to him mostly was that Poppa was out of the house a lot, including evenings and weekends, and that this was a source of tension between Poppa and Nina and sometimes Poppa and Michael. Sometimes, the people Poppa worked with would come to him. The sitting room would fill up, often so many people that some sat on the floor. There would be debates and one or two of the men would leave, shrugging their coats on as they went out and slamming the door behind them. Mostly, people filtered out quietly, often long after Harper had been sent to bed. He would be awoken by the murmurings of hallway departures.

Once, when Bud was still a baby, Harper came downstairs to see Nina standing at the front door, holding it open, looking out anxiously. She turned as she heard Harper and said, ‘Go through to the kitchen, go on now.’

Harper stopped where he was, halfway down the stairs. ‘Why?’

‘Just go, go on, not long. Poppa’s just clearing something off the front lawn.’

He couldn’t see Poppa from where he stood but he could hear the hiss of the garden hose. ‘What’s on the lawn?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ Nina replied, shutting the front door and turning to him, shooing him with her hands. ‘Just some bleach, someone stupid spilt it.’

The next two meetings were held in the kitchen, until Poppa decreed it was ridiculous. The kitchen was too darn small.

People would bring things on plates for the meetings, often — there was always food in Nina and Poppa’s house — and sometimes, Harper would hand round the things on plates. Once, as he was handing round some slightly undercooked cookies that collapsed as people lifted them from the plate, a plump man with large hands looked at Harper and said, ‘Say, son, where you from?’

‘My grandson is from Indonesia,’ Poppa called across the room, where he was standing talking to two men who were both smoking. ‘All the way across the world.’

‘How come you. .?’ the man began to Harper.

Poppa cut across him. ‘How he got here doesn’t matter. He’s here now.’ He gave Harper a smile.

It was only later, years later, that he realised that the whole time things were going right for him, they were going very wrong for Michael Junior and his mother: almost from the start.

They had jobs for a bit — his mother worked in a shop for a while, Michael a garage, but no job seemed to last, and sometimes they were both home for weeks at a stretch but they stayed in their room and if he asked Nina she would say, ‘They’re very tired, they’re resting. Don’t disturb them.’ Then they would be gone all weekend. One day, he went into their room when they were away; he was looking for a book he had been reading on their bed and, underneath the bed, he saw a tin box and a flat-shaped bottle on its side and a row of four or five glass tumblers that all looked sticky and, without understanding, he knew that these were bad things that had been hidden. He said nothing to anyone.

Michael was kind to him, when he was around. He sat on the steps leading down to the garden wearing a white undershirt and smoking, smiling his slow smile and tossing a ball to the end of the garden so that Harper and Jimmy could run after it together. Harper always let Jimmy win.

But there were the fights between his mother and Michael that took place in that bedroom when the door was closed. Michael’s voice was deep, patient mostly, until something crashed against the wall. His mother always started shrill and hysterical, right from the very beginning. They did it in the evenings after Harper had gone to bed, but he woke to hear it often.

One evening, when it was particularly noisy, Nina came into Harper’s and Bud’s room and sat on the edge of his bed, and stroked his hair back from his forehead. Bud was sound asleep in his cot. Harper had been lying awake for a while. Nina stroked him for a while in silence, then said, ‘They saw a war, Nicolaas, try and remember that, what your mother went through, what Michael went through in a different way, those of us older, those of us younger like you, it’s difficult for us to understand what they went through. They were just so young, and Michael saw some terrible things, I know, even though he doesn’t talk about them. He is. . well, it’s hard to explain.’

And then, one day, Michael wasn’t there any more, and Poppa stayed off work for a while — which was unheard of — and took to standing at the window in the front sitting room, just staring out into the street, his hands in his pockets, for hour after hour. Harper’s mother stayed in her room and wept and there were sharp words between her and Nina on the rare occasions that she emerged.

He began to wonder if Michael had died and nobody had told him, but when he asked Nina what had happened, she sat him down on the back step, which was where the difficult things often got said in their house, and told him that Michael had been unhappy for a long time, ever since he came back from the war, unhappy in the same way that his mother was sometimes unhappy, and that she, Nina, guessed they had got married hoping that their unhappiness would cancel each other’s out but instead it just made it multiply. Did he know that his mother sometimes took a few too many alcoholic beverages? He nodded. That much he had worked out. Well, Michael did too sometimes and they had sort of encouraged each other, which was obviously a bad thing. They both should have been with people who would have done the opposite. There had been a big argument when he had been at school one day and Michael had gone off to another city and it would probably be a very long time before they saw him again and it was making everyone very sad. It was particularly hard for Poppa, Nina said, because he saved people all day long and yet he couldn’t save his own son.

At this point, they heard, behind them, ‘Dubba! Dubba!’

They turned. Bud had crawled out of the open kitchen door and wanted them to watch as he stood unsteadily, a feat he had only just learned, before dropping to all fours again and crawling the small space over to Harper. Once he reached him, he levered himself to his feet again by grasping at Harper’s shirt, standing unsteadily for a moment like a tiny, genial drunk and then splaying both fat hands and bashing them on Harper’s head, a kind of fierce patting.

‘Hey Bud, cut it out,’ said Harper, smiling and remaining motionless to allow Bud to continue, and Bud laughed his throaty chuckle as if what he was doing was the funniest thing in the world.

Nina looked at them both and shook her head and said, ‘You two brothers got a lot more sense than the whole of the adults in this house put together. People say things are complicated but you two know they aren’t, they’re really simple.’

It was a Sunday afternoon when his mother told him she was going back to Holland for a bit, to see Aunty Lies. His first thought was that she was going to say he had to go with her — she had told him often enough that he was the centre of her world. The thought of being separated from Bud and Jimmy the dog, even for a few weeks, was more than he could bear.

But instead, Anika pressed him to her bony chest and said, ‘I know you’ll miss me so much, Nicolaas, but I need you to be braver than you’ve ever been. Things here have been really hard for me since Michael left and I need to go back home for a bit. Can you manage without me for a little while? It’s something I just have to do, things have been so mixed up here lately and you know how much I miss our Homeland.’ Did he? ‘I’m just going back to sort out a few things. Bud is still little and he’d get seasick if I took you both now, you wouldn’t I know because you’re really good about that kind of thing. You know, you’re the only man who has never let me down.’

With Michael and his mother gone — and neither absence given a definite end date — the house was calmer, although as Bud grew, that livened things up a bit. He was a toddler who ran up and down, everywhere, from the minute he could, both furious and amused at the same time: tight curls, light brown skin with a throw of dark brown freckles across his nose, as if he had been playing with a very fine paintbrush, a high piping voice that called Harper, ‘Nick-er-lus.’ Three syllables at least. Once he had learned to pronounce it, he would jump his small bottom up and down in his high chair at mealtimes, repeating it again and again if he did not have Harper’s full attention for one minute of the meal. ‘Nick-er-lus, Nick-er-lus, Nick. Er. Lus!’

‘You know, Nicolaas,’ Nina said once, when she was getting him to help her fold laundry. ‘That little boy thinks all the good things in the world come from you, like you’re a god or something. You should hear him when it’s time for you to come home from school.’

He was not a god. Nor was Poppa, the great lawyer who everyone admired so. If either of them had been a god, it would never have happened, that dreadful day three years later, in the bright sunshine, with the sun sparking off water clear as glass.

So many times, in the aftermath, he found himself reliving that afternoon and holding back or running forward, insisting that they took the other fork in the path, being ill that morning, or pushing Bud off a step so that he would twist an ankle — anything, anything that would mean that day could not progress until the moment when time stopped altogether, in bright light, the thunder of white water in the air.

Other families had holidays, that was the truth. But other families were not like theirs: Poppa, Nina, Nicolaas and Bud. It wasn’t just their ages or their different skin tones, no one of the four of them alike, it was Poppa’s work too. Nina explained it to them one evening, when Poppa was, as usual, late for dinner. ‘Think of it like this, boys. Your Poppa is out there fighting this giant monster. It’s a great big monster that eats people. And he knows full well he can’t defeat it all on his own and that it’s going to take years and years but even when he works really hard that monster keeps on eating. But if he stops work for a bit, the monster eats harder and faster.’ She paused and looked at each of them sternly. ‘And so what’s Poppa to say to the people who get eaten if he takes a break? Sorry, I’ll be back tomorrow?’

Harper looked at Bud, across the table from him, five years old, wide-eyed, knife and fork clutched in the wrong hands. He thought maybe that comparison was a little much for his small brother.

The front door slammed and Poppa ambled, shoulders down, into the kitchen, loosening his tie. Bud dropped the knife and fork onto the table with a clatter, jumped down from his seat and flung himself against Poppa’s legs, burying his face in them. Poppa put his hand absently on Bud’s head and looked up and Nina said, ‘I was just explaining to the boys how you were out slaying the dragon.’

‘Oh,’ said Poppa, gently detaching Bud from his trousers and giving him a small shove back towards the table, glancing at the food, ‘that dragon.’

That night, Harper lay awake in his room after bedtime, as he often did, using his new torch to make hand puppets on the wall. He and Bud still shared the same small room — he didn’t really see why he couldn’t have the one that his mother and Michael had used. It had been kept just as it was three years ago, except cleaner, and was now called ‘the guest room’. It annoyed Harper that he got sent to bed at the same time as Bud. He was more than twice his age, after all. Nina said it was okay for him to read for a bit while Bud went to sleep but often he lay awake with his hands behind his head for some time. Since he got his new torch, last birthday, he had taken to making finger puppet shows on the walls, the stories of princes and warriors that his mother used to tell him about, from the place she always called ‘the Indies’. It was the only time he missed his mother, at bedtime; something about telling himself the stories made him hear her voice, occasionally. His shadow shows were always an amalgam of his mother’s tales and events from the cartoons he and Bud were allowed to go to on Saturdays at the Variety picture house for nine cents apiece, although he didn’t think the original Arjuna had had a space rocket.

That particular evening, Harper was doing a puppet show for himself with the torch laid horizontally on top of books piled on his bedside table. Across the room, Bud was asleep, curled up turned away from him, the small hillock of his back exposed where his quilt had slipped down. Then Harper heard voices from across the landing.

Bored of his own puppet show — Arjuna always won, of course — he crept out of bed and went out onto the landing. The door to Poppa and Nina’s room was not quite closed.

‘C’mon,’ he heard Nina say. ‘They’re growing boys, especially Nicolaas, a few days is all I’m asking.’

‘I can see they’re growing.’ Poppa sounded disgruntled but not annoyed. He sounded like a man who had already lost the argument. ‘Seems like they’re doing just fine to me.’

‘He just wants to feel like a normal boy, you know, in a family, doing things that families do.’

‘That’s true enough, honey, but how many black families do you know get out in all that “fresh air” you talk about?’

‘You saying fresh air is just for white people?’

‘I’m saying fresh air costs money. How many families you know. .’

Nina’s voice rose. ‘I’m not talking about the families we know, I’m talking about ours. You telling me you’re scared of the looks we going to get from whitefolks on a path through a forest? After you stand up in front of judges?’

‘You know that’s not true.’ The way Nina and Poppa talked when they were alone was different from the way they talked in front of Harper and Bud, less proper, a kind of in-joke, as if they were about to start laughing and thumping each other any minute.

‘You scared of bears!’

‘No. .’

‘You are, Michael Senior! Shame on you, big man like you and he’s scared of bears!’

He loved that laughing tone they had when they talked to each other like this. He loved nothing better than overhearing it. Eavesdropping was a habit he had got into when Michael and his mother were around and it had proved a habit hard to break — but when he eavesdropped on Nina and Poppa, what he heard mostly was them teasing each other.

The door to his room creaked. He looked round. Bud stood there in his pyjamas. Harper lifted a finger to his lips and gave him a stern look to be quiet.

‘I need to pee,’ whispered Bud.

‘Ssshh. .’ said Harper, ‘they’re talking about taking us on holiday.’

Bud’s eyes widened. He crept up behind Harper, shuffling his bare feet silently along the boards so as not to lift them, then stood very close, leaning his head on Bud’s arm.

‘You know, the boys would probably go somewhere for a bit of fun. .’ Poppa’s voice was the tone of a man negotiating the terms of his capitulation. ‘Like the beach, or amusements, you know, throw balls at coconuts, eat sticky stuff. There’s a great big ocean over thataway, you know, goes by the name of the Pacific. You saying you want to go the other direction?’

‘Fresh air, and some education, somewhere they can climb up a mountain and use up some of that energy, camping maybe.’

‘I couldn’t put up a tent, woman, not if my life depended on it.’

‘Bet you those boys could.’

‘I’m just not sure about people like us going to a National Park.’

‘People like us, huh? People like us?’ It sounded like Nina had thrown a pillow at Poppa’s head and Poppa had batted it away. ‘The Martins are people like us and they went to see the Carlsbad Caverns.’

‘That’s New Mexico. That’s different.’

‘People down there worse than California.’

‘Well, that’s true.’

It had been Nina’s idea, but when they got to the National Park she discovered that walking uphill all day was not really her thing. And the superintendent of the campsite stuck them in the canvas cabin furthest away from the amenities because, they were all convinced, they were the only non-white family in the whole damn village and Poppa had said, ‘I told you so,’ which had wounded Nina’s pride. And then some Mexican nuns arrived and were put in the canvas cabin next to them and that cheered Nina up no end because, she said, at least she had some women to talk some sense to. And so it happened that that day, it was just the three of them, Poppa, him and Bud, that set off up the mountain path to see the waterfall.

They were all in something of a bad mood, having argued about which way to go at the bottom of the path: it was early and not many people were about. It was incredibly hot. Poppa had said that it was cooler the higher up you got, that the hot air settled in the valley and that all you needed to do was walk up a little bit and then the breezes would blow, but Harper and Bud were unconvinced. ‘I’m only five,’ Bud moaned, as they stood studying the wooden sign at the bottom of the path. ‘I’m smaller than you and you.’ He was drawing a shape in the dirt with the toe of his shoe. Harper tried to be the good one, lifting his head, breathing in the scented air from the pine trees, but Poppa didn’t notice, just grumbled, ‘Come on boys, Nina says you need fresh air and it’s fresh air you’re going to get. Whether you like it or not.’

The dirt track was steep right from the very beginning and hard work. Harper’s feet slipped on the loose scree. They didn’t have proper leather boots like they had seen some of the serious climbers wearing — he and Bud were in the cloth shoes they wore for physical education at school. The thin rubber soles did nothing to protect them from the pebbles and sharp stones on the path.

Poppa went ahead, his long legs taking a stride that equalled four small steps of theirs. He and Bud began to play a desultory game, hanging back, kicking at loose stones on the path, kicking them forward, running up to them, kicking them forward again. He noticed how unpredictable the trajectory of each stone was. A smooth one could shoot far ahead even if it was small and light. An awkward-shaped, multiple-sided one would sometimes tumble twice then lodge in the dirt, however hard you kicked it. Some went in a straight line. Some somersaulted off the edge of the path into the gully below: the path was bordered by a steep, wooded rise on one side and a plummet down to the riverbed on the other.

After a short while, Poppa stopped, withdrew a handkerchief and mopped his brow, then turned and said, ‘C’mon you two, you’re idling. We want to make that waterfall before we need to stop and eat.’ He was carrying a knapsack with a metal water bottle and three small sandwiches. The thought of a sandwich, Harper realised, was the only thing that would get him up the mountain.

At that point, a middle-aged couple came down the path. They must have risen early if they had been up to the fall and were on the descent already. They stared at Poppa as they approached, slowing their pace. They both had those leather boots on, with stripy laces, thick socks, long shorts and walking sticks. The man was white-haired, wearing glasses; the woman had her hair in a headscarf. Poppa moved to one side on the narrow path, politely, to let them pass. They stared at him, then their gazes shifted to Harper and Bud, and Harper saw on their faces the calculation that people often made when they were out as a family: Poppa black, Bud black but light-skinned — and him, something hard to guess at. Part-something.

Even though Poppa had moved to one side to let them pass, they didn’t say thank you or smile at him. Instead, the woman said lightly, to her husband, as they passed Bud who was trailing third, ‘Well, I can’t say I realised this was the coloured path.’

The three of them stood still for a while after the couple disappeared down the path, around the bend, then he walked up to Poppa and said, ‘There wasn’t a sign.’

Poppa’s face was set. ‘No, son,’ he said, ‘there’s no sign because there isn’t any coloured path and there isn’t any whites-only path here either, that woman just thought there should be. Take no notice, she’s just ignorant.’ He looked up the path and passed his hand over his face, then muttered, ‘As if this mountain isn’t steep enough.’

Then Bud ran up to them, his hand outstretched, calling, ‘Poppa!’ and Poppa turned and took his hand firmly, his large one enfolding Bud’s small one, and said softly, ‘Come along, son.’

They all set off again, Bud and Poppa walking ahead of him, holding hands, and Harper found himself hanging back. He kicked at stones on his own. After a few more paces, Poppa turned his head to the side and without looking round properly, said over his shoulder, still walking, ‘You too, Slim Jim, you too,’ and he ran ahead and took Poppa’s other hand, and they walked like that for a few minutes more until the path narrowed too much for them to walk side by side and he and Bud ran ahead gleefully, jumping and shouting, ‘Who’s behind now, Poppa!’ and the moment with the couple, the looks, was gone.

All three of them were panting as they neared the top of the path, and then they stopped for a while and sat on a plain plank bench by the side and looked out through the dense cover of trees where the sun struck through in brilliant beams. They took it in turn to drink from the water bottle. Ahead of them, they could see that the path forked. To the right, it widened out — the left-hand fork was steep and narrow.

Poppa was studying the pencil-drawn map he had made after looking at the visitors’ information in the lodge at the bottom of the hill.

‘We can go that way,’ he said, pointing to the right-hand fork, ‘which is easier but takes a little longer, and goes up to the official viewing point, or we can go that way. Steeper but shorter I think.’

‘Shorter! Shorter!’ said Bud.

‘Shorter doesn’t mean easier, son.’

In Bud’s world it did.

Poppa looked down at his map and frowned at his own handwriting, turned it upside down and back again, the full three hundred and sixty degrees.

There were voices then, and a moment later, a group of eight or nine white people, two families with older children, came down the wider, easier path. Poppa nodded at them as they passed. One of the men nodded back. The rest of the group ignored him. ‘Okay,’ Poppa said after they had gone, ‘let’s try that way.’ He pointed to the narrow, steep path, the left-hand path.

By the time they were halfway up, they were bad-tempered with each other again. The terrain was steep and at intervals involved clambering over boulders that blocked the narrow path: Poppa hauled Bud up by his arm a couple of times — Harper refused help. The trees and undergrowth of ferns and bushes were so dense that they heard the thunder of the fall before they could see it: and then at a point about halfway up, there was a space where there was a gap in the trees and, yes — there it was, as if suspended mid-air, the magnificent crash of brilliant water, frothing and foaming as it fell.

All three of them stopped to look: the relentlessness of it, the continuous descent of all that water. It carried the eye down as a passing train carries the eye along but just kept falling and falling, so densely white in the centre it seemed blue, the fine mist of spray all around, hanging in the air: and most miraculous of all — the air full of small rainbows, faint small rainbows flung in all directions in the mist.

‘Whoa. .’ breathed Bud. He was not a boy who was easily impressed by natural wonders.

Harper looked up, to where the top of the fall was just visible high above them, where the water shot out horizontally, foaming ferociously, such was its force and power. ‘We really going all the way to the top?’

‘You bet,’ Poppa replied, mopping his brow. ‘There’ll be somewhere up there we can sit down, have the sandwiches. We should have brought Nina, what do you reckon?’

Harper pulled a face. ‘It’s going to get slippy up top, the rocks will be wet.’

‘Well, you two take care.’

The path became steeper and steeper: their pace became slower and slower. At times he doubted it was really a path at all, just a scramble through the trees over boulders made treacherous with spray water and rotting brown ferns. We should have taken the longer path, he thought, never mind how many looks we got, but he didn’t share this thought with Poppa or Bud.

It must have been an hour before they reached the top, and then they emerged into a clearing that was a little way upriver from the edge of the fall. At this point, the river turned just before it fell: he was disappointed you couldn’t see the edge. Bet you can from the official viewing point, he thought.

You couldn’t see it but you could hear it, the thunder of it — and feel it too; the air in the clearing was hung with fine spray. A large, wet stone made a natural platform that went up to the river’s edge and here the river was so wide the water was very shallow — it would be easy to wade across to the other side: it would come only partway up your calves, he thought. The widening of the river meant it slipped more slowly at this point. There was no frothing or foaming here; the water was completely calm: you could see the gleaming brown and grey rocks on the bed. Right by the edge closest to them, there was a natural pool made by a dip in the riverbed. And here, miraculously, the water was still. Around the edge of the pool, it flowed in small eddies downstream towards the fall, but inside the pool, the water was motionless and clear as glass.

‘Well, look at that,’ said Poppa. ‘Perfect.’

From somewhere upriver, they could hear voices, the people at the official viewing point, out of sight amongst the trees: but here, they had their own private spot, a clear pool and total privacy. It had been worth climbing that more difficult path.

‘Can we get our clothes wet?’ Harper asked. It was going to be difficult not to if they stopped for their sandwiches here.

‘Sure,’ Poppa said, ‘let’s take our shoes off. It’ll all dry soon enough back at the camp.’

It was strange to think how hot it was down in the valley below, with the cool damp air up here: the relief of it. Odd to think they would be descending into such heat on the way back. He thought about how, when you were hot, you couldn’t imagine ever being cold again: and vice versa. Some things could only be felt, not imagined.

The rock was too wet to sit on so they perched on boulders at the edge, each on their separate one, grinning at each other while they ate their sandwiches. Bud finished first, as usual, leaving his crusts; Poppa wheeled a large hand, ‘Bring them on over here, Bud.’ When he had handed his crusts over, Bud said, ‘Can I go paddle in that pool?’

‘You crazy?’ scoffed Harper. ‘That water will be freezing. That’s ice melt, Bud.’

Poppa frowned.

‘Please!’ said Bud, putting his head on one side, smiling. It annoyed the hell out of Harper when Bud did that. Bud was five, he wasn’t a baby any more — but he sure knew how to behave like one when he wanted his own way. He could twist Poppa round his little finger with that look.

‘You’ll have to take everything off excepting your underpants,’ Poppa said.

Bud jumped up and down a couple of times, then began to undress.

‘He’s crazy,’ Harper commented, although in fact, the thought of dabbling his feet in that glassy water had already occurred to him. He couldn’t do it now, though, or Bud would say, ‘You’re copying me.’

Bud passed Poppa his T-shirt and his shorts and Poppa hung them on the twig of a bush behind him. Then he put on his stern voice, ‘Now listen, no swimming, I mean it. You get in that pool and paddle, stay close to the bank here, that’s it, okay? Two minutes.’ In the distance, through the trees, Harper could hear some people on the official viewing platform laughing and calling out to each other, taking photographs, perhaps.

Bud dipped a toe in the water and then shrieked, pulling his elbows into his torso and screwing up his face. ‘It’s cold!’

‘Told ya,’ Harper said. He was still sitting on his rock, wishing there was another sandwich and thinking how the littlest one in a family got to do all the cute stuff, while he had to be grown-up and responsible. ‘Chicken!’ he called out, as Bud hopped from foot to foot.

‘Am not!’ Bud called back.

‘I’d get in before you fall in dancing round like that,’ Poppa said, laughing.

Gingerly, Bud stepped in. The pool was very shallow — when he stood upright it only came halfway up his thighs. He kept his arms bent and elbows tucked in tight.

‘Come on out, Bud,’ said Poppa, smiling, ‘it’s too cold. Let’s dry you off with my handkerchief.’

‘You can’t do much in that,’ said Harper, and heard in his own voice a mean edge. ‘It’s too shallow to float in even.’

Goaded, Bud dropped down, bending his knees, and leant back, and then there he was in the pool, arms and legs extended, floating on the surface in a starfish shape, and Poppa called, ‘Whoo-hoo!’ and clapped a couple of times and Harper waited for Bud to jump up shivering but he stayed in the starfish shape, eyes clenched tight shut, face turned up to the sky, and said, ‘Whoa. .’ in satisfaction at his own bravery.

Show-off, Harper thought. I give him ten seconds maximum.

Still lying flat, Bud began to turn. He was on his back in the water, spread out, eyes closed, arms and legs motionless: but even though he wasn’t moving any part of his body, he began to wheel in the water. Beneath the still surface of the shallow pool, there was a current, an invisible force turning Bud’s small floating body. As his brother began to spin, Harper jumped to his feet at the same time as Poppa and they both called out and Bud opened his eyes, raised his head and looked at them, just as the eddy at the edge of the pool took him, tumbled him, pulled him to the left. He made one attempt to stand, getting to his feet so quickly that he slipped immediately on the wet rocks. He was down again, then gone.

In the terrible and silent months that followed, the pictures that came into Harper’s head when he lay awake in his bed at night, eyes wide open in the dark, were this: the sunlight striking the water, how it was clear as glass; Bud’s arms and legs outstretched in a starfish pose and how it seemed that he began to turn and spin in the river so very slowly at first, even though everything had happened so quickly; the dreamy look on his face as he turned and drifted and then, all at once, went from a slow turn to spinning in the water as he lifted his small, questioning face at the sound of their cries. The water beyond the pool was still so shallow, no more than thigh height on him, but the current beneath the surface so strong that when he tried to stand it took his feet from under him in an instant.

As Bud disappeared around the corner towards the fall, pulled from sight, Harper looked at Poppa for confirmation that what he thought was happening was not happening, and that was the worst moment of all: the look on Poppa’s face as he stared after Bud, the knowledge that the fissure that had opened in his head had opened in Poppa’s head too. Something so horrible it could not even be imagined had actually happened, right before their eyes. The edge of the fall was a few feet away, just out of sight. While they were still trying to believe the unbelievable, Bud was already dead.

It was four months on from that afternoon, when their house was still cloaked in grief, that the letter came from Holland, the pale blue envelope with the blue and red flashes on the edge, wafer-thin like an old man’s skin, his mother’s spidery and precise hand, addressed to Michael Luther Senior.

It was a Saturday so he was home — he didn’t go to the cartoon shows at the Variety any more, not on his own. He had collected the letter from the mailbox himself. When he handed it to Nina, she put it on the kitchen counter and said lightly, ‘Let’s wait till your grandfather is home, shall we?’

‘Why is it to him?’ he asked, looking past Nina at the letter where it lay.

‘I really need some help with these greens.’ It was only later that he realised she had been playing for time.

Poppa arrived back about an hour later, carrying some fresh rolls from Balian’s. He had been calling in on a neighbour who needed some advice: lots of people wanted free advice from Poppa. The neighbour lived in a big house in Sugar Hill and while they had lunch Poppa talked about how this neighbour had not one but two white maids and how a famous musician lived next to him — the conversation was low-key, as it always was since that day. Harper felt much older, these days — old enough, in any case, to recognise that normality was effortful for all of them. It was only as Poppa was patting his lips with his napkin that Nina, who had scarcely spoken a word throughout the meal, rose, turned to the counter-top where the letter lay and held it up.

Poppa stared at the letter in Nina’s hand, and then he stared at Nina, and Nina stared right back.

‘It’s from my mother. .’ Harper announced, unnecessarily. ‘We haven’t opened it.’

Poppa said, calmly, his gaze still locked with Nina’s, ‘Nicolaas, if you’ve finished, you can go and play with Jimmy.’

Harper rose and picked up his plate and Poppa said, ‘You don’t need to clear the table today, Nicolaas, go play.’ Harper began to feel sick. Clearing the table was a rigid duty. He looked at Nina but she was still staring at Poppa, the letter in her hand.

Poppa repeated, in a light tone of voice, ‘Nicolaas. Go kick a ball around the garden.’

As Harper closed the back door behind him, slowly because he wanted to hear what would come next, Poppa said, ‘We don’t know for sure.’

He sat down. A long silence came then.

Then Nina’s voice, a strangled kind of shriek. ‘That selfish. . selfish. . trash. . that’s all she is.’

He had never heard Poppa raise his voice to Nina before now — Michael, when he was here, him occasionally, but not Nina.

‘Never use a phrase like that of our boy’s mother! It isn’t right.’

‘Is it right what she’s doing? Is it? How can you defend her? Everything went wrong the minute she came along. Michael.’

‘Michael wasn’t her fault, you know that.’

‘She didn’t help.’

A concession, then. ‘No, she didn’t. But. .’ Poppa’s voice was softer now.

He had descended two of the steps before he sat down to make sure his head wasn’t visible in the glass panel in the top half of the door. All the same, all they had to do was glance out of the kitchen window to see that he hadn’t made it as far as the backyard.

Nina was crying now. ‘Haven’t we lost enough?’ she sobbed. ‘Haven’t we?’ Poppa was soothing her.

The most frightening thing was that, whatever the contents of the letter, things were bad enough for them to have forgotten him. Normally, Poppa was sharp enough to realise if he was hovering around. He sat on the step, listening to Nina’s sobs. At the end of the garden, Jimmy was snuffling in the border, the fluffy swoop of his tail a crescent-moon shape, batting to and fro.

He still expected his brother to show up at any minute — still caught himself wondering why Bud did not come jumping down the stairs, two at a time, like always, or appear running around the corner of the house just as Harper had picked up a ball or a bat, claiming it was his. In the mornings, he woke up alone in the box room and looked over at Bud’s empty bed, the quilt neat and smoothed. If he closed his eyes again immediately, he could hear Bud’s voice in his head. He still thought to himself, some mornings, When I open my eyes again, Bud will be there. If I believe in it strongly enough, then that will make it so. Arjuna the warrior could have made that happen, somehow. Reverend Wilson had organised a memorial service and the whole of the district had come — people still left pies and casseroles on the veranda with chequered cloths over them — but there had been no funeral. His body had yet to be found.

Later that day, Poppa called him into the sitting room and asked him to sit down. It reminded him of the first time he had come to the house, when Poppa had asked him into the kitchen and enquired, with a lawyer’s solemnity, whether it could really be true that he had an extra a in his name; and for the first few minutes of the conversation, even as it became clear how serious this matter was, he wondered whether Poppa was about to turn the whole thing into a joke.

‘Nicolaas, son, tell me, how much do you remember about your mother?’ Poppa continued without waiting for him to answer. ‘Do you remember how, when she left, your mother said she would either come back or send for you and Bud? Do you remember that?’

He didn’t remember the conversation quite like that, but that didn’t seem important right now. It was more than three years since his mother had left. There had been letters occasionally, a birthday card each year. There had been a Christmas present that had arrived one February, three small hardback books he couldn’t read with a note saying he mustn’t forget his Dutch.

‘Well, even though Bud is gone, has been taken away from us, that time has come,’ Poppa said.

They were going to Holland? He remembered so little about having lived there. The bread they ate was stale. They had to wear three coats inside the house because it was so cold. His mother had wailed every day that without his father’s army pension, they would starve. They were going back to mud and cold? Did you still have to wear three coats inside the house?

‘When are we going?’

Poppa paused. ‘Nina and I aren’t going, son. Our lives are here, in Los Angeles. My work is here. We would keep you here with us forever, if it was possible, I want you to know that. We think of you as ours. But your mother is your mother and she wants you back.’ It finally became clear: no Nina, no Poppa, no Jimmy either. He had lost Bud and now he was losing the rest of them.

It was very simple. ‘I’m not going.’

‘Nicolaas, your mother wrote us some time ago, after — after Bud was taken from us. We didn’t tell you because we didn’t want to worry you in case it wasn’t going to happen. We wrote back saying how we very much wanted you to stay with us but she has written us again and she is insistent and she is your mother, after all. She wants you back.’

‘I hate her.’

‘No, you don’t. Your mother loves you and that’s why she wants you back.’

‘She knows I like it here.’

‘Yes, she does but her need is greater than yours, in her head.’

‘Then she is a bad person. How can you let me go and live with a bad person?’ He suddenly felt very grown up, like a lawyer. It was simple. He just had to win the argument, then everything would be okay.

Poppa had been standing up in front of him, but now he sat down next to him, reached out and, very gently, took hold of his upper arm, as if he needed to hold on to it for support. ‘Nicolaas, I can see how it seems like the same thing to you, from your point of view I mean, but she isn’t a bad person.’

‘Then what is she?’ At that moment, the immediate calamity was less pressing in his head than his appreciation of the struggle his Poppa was undergoing, the great lawyer, so used to dealing in certainty, now facing his toughest challenge yet: the moral reasoning of a twelve-year-old boy.

Poppa pursed his lips, taking the question very seriously. ‘She is rather a person who believes that because of the bad things that have happened to her, she can never be blamed for the bad things she does herself. Nothing is ever Anika’s fault, we realised that after a while. When a person believes themselves to be unaccountable for their actions then there is nothing you can do. You can’t argue with them, you can’t reason. You might as well bang your head against the wall over there.’

‘It’s the same thing, isn’t it?’

Poppa hesitated. ‘No, I don’t believe it is the same thing. The harm and hurt from your point of view may be just as great, but being unaccountable is not the same as being bad even though the unaccountable person may do as much harm as the bad person.’

He was unconvinced. What did motivation matter if the end effect was the same? There was a long silence between them then, while he struggled with the idea that this argument was more than theoretical.

‘I’m sorry, Nicolaas, truly I am, because you’ve had so much moving around, and we had really hoped that your moving around was done, that you were here for good. Now, son, I know how you are feeling but I think we need to go and see Nina now and be brave for her because. .’ And suddenly, Poppa stopped in the middle of this speech, and took a great heaving breath, as if he had been underwater for the whole conversation, had only just surfaced and had the chance to gulp at air. ‘Because we need to try and make her feel better, okay? Can you do that? Can you, Nicolaas?’

Reverend Wilson’s brother took them to the Union Passenger Terminal in his Packard sedan. Jimmy came with them in the car, then was being delivered to neighbours to be looked after while Harper, Nina and Poppa undertook the long journey cross-country. Harper watched the car pull away with Jimmy looking at him out of the back window, his ears high, head on one side slightly, panting a little as it was a hot day. But even then, he did not really feel the weight of his departure, not with Poppa and Nina with him and a long ride on an Interstate to look forward to.

They were standing on the sidewalk in front of the station. They had just waved Jimmy off. Nina was checking their belongings: small travel cases for her and Poppa, his large one; a wicker basket with a lid that was piled high with luncheon-meat sandwiches. When he had asked why she was making so many, she replied, ‘The rest of America isn’t like West Adams. We might not feel too comfortable in some of the restaurants.’

Poppa frowned and scratched his neck. Nina had persuaded him to wear his heavy coat. ‘I’m a little warm in this thing,’ he grumbled.

Just then, a police officer in a peaked cap with a badge wandered up, a leather strap diagonal across his chest, attached to his belt, just above his gun holster. Harper stared at the holster and the heavy-looking black gun: a real gun. He looked up at the officer, a man with a puffy white face and cheery smile, and grinned at him. The officer grinned back.

‘You folks travelling today?’ he asked them, looking at all three of them.

‘I have our tickets here,’ Poppa replied, patting the pockets of his heavy coat.

The officer was looking at Harper, then said, ‘That’s okay, I don’t need to see them. This your child, boy?’

Harper looked at the officer, confused, but Poppa, who had stopped patting his pockets and was standing very still, replied quietly, ‘My grandson.’

The officer reached out a hand and placed it on Harper’s shoulder, giving him a small pat. ‘Nice-looking kid. You look after your grandparents now, son.’

Harper glanced at Poppa, who was staring straight ahead, looked back at the officer and said quickly, ‘Yes, sir.’

And the long journey and the passing countryside led eventually to this: another embarkation shed, a huge thing with a vaulted roof and sawdust floor and great, high windows through which vast shafts of light lit the crowds of passengers below and made travelling clothes, travelling crates, boxes and suitcases all shades of brown and grey, the flat colours of transience. After they had got to the head of a very long queue and put his name on the passenger list, the woman at the desk gave them a sheet of paper with the rules for Unaccompanied Young Persons and handed over a label on a piece of string. He had to wear it around his neck at all times. It had Holland-Amerika Lijn printed on one side and HAL in big capitals on the other with his name, date of birth and his destination written in a sloping hand. Beneath was the name of the person who was meeting him at the port in Rotterdam: Mrs Anika Aaltink.

He was mortified. He had to wear a label like a tiny child would? He was going to be thirteen soon.

‘Just like a parcel,’ Nina said, as she tucked the label inside his jacket, kneeling in front of him, even though that made him taller than her now. All at once, she grabbed him and held her to him. Harper glanced around, over her head. In the corner of the departure shed was a group of teenage boys in school uniform.

‘The most precious parcel in the world,’ Nina said brokenly into his chest. Poppa put his hand gently on her shoulder and patted it until she released him and stood up.

His last sight of Nina and Poppa for eight years came as he exited the departure shed at the far end, on his way to the jetty. When he turned around, they were standing holding on to each other and smiling at him: Poppa tall and bulky in his winter coat and hat, Nina, petite and smiling bravely, both with their hands raised. Nina waved hard and Harper, who had attached himself to the end of the group of boys, lifted his hand in an awkward little half-wave, glancing from one of them to the other quickly, worried that whichever of them was the last one he smiled at, the other might be upset — but at the same time not wanting to embarrass himself in front of the group of big boys just ahead of him.

It was a relief to get out onto the concrete jetty, where the ship loomed and the air smelled of smoke and fuel and a soft rain fell and the business of goodbye was over. Right at that particular moment, the adventure to come seemed adequate compensation for leaving his grandparents behind. The missing them would come later.

*

Travelling the Atlantic Ocean alone, the label round his neck at all times as he had been instructed, even when he was washing — surely it must have made some impression on him? When he tried to remember that voyage, there was something in his head about an ice cream, an ice cream sandwich made with thick soggy slabs of some sort of cookie mixture. A sailor who played cards with him? A little girl in a pinafore? Without his mother there to make the pictures of the voyage, that Atlantic journey at the age of twelve seemed vaguer when he thought back to it than the one he had undertaken with his mother when he was three. Saying goodbye to Poppa and Nina must have been hard but, as far as he remembered, the voyage itself didn’t bother him — being in a state of transition was too familiar to his bones.

The arrival — that was different. Like all the passengers, he hung over the side, watching the coast appear. He joined the melee processing clumsily down the gangplank, bumping his case on the wooden ridges and losing control of it at one point, tripping a young woman in heels just ahead of him. She turned her head back to him, scowling over her shoulder, then stopped, blocking the way for everybody, to adjust her stockings. Then he was on the quay and trapped in a huge crowd of adults who grouped and gathered in greetings before moving off, people clinging to each other. When a clearing opened, he turned to his left and saw, first of all, a barrel-chested man in a tweed coat and black hat who was shouting, ‘Indié verloren, rampspoed geboren!’ with his arms wide open. His ruddy face was contorted and open-mouthed, as if he had made a tremendous joke. On her knees next to him, kneeling right there on the wooden planks of the arrivals jetty, was a woman with her hair scraped back in a ponytail that revealed harsh lines leading down from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth. She had tears pouring down her cheeks. She, too, had her arms open and she was crying, ‘Come here! Oh come here, baby boy!’

The power of transience: in motion, you could be whoever you wanted to be. When had he learned this? On that solo Atlantic journey, with the label round his neck? Or earlier, at the age of three, watching his mother cadge cigarettes from different passengers or sailors, varying the details of who she was according to whether she was talking to a man or a woman, a sailor or a fellow passenger? Whatever lessons were learned then, chief amongst them was this: if you don’t want people to know who you are, keep moving.

If you kept moving fast enough, you could be several selves in quick succession. If someone struck up a conversation with you on a plane, you could pretend to be from Macau and single and a brain surgeon — after you had assessed that the person you were talking to was neither from Macau nor a brain surgeon themselves, of course. In the taxi queue outside the airport, you could be a Spanish businessman, widowed with six adorable children. Later that same day, in a hotel bar perhaps, you could say you were psychic and that your mother had been mistress to a Persian king — you could claim you had a fatal disease and only months to live. The possibilities were endless.

He was recruited by the Institute straight out of his military service and for the first couple of years, after his basic training was done, was sent on jobs that involved a lot of transience. It was mostly delivering packages to embassies or organisations, although he was too junior to know the contents. New recruits often spent a year as delivery boys before they returned to be based behind a desk in Amsterdam and learn more about the Institute’s work — they weren’t going to trust you immediately, after all. This suited him fine: he was in no hurry to get his feet beneath a desk.

Travel of any sort was terrific training. Officials, for instance: there was a certain look that got you past those people — immigration or customs officers, ticket collectors; the people who wore uniforms that denoted status without any real power. This look could best be described as politeness tinged with boredom — a look that implied there was absolutely nothing at stake. That was the mistake that illegal immigrants or drug traffickers always made; either their rank fear showed or they were excessively friendly. The answer lay somewhere between the two: but a hint of boredom, that was essential. The person behind the desk in front of you was almost certainly bored as well, after all. You were in it together.

Once he was settled in a seat in a departure lounge or railway station waiting room, he liked to do his homework. How readily people gave themselves up to his gaze. The families were straightforward, the women and men clutching children, exhausted by the endlessness of it all but mostly by their offspring’s obliviousness to their sacrifice. The businessmen always liked to sit a little apart, to indicate that they were only there because they were being paid to be there. Then there were the young couples, usually having stupid arguments, because all arguments were stupid between a couple at that age, everything freighted by the lifetime of disappointment that lay ahead. ‘So much for Things go better with Coke,’ he once saw a beautiful young woman wail at her unfortunate beau, who had trailed halfway round San Diego airport in search of a vending machine and then brought the bottle back without opening it. She meant, are you the one? Am I having children with you? Is this it? What she meant was, when you’re having trouble at work at the age of forty-five, will you be the kind of guy who lets his boss walk all over him and doesn’t get his bonus and can’t look after me and the kids? Because if you don’t have the initiative to open a bottle of Coke on the opener attached to the vending machine before you bring it back to me then how do I know you have the initiative to hold a good job down and to anticipate what I need when I need it? She didn’t know it, the beautiful young woman, but that was what she was asking. And the young man’s soft sigh — he didn’t snap back, just accepted the admonition — said, yeah, well, all that’s probably true but I’m easy-going at least and maybe that’s more important than you think and this is the guy I am so take it or leave it, hon. The helplessness of other men never ceased to amaze him.

These were the times when he gave a shudder of gratitude at his observer status. Who would want to be part of that? The truth was, even though he was the same age as the young couple, his courier work made him feel a world apart from them, mature and powerful.

When did he ever see anyone in any of these transitory places that he would have liked to trade lives with? Rarely, although it wasn’t unusual for large groups of people in motion to include one or two oddities like him. At an airport in Ceylon, on his way back from delivering a report for a British firm, he had seen one, another oddity, sitting amongst the people waiting to board one of the newly established flights. The airport had been an RAF station during the war and was only just being developed for commercial purposes. The cost of flights was prohibitive for anyone but government officials or the wealthiest of local families so the people waiting were all well dressed, many of them Indians returning home. Amongst them, clearly happy to stand out, was a white man, small, ginger-haired, tough as a little terrier, Harper guessed — he could always spot them. Ordinary people thought that the men to be afraid of were the obvious ones, the big men who shouted aggressively, the ones with uniforms and guns. Harper knew better by then. This man sat quietly in the departure lounge like him, dressed in slacks and an open-necked shirt, his frame coiled and dense, his eyes watchful. He was playing the game too. CIA, Harper guessed — definitely American, in any case, on his way back from something, technically off duty but unable to relax. He must have been doing something in conjunction with the British as well, the Americans didn’t have that many interests in Ceylon. He was scanning each passenger in turn, just as Harper had. When his gaze reached him, Harper looked back, keeping his expression a professional blank as he and the other man took in everything about each other and moved on. Anyone watching them would assume they hadn’t noticed each other at all, whereas he knew this man had surmised in a second that he was a fellow professional, albeit not exactly his sort.

In the far corner was an Indian couple in late middle age, sitting next to each other but staring straight ahead. The woman was wearing a knitted brown cardigan over her sari. Her husband had his hands resting on the top of his walking cane, which was upright in front of him. His mouth was slightly open. Harper knew that this couple, each in their own way, would do almost anything rather than spend another minute together. Two British girls sat opposite the middle-aged couple, embassy secretaries perhaps, fanning themselves against the exhausting humidity with magazines, prim in their chairs, legs tucked underneath and crossed at the ankles, exchanging glances from time to time. He guessed they had been sharing an apartment for a while. They were returning home with heads full of secrets about each other. One had flat, chunky-heeled lace-up shoes and the other, the one with money in the family somewhere, was in delicate blue pumps. Even though they hadn’t known each other before they came out here and had little in common, they were bound together now. Nearly everyone waiting for the plane was fed up or impatient. The travelling world was full of people who wanted to arrive so badly that that imperative stopped them observing their journey. If you didn’t want that, you were at a distinct advantage.

If a flight was delayed long enough, then by the end of the wait, he felt he could write the biography of almost everyone on the aeroplane.

As the group rose to board, the American in the open-necked shirt walked past where he was sitting. Their glances met again but they did not exchange a word, or even a nod. In that instant, Harper, new to his line of work, felt that although he was a man excluded from civilian life, with no real nationality or home, he was part of something else: a kind of brotherhood, an understanding that would only be acknowledged in the briefest of looks. There was a community of shadow men out there, around the world, in airports and railway stations — on the streets, hidden in hotel rooms, disguised as ordinary people and indistinguishable to everyone but others of their kind, all ghosts, all invisible, all playing the same game. He had been inducted.

Lots of training, lots of games, lots of sex: that was how he remembered those years in Amsterdam leading up to ’65. He was a young man in his twenties and apart from a multiply-divorced mother who drank so much she didn’t know who he was sometimes, he had no ties, no obligations. He didn’t look like the people around him but he didn’t look definitively like anyone else either. Part-something.

The trick to being unusual was learning how to milk it. He liked to use the geography of his birth to wrong-foot people, especially women he was trying to bed. He liked to choose exactly the right moment to reveal a little about himself — after a few drinks together, when their gazes had locked once or twice. Maybe there had been a light touch or two, a brushing of a sleeve, a hand resting briefly on a knee, although that would have been quite forward in those days. In the early sixties, as he remembered, a woman’s favourite way of inviting physical contact was to pick a bit of fluff off your suit jacket, often with a brusque, maternal swipe of the hand. After a certain amount of this, a certain amount of her batting him around like a small boy, came the point when he could start taking the initiative. These small physical gestures were only indicators, though. The real movement forward came when the talking started, when they began exchanging stories. That was when he knew he was home and dry.

One of his favourite gambits was to ask her where she was born: always so much more tactful than asking a woman how old she was. You could get tripped up that way if you weren’t careful: they had a tendency to ask you to guess, a question which was surprisingly hard to answer to your own advantage. If you stuck to where rather than when, it was a neat and simple way into intimacy. You couldn’t say to a woman, ‘Tell me your unhappiest childhood memory,’ straight off, but when they told you where they were born, the conversation automatically became more intimate. The tragic detail from her childhood would be lying in wait at the end of that simple, factual answer. Sometimes there wasn’t one, of course — sometimes the story of her birthplace was routine, told with a self-deprecating laugh in acknowledgement of its ordinariness. And then, because she was a nice woman — he only went for nice women — she would ask back.

The pause. The downward look. The soft voice that indicated this was not something that he usually confided in a person he had only just met.

‘I was born in a concentration camp.’

The best bit was the steady gaze he received, tinged with confusion, as the woman he was talking to recalibrated what little she knew of him, this tall young man with brown but not-dark skin and thick but straight black hair, who looked definitively un-Dutch but not definitively anything else.

Once, but only once, one of them said it out loud, sceptically, ‘You don’t look Jewish.’

Was it Alida who had said that? No, Alida came later. Alida came after ’65. Alida was the one who looked for the scars on his back: the scars that weren’t there.

Once, in a bar on Gravenstraat, a pale freckled woman with large breasts but unfortunate teeth came up to him while he was sitting on a high stool and stood next to him, waiting to be served. He wasn’t really out for the night, just having a beer after work, making the same one last until he was ready to go: Frankenmuth, brewed for modern American tastes. She stood a little closer than was necessary, considering the bar wasn’t all that crowded, she staggered a little — she was quite drunk, he thought — and put her hand on his thigh to steady herself, before saying, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ and then snatching the hand away, as if his thigh was hot.

The bartender came up to them and rested his wrists on the bar, looking at them expectantly, and the woman said, ‘Oh, it’s me now, thank you darling. Can you do a Pink Squirrel? Two of them.’ She held her fingers up in a V-for-victory sign.

The bartender looked at them with such disdain that Harper wanted to say, please, the second one isn’t for me.

‘Oh, okay,’ she said then. ‘Two Old-fashioneds.’ She looked at Harper. ‘My friend’s in the corner there. She’s really nice.’

They made small talk while the bartender mixed the drinks. Behind the rows of bottles on the wooden shelves, there was a mirrored surface that reflected the jewelled golds and browns and oranges of the various liquors. When he moved his head, he could glimpse different shards of their reflections; her hairline, an eye or ear, his nose. She turned her back to the bar, placing both elbows on it, and surveyed the room as if they were spies, before talking from the side of her mouth.

‘I’ve never met a neger before,’ she said. ‘Me and my friend are going to a party later, want to come along, meet my friends? They’re really nice people, they’d be interested to meet you.’

Up until that point, he had been giving it some serious thought. ‘Thanks,’ he said, picking up the change he had left on the bar and pocketing it. ‘But I’ve already met more than enough white people.’

*

‘Choose an Anglo name,’ his trainer at the Institute had told him, as they sat with clipboards in the meeting room and worked their way through the details of his new identity for travel purposes. ‘Something that’s easy for anyone to understand, something nice and neutral. Not Smith, for heaven’s sake. Barnhardt actually chose Smith.’

Nicolaas Den Herder, born on the island of Sulawesi in the Dutch East Indies, to a white Dutch mother and an Indo officer in the Dutch Colonial Army, had already changed his surname to Luther, then to Aaltink, then back to Den Herder.

He thought about it.

‘Favourite film star? Childhood pet?’ the trainer said helpfully.

‘My mind’s gone blank.’ How was it possible to name yourself?

The trainer sighed, lifted a sheet of paper on his clipboard, looked down and said, ‘Walton, Fullerton, Jamieson, Johnson, Harper, Headley. .’

‘Harper,’ he said to his trainer. Then, firmly, as if he had just put on a pair of shoes that fitted well, ‘John Harper.’

Once his probationary year was over and he had Stage One security clearance, he was based in Amsterdam at the Institute’s head office. His training was twofold; the training for what he would tell people he did for a living and the training for what he would really do. Officially, John Harper was a researcher for the Institute of International Economics, Amsterdam. His job was to read the newspapers and make economic forecasts and write reports. The international companies that retained the Institute then used those reports to decide upon the wisdom of sending in staff or building factories or digging holes in whichever particular country they were interested in.

Unofficially, there were the games. Maybe that was why he got into his line of work. Maybe that was why anyone got into it, because they liked playing games: well, that was why men did it, he presumed. Women didn’t seem all that bothered about playing games, let alone winning them. It was the watching — yes, that was it. Maybe women just weren’t voyeurs: too used to being the observed rather than the observer.

During this secondary induction period, his trainer told him to go and sit in a doctor’s waiting room and stay there until he had worked out what was wrong with every single patient.

‘Why?’ Harper had asked. ‘And how will you know if I’m right?’

‘That’s not the point of the exercise,’ his trainer had sighed. ‘The point of the exercise is to get you used to looking at people and working out what their story is. I don’t want to know whether you are right or not. I want you to come back and tell me how you came to your conclusions.’

In years to come, when his line of work turned into big business — it really took off in the eighties — there would be whole manuals on this stuff, training weekends, presentations on whiteboards with handouts in folders to take away and read at your leisure; graphs, statistics. Back then, in the sixties, the people who trained you more or less made it up as they went along: a little amateur psychology mixed with a whole bucket of intuition. Maybe it was easier, back then, when it was clear who the enemy was — and it was very clear.

Despite what was going on in Saigon, Harper’s department, the Asia Department, wasn’t really where it was at in 1964 — President Johnson wasn’t listening to de Gaulle, so what was new there? No, the best people were all in the Soviet Section, a whole separate unit staffed by people who had Russian or Eastern Bloc language skills: bunch of comedians they became round the office, once the guy with the eyebrows took over in Moscow, those Groucho jokes wore thin pretty fast. Other than that, there were certain countries that were hot for a while for one reason or another; the small South American desk got very excited about the coup in Brazil. There was Panama, Zanzibar, Cuba of course. The focus tended to change emphasis according to the State Department’s priorities. Even though the Institute was independent and nominally Dutch, the Americans were their most important clients — nearly three quarters of the contracts were coming from them. Company offices were going to open up in Los Angeles and New York as a result and they were already in partnership with a West Coast firm like theirs — later, there would be a merger. Harper was one of the operatives who applied for transfer there but the jobs all went to people with experience in the Soviet Section.

Everybody wanted to be in America if they could, not Europe with its old, cold, bombed-out cities, their cheap concrete buildings flung up like dentures in a ruined mouth. There was going to be this big new skyscraper in New York, the world’s tallest building it would be. They’d been arguing about it over there for years but now it was going to be designed by some Japanese guy — how ironic was that. Harper had a debate about it with Joosten who said that the guy wasn’t a Jap, he was just an American with a Jap name, and Harper said he didn’t care, he thought maybe the guys who gave him the job had memories that were pretty short, like, er, Pearl Harbor, a load of aeroplanes came out of the sky one sunny day without warning, remember? He didn’t really mean it and Joosten knew he didn’t, being anti-Japanese was something he made a show of to remind his colleagues that not all brown guys were the same. It was just something to say while they sat in a bar after work. A moment later they were arguing about whether the A-11 would burn to a crisp at seventy thousand feet.

One day, Harper’s boss Gregor came to the door of his office and leaned casually against the doorpost, arms folded. Harper had his head bent over his desk but the moment he became aware of a figure blocking the light, he knew who it was. Gregor never announced himself with a ‘good morning’ or a ‘hi’. He announced himself with silence.

Harper’s head was down over a list of figures. He was muttering the figures out loud and twirling ticks and crosses on the list with a pencil, so he had a small but satisfying excuse to take a moment or two before he looked up. While he took advantage of that moment, Gregor waited. Gregor continued to wait when Harper lifted his head. Gregor met Harper’s gaze and waited long enough for their mutual stare to become odd, expectant.

Gregor dropped his gaze, lifted it again, pushed his glasses further up his nose and sniffed — only then did he say to Harper, ‘Got a minute?’

Harper sat back in his chair to indicate that he had. He did not put the pencil down.

Gregor used his weight to lever himself upright from the doorframe, looked behind him at the open-plan office, quiet but for the discordant clacking of several typewriters at different distances from where he stood, and only at that point did he uncross his arms, take a step into Harper’s office and close the door behind him.

‘It’s raining,’ Gregor said, lifting an arm to indicate the view from Harper’s office window, which included the brown water of the canal and the blank brick wall of a warehouse building that dropped straight into the water. Harper liked the fact that there were no other windows looking into his office. The rain was invisible against the brick but when he looked at the brown canal he saw tiny pits on its surface, disappearing and reappearing in a pattern.

‘So, our Asia Department.’ It was a statement rather than a question so Harper remained silent.

‘Well,’ said Gregor with a sigh, as if Harper was being particularly truculent that afternoon. ‘We need someone on the ground. Jakarta, land of your birth, it was Jakarta, wasn’t it? Six months, a year maybe, maybe longer.’

‘Long time.’

‘He speaks! The enigmatic one speaks!’

Harper did not return Gregor’s smile. ‘Have they asked for me?’

‘I’m asking for you.’

He frowned, leaned forward, dropped his pencil on his desk. ‘Why me?’

Gregor actually shrugged. ‘Look, it’s up to you. I know it’s a big deal, it would be your first big job and you’ll need Stage Three clearance, and some physicals. To be honest, seeing how new you are I’m not sure but you know the region.’ He sniffed and rubbed at the side of his nose with one extended finger. ‘It’s your background rather than experience.’

‘Joosten knows the region better than me. He’s been.’

‘This one isn’t for Joosten. This one needs the time to develop contacts on the ground and we need to send someone as soon as possible, now the guy in the black hat has pulled them out of the UN. You’ll be taking a crate on delivery so instead of an aeroplane through Karachi, you get to go on a cruise, pretty good I would think, lots of deckchair time to do your homework. . and,’ this next point a concession to the obvious, ‘Joosten can’t pass for a local if he has to. Things are getting a little hot for us palefaces out there.’

‘Why not use the local operatives?’

‘Client doesn’t trust them, wants someone we’re sure of here, who we can move swiftly to another island as soon as job done, but it also has to be someone who can do the local thing, which, my friend, narrows it down to you. Pronto.’

Gregor watches too many movies, Harper thought. ‘Why the hurry?’

‘I can’t tell you until you’ve said yes.’

He’d been waiting for an overseas assignment ever since he joined the Institute. He had always been curious to visit the country where he spent his first three years, even though, especially though, he had no memory of those years and only his mother’s dubious stories to go on. True, it was something of a backwater, but that would give him more autonomy too.

Gregor was waiting. His patience irritated Harper so much that he was on the verge of saying he wasn’t sure he was ready and didn’t want to be told any more details, just to be difficult, but then Gregor lifted both hands, splaying his fingers in an okay, hands up motion, as if Harper had opened a drawer of his desk and extracted a pistol. ‘Look, there will be bonuses involved. Quite a few of them, in fact. And an opportunity to move sideways, which is presumably what you’ve been waiting for. It’s what all you new young guys want, isn’t it?’

‘Sideways in which direction?’

‘You don’t look all that happy behind a desk.’

Did anyone look happy behind a desk?

The following week, Gregor summoned him to his office and introduced him to a middle-aged American who called himself Johnson. Johnson had dull, pitted skin on his cheeks, the remnant of some childhood disease, and a very bald, very shiny head — it was adulthood that had done that bit. He kept running a hand over his shiny head while he spoke, as if he liked to keep it polished that way.

After things were agreed, Harper shook hands with both men and Johnson said, ‘Gregor here speaks very highly of you. I must admit I was a little concerned you were inexperienced, on paper, I mean, but now I’ve met you I can see why he does.’

Now you’ve seen my skin, Harper thought.

Gregor intervened. ‘I told him you got the Cadet Lion Honourable Mention in your year. And you scored ninety-eight per cent on our induction programme. There’s a few physicals but that won’t take long.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Harper replied.

Later that day, Gregor said, ‘I also told him you spoke all the languages out there. You can get up to speed, can’t you, once you’re on the ground? It’s not going to take you that long to pass.’ He wondered if the Malay he had learned as a child might help with his Indonesian, whether it was buried there somewhere. He was quick at languages, he’d get conversational faster than most, but the sort of fluency Gregor was talking about took years — and Javanese was another thing altogether. Javanese was fiendish. Gregor’s optimism about Harper’s language skills was based on no more than his own colossal ignorance. He pulled a face to indicate it wasn’t that simple and Gregor said, ‘Oh c’mon, you half-castes have a real facility for languages, you’re gifted at it, you guys, you’ll be fluent within weeks, accent and everything.’

Harper felt the drip, drip, drip of all the remarks they made around the office, about how good his sun tan was, how much he must like spicy food. Such remarks were always phrased as compliments. He had been permanently resident in Holland since the age of twelve but people often remarked on the flawlessness of his Dutch.

*

His pain threshold was fairly high but he had a secret weakness: a great and pressing fear of any situation where breathing might be difficult. It wasn’t the same as claustrophobia: lifts and cars were fine. If the situation demanded it, he could have happily spent hours hiding in a wardrobe as long as there were holes in it — but suffocating, drowning, these were the fates he dreaded. It was the totality of them, he sometimes thought. Pain belonged to the location where the pain was situated — a broken arm was a broken arm, however agonising. Even a stomach ache or backache, those most internal of pains, could be ring-fenced from the rest of your body, your consciousness, if only you were strong enough: but being unable to breathe, for whatever reason, was a state that possessed the whole of you.

So when the hood came down over his head, he panicked, sucking in a great breath that pulled the rough fabric into his mouth. The two men holding either arm threw him to the ground and he landed on his back with a thump that made his head snap backwards and expelled what little breath there was left in his lungs out into the hood — he sucked in again, more violently this time. As he rolled to one side, he forced himself to do an inventory: whiplash, perhaps, some bruising to his back no doubt. No broken coccyx at least — he would have felt that immediately. He tucked his chin down and braced himself, expecting one or both of the men to kick him now he was on the floor: with his hands tied behind his back he couldn’t roll into a ball — his head was very vulnerable. But it wasn’t that that was worrying him most, it was his breathing. He had a moment to observe his own efficiency in noting this.

Instead of laying into him, the men left the room. At least, he thought they had left — there were the sounds of their feet scuffing on the dirt floor, the slam of the door.

He lay very still but his own breath was ragged against the cloth and too harsh for him to listen to the room. He was still hyperventilating and each time he did, he sucked the hood back into his mouth, shortening the breath and making him hyperventilate more. It came to him that if he did not control his breathing, then without the men doing anything more, the end would be suffocation. That was what happened. You shortened your own breath millilitre by millilitre, a bit like someone with a rope around their neck struggling so much they pulled the noose tight. Would they use the water trick? He had heard stories of people choking on their own vomit when they did that.

It would be really stupid to suffocate himself when they weren’t even trying to kill him. He lay trying to steady his lungs, interrogating the pain in his shoulders where his arms were pulled back. He found that if he rolled his shoulders back in tiny movements, like a minute version of a limbering-up exercise, it eased the pain.

He managed to slow his breathing a little, but only a little. Each time he inhaled, he still sucked the cloth into his mouth, like a tiny billowing sail, shortening the breath that followed. When he exhaled, he blew the cloth back out with more force than was wise, filling the interior of the hood with his own CO₂. I must stop this.

The door opened again, slammed back against the wall. The light in the room changed — he could tell through the hood. Sounds were muffled but he felt sure that several men had entered the room. A pair of hands scrabbled against his neck and the drawstring around the bottom of the hood. For a moment he thought, if they aren’t careful, they’ll asphyxiate me instead of getting me free. The string pulled against his windpipe, released, and the hood was yanked away. As his eyes adjusted he caught the blurred form of a figure in front of him and then another two against a wall, more distant, to one side, but before he had time to configure what he was seeing a hand grabbed a handful of his hair and shook his head from side to side and Joosten’s round face was in his and his voice was booming in his ears, ‘Wakey wakey Nic old man, you’ve passed!’

‘Fuck you, Joosten,’ Harper gasped, his breath still painfully laboured in his chest, ‘fuck you.’

The two trainers, leaning back against the wall of the cell with their arms folded, burst into appreciative laughter; Joosten clapped him on the shoulder; and for a moment or two, as the breath that heaved in his throat still felt as heavy as sand and his chest pressed painfully inwards, it occurred to Harper that when he got out in the field, it would not, after all, be one big game.

There was a pleasing symmetry to his arriving in Jakarta by ship. He had left on a long sea journey at the age of three from this very port, perhaps even this very jetty, and here he was, returning the same way, nearly two decades later. Last time he had stood on this spot he was an undersized boy, head shaved to keep the lice at bay. Now, he was a man. He had done his national service; he had — as Gregor had pointed out to Johnson — received the Cadet Lion Honourable Mention in his group; he was fit and trained.

He imagined his younger self, big-eyed and malnourished, a refugee child clinging to his mother’s skirts, looking up at his grown self in awe. I’m back, he thought, as he stood on the dock long after the other passengers had disembarked, waiting for the crate he was accompanying to be unloaded, looking around at the vast sheds and the gangs of shirtless men, a foreman yelling at them in a high-pitched voice. The jetty he was standing on was for deep-sea ships, the passenger liners, and his boat was the only arrival in port at present, but stretching far in the distance, to his right, was the long strip of docking bays for the smaller freight boats, old wooden things, hardly seaworthy they looked, with peeling paintwork on their high bows. These were the boats that would sail to and from Sumatra, Borneo, the smaller islands perhaps, carrying everything from cement powder to coconut husks for animal feed, coffee, spices. He could get on one of those freight vessels and be almost anywhere, nowhere as far as anyone else was concerned. What a fine thought. The further you travelled, the more you faded from view, until nobody knew where you were or if you even existed. Were it not for the seriousness of his mission, he would be tempted to stroll down to one of those boats now, deserting his crate and his tin trunk full of research, shedding everything Dutch or American about himself, bribe the captain with cash, stow away — and disappear.

The port was undergoing expansion; skeletons of new sheds were ranged in different stages of construction and beneath the mechanical chunter of boat engines and the shouts of men was the grind and spin of machinery at work: a cumulative noise that made the port seem like a living thing, a monster needing to be fed. A row of open trucks loaded with sandbags and coils of rope lined the edge of the concrete jetty to his left — parked perilously close to the water, he thought. As he watched, a man standing on top of the bags raised a hand in which there was the steel question mark of a hook. He jabbed the hook into one of the bags then pulled, slitting the bag open. Sand ran out in a torrent, down the side of the truck and into a wheelbarrow held by another man waiting below. Indonesia: always a work in progress — he had followed the recent history of the land of his birth enough to know that. But now what? Where was that progress heading now the great Bung Karno was drifting ever closer to Peking?

He had bought a packet of kreteks on board ship and he paused to light one now, ceremoniously — he had made himself wait until he was standing on Javanese soil. It wasn’t much to mark his return but it was small and private, which suited him just fine: the only other person who would appreciate the significance of this arrival was his mother and she didn’t know where he was, only that he had left Amsterdam ‘on another one of your stupid trips’, as she called them. Lately, she had taken to accusing him of not being abroad at all, just avoiding her. ‘When are you going to find a nice girl and settle down? What’s wrong with you? I’d been married twice by your age.’ That wasn’t strictly accurate but then Anika rarely was.

He flicked the match away, inhaled deeply on the cigarette, blew out, then flapped his hand at the young man who had darted forward from the crowd in the hope of picking up his tin trunk or one of the cases that sat on top of it. ‘Tidak, tidak. .’ he said, then added, ‘Terima kasih, tak usah. .’ He passed his tongue over his lips — the sweet taste of cloves; the kretek was a honeyed hint of delirium, temporary and addictive. The ground beneath his feet felt pliant after three weeks at sea.

He was being met by a driver — the local office had organised it. The ship had docked early but it would take some time for him to locate his crate once the ship had been emptied. The driver would be late. There was no hurry. Above him, to the right, some of the crates from the cargo hold were already swinging on ropes, the men waiting below, the foreman shouting.

The Institute’s operations were in their infancy here: there was no physical office, just two local staff who both operated from their homes and they were out of town in Central Java, assessing the situation there. There would be no briefing for a while and even afterwards, he would be running his own operation, more or less, under Johnson’s instruction. The local staff were there to help with his language skills and advise on customs and etiquette, they weren’t trained men. There would be a chance to orientate himself, walk around, get used to the humidity, practise his Indonesian in shops and restaurants in districts of the city away from the ones where he would be working — and to buy more kreteks. Gregor may have been over-optimistic about his language skills but soon he would be smoking just like a local.

His instructions were to go with the driver to an area north of Glodok. The driver would know where to go, which street to wait in. Afterwards, he would be taken to a guesthouse in the Menteng district — but first he had to hand over the crate to the Americans. As they drove, a light rain began to fall, misting row after row of low-rise buildings, the warehouses giving way to long strips of open-fronted shops. Harper glanced at the driver from time to time, a silent man with a small, triangular face. More than just a driver, he guessed. He tried a little of his Indonesian on him but the man spoke so quickly and briefly in reply that he couldn’t catch what he was saying.

The main roads were broad in Old Jakarta but behind them were multiple smaller roads and alleyways — although he’d been told to take a walk through the kampong if he wanted to understand the meaning of the word narrow. Most of Jakarta was kampong, Joosten had said, vast shanty towns of slums, divided and subdivided, with streets so small, so densely lined with open shacks that you walked through people’s living rooms as you strolled along. At the height of the dry monsoon, in August, a load of them would burn down. Then they sprang up again. And later, when the weather broke and the wet monsoon rolled in, they would be flooded. Fire and water: the alternate hazards of Jakarta.

They parked in a road behind Kota railway station. There, they waited in silence. Harper offered the driver a kretek and he took one with a terse nod. Eventually, another car pulled up behind and a white man around Harper’s age got out with two Indonesian men. Harper saw them emerge in the rear-view mirror and opened his door. By the time he had climbed out, the white man was standing there, extending a hand. ‘I’m Michael, welcome to Jakarta.’ He had an American accent and a short crowbar leaning at a diagonal out of his jacket pocket.

‘John.’ They shook hands.

Michael turned to where the other men were already lifting the crate out of the boot of Harper’s car. It was heavy — they both carried it, two-handed and shuffling, to the boot of the American’s car and placed it inside. Harper waited while the American went round to the rear of the car, gestured for the men to get back in, then bent his head into the boot. There was a crack and a splintering sound as he prised the crate open. He stayed bent into the boot for a few moments, counting, perhaps, moving straw aside? M1 Garands? The Heckler & Koch? Or it could be ammo, more likely with a small delivery — or something specialist, perhaps. After a moment, Michael straightened, lifted his hand to Harper in salute.

First job done. That was pretty easy. Harper got into the passenger seat of his car.

‘Guesthouse now, sir?’ asked his driver, cracking a smile for the first time.

Harper nodded. ‘Guesthouse now.’

For the next few months, he acclimatised. He got used to the blanket of heat that lay over the city at all times of the day and night, the way the closeness of the air made him feel a little nauseous first thing in the morning. He toured the city on a moped, weaving in and out of the traffic on the wide superhighways that carved their way through the shanty towns like a lawnmower scything grass: the Great Leader Soekarno was on a massive building programme, to prove to the world that Jakarta was a modern city, the Paris of the East. He wrote reports for Johnson and Amsterdam on the grip the PKI was exerting in certain districts: anti-Western graffiti was everywhere: KILL CAPITALIST SKUM. He befriended Benni the gangster — and saw his first but not last incident of a man being tortured.

As the antagonism towards foreigners in Jakarta grew, more and more of them left the city, particularly the Americans and the Brits, and he began to understand why Gregor had chosen him. He bought his clothes at a store next to the guesthouse and let his hair grow for a bit then went to a barber on Jalan Gondangdia who cut it like the local men’s — he had arrived with it too short and neat around his ears, he realised. He worked on his language skills and his mannerisms. When he wasn’t hanging out with Benni’s gang, he took to wandering the streets in a white shirt and sarong. Sometimes, he would spend time squatting by the road alongside other men with mopeds but nothing to do because petrol was so scarce. He joined a couple of demonstrations where he wore a red bandana and shouted slogans but his instructions were clear: observe, join in a bit but don’t get actively involved. Only once did he overstep the mark, caught up in the excitement of one march, when he observed an Australian television crew filming the gang he was with. As they passed, he shook his fist at them and shouted, ‘Lackeys of the British!’ and the young men either side of him took up the shout. The film crew followed them for a few minutes, until two of the young men in Harper’s group detached themselves and went up to the Australians and started shoving them backwards. Harper kept going but glanced back: it was frustrating, always being on the fringe of the action.

At other times, he dressed in his beige slacks and a shirt, combed his hair with pomade and pressed a panama on top and went hanging out in the bars frequented by the foreign press. Once, he even encountered a man he was sure had been amongst the Australian television crew — but with Harper in Western clothes and speaking immaculate English, there was no flicker of recognition from the Australian, to whom all Indonesian protestors no doubt looked the same. The man was called Gibson and they got drunk together on Tjap Tikus, high-end arak, round a small table in a side-street bar off Jalan Thamrin.

‘Soekarno’s started eating his own,’ Gibson confided. ‘You know lots of the ministers have taken to sleeping away from their homes at night? The Father of the Nation’s getting careless. When you start making your own people that nervous, you know. .’ He made a short stabbing notion at Harper’s ribs.

Later, after Harper had moved on to fruit juice but Gibson had stayed on the arak, the Australian became loquacious. ‘Indonesia isn’t a nation, it’s an imagination,’ he said, then looked around, pleased with himself. ‘S’karno made it up! Made it up, the speeches, and, take it from me, when they push’m out, the whole lot will just evaporate. . like a dream. .’ At this, Gibson splayed his fingers and moved his hand in a semi-circular motion in front of Harper’s face. ‘S’all going to fall apart. Easy to sneer at him, in his hat, with his girlfriends, but you look at what will happen if he goes. Jus’ wait. Holds it all together.’ He clenched his fist.

Harper made a note of the man’s sympathies — perhaps the Americans should look into him — and could not resist adding, ‘Well, maybe we should wait and see what happens if this region becomes the next Communist bloc. I wonder what the Indonesian for gulag is.’

The bar was dark, the fan above them inefficient, the crowd large even though a lot of Westerners had left: there were so few places in the city where Westerners felt comfortable any more, they had a tendency to congregate. Gibson withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. ‘God knows why they call it the Cold War, it’s fucking hot in Jakarta.’ And Harper rewarded him with a clap on the shoulder and a convincing laugh.

Then came the abrupt command from Johnson: forget the gangsters. Four months of careful, nauseating and sometimes dangerous sucking up to Benni and it was all down the drain.

‘Why?’ Harper asked. He and Johnson were in the same bar where he had drunk Gibson beneath a table, but this time it was daytime and they were sipping green tea. The curfew had made nighttime excursions increasingly difficult, the journalists all stuck to the hotel bar now, and the power shortages meant many places closed at night anyway. The Merdeka Day celebrations had been and gone and Soekarno had declared a new stage in the revolution, which for most people meant that the rice shortages had reached epidemic proportions. No one was paid in rupiah any more, there was no point: people were demanding to be paid in rice and there wasn’t enough rice to pay them. Some were simply marching into stores in mobs and helping themselves.

They were sitting at the front, by the windows, where the shutters were pulled back and Johnson’s car was parked on the kerb. Harper had noticed that Johnson never went anywhere on foot any more — he was always in a car with a couple of minders in it. The People’s Youth had taken to beating up foreigners.

Johnson was in his usual taciturn mood, sipping carefully at his tea, glancing out of the window from time to time. ‘Things are moving fast,’ he said. ‘We need to speed things up a bit.’

Johnson insisted that Harper move into Hotel Indonesia, which was full of foreign journalists like Gibson and the businessmen who were prepared to overlook the rising political tensions while Jakarta was an opportunity: Soekarno was still building freeways, after all. ‘We can’t guarantee your safety if you stay in that guesthouse,’ Johnson told Harper and Harper wanted to reply, when have you ever guaranteed my safety? Johnson would stay concerned for his well-being right up until the point when he was compromised in any way, upon which he would deny that he or any other American official had ever met or known him. Surely the visibility of being in a place like Hotel Indonesia, full of foreigners, constantly spied upon, had its own dangers?

And so, he changed identity again. He folded his sarong neatly and put it away and checked into the hotel wearing slacks and his panama, carrying a newspaper, walking with his shoulders thrown back.

‘Welcome to Hotel Indonesia, sir,’ said the doorman, with a deep bow.

He acknowledged the courtesy by touching his newspaper to the side of his forehead and toyed with the idea of saying, ‘Ciao.’ Maybe he should learn some Italian. He’d passed for Italian before now. He knew Jews, Arabs and Asians who had pretended to be Italian. Everyone liked Italians — the food was great, the women beautiful, and they were hopeless at invading other countries.

He disliked being in a smart hotel, which almost certainly had eavesdroppers on the end of the telephone lines and apparatchiks of the government security services amongst the staff. Okay, so the air conditioning and comfortable bed were good but from a professional point of view, he felt too exposed to do his job. He couldn’t operate underground now — there could be no more strolling the streets in a sarong. He began to wonder if Johnson had parked him here in such a stupidly expensive place because he had decided he didn’t really have any use for him. Not for the first time, he wondered how much operations like this cost, and how the American taxpayers who funded CIA guys like Johnson would feel about it if they knew.

Then came the night Harper went down to the lobby and found that the doorman standing on the inside did not, for once, open the door wide onto the hotel driveway with a smile and a deep bow. He stood still and straight, with his arms folded and a serious expression on his face.

The assistant general manager was standing next to him with a smile. He stepped forward as Harper approached and said, ‘Good evening, sir, perhaps you would like to avail yourself of the dining room or the club lounge this evening?’ He indicated across the lobby with his arm wide.

‘Is there anything wrong?’ Harper asked, looking out onto the driveway, where sleek cars were still pulling in and disgorging smiling passengers for the nightclub on the top floor. The streets looked normal to him.

‘No, not at all,’ the assistant general manager replied quickly, still smiling. ‘Shall we obtain you a taxi?’

It was nothing he could put his finger on, just a feeling. ‘No, thank you,’ he said.

Back in his room, he rotated the dial on the bedside radio receiver but only got the hotel’s piped music or a blur of white noise. The white noise was odd. Soekarno’s speeches were usually broadcast more or less continuously and there had been one at Senayan Stadium earlier that evening. He turned the radio off and went to the window. The huge round pond that filled the centre of the roundabout outside the hotel was in darkness, the floodlights dimmed. A few lone cars were circling it. It was as if the city was holding its breath.

In the morning, he woke to the same sensation. He went and looked out of the window. The roundabout was quiet. Normally, by this time, you would hear the stirrings of hotel staff outside in the corridor; was he imagining it or was the corridor quiet as well? After months of almost daily demonstrations, there seemed a strange absence — that crackle in the air, was it gone? Perhaps he was just tired of waiting. Nothing was more exhausting than doing nothing, after all.

The only place to find out more was the bar.

The journalists were all drinking and eating bowls of nuts for breakfast. That was when he knew. Those who monitored Radio Republik Indonesia had heard the announcement of the Communist takeover when they rose. Most of the hacks were there, apart from those who were still asleep: there was a rumour that a New Zealand correspondent known for his lunatic risk-taking in pursuit of a story had set off for Merdeka Square, where soldiers were already setting up roadblocks around the presidential palace.

He ordered a drink himself and sat on a bar stool next to a group of Australians. ‘This is it boys, I tell you,’ one was saying, ‘the Commies are taking power and we might as well get drunk because it’s bullets in the back of the head before sunset.’

‘Let’s wait and see,’ drawled one of the others, while lifting his glass.

There was a note of hysteria amongst the hacks, Harper thought — a hysteria he did not share. After a while, he went upstairs and smoked ferociously while waiting for the phone to ring with his instructions. It didn’t.

Within three days, the same journalists from that morning were in the bar celebrating. The Communist takeover had been defeated. The military were back in power. Two days later, the Generals who had been killed by the Communists during the attempted coup, or putsch, or whatever it was, were being buried with all due pomp and ceremony at Kalibata Heroes Cemetery.

Still no word from Johnson.

That afternoon, he decided to see if he could get an international line: they had been closed for some days but it was worth trying intermittently. More than once, one of the hacks had wandered into the bar crowing about his success in getting through and started an exit stampede, only for everyone to return disconsolate because the connections were down again.

Harper tried the phone in the lobby rather than the one in his room, although it was probably also bugged. There would be a low-ceilinged basement somewhere beneath the hotel, rows of desks staffed by young men with neatly combed hair and headphones pressed to one ear and a pencil in the other hand. However often the regime changed, the same staff would be there, still taking notes. The junior apparatus of government always stayed the same, at least for a while: the notes might be delivered to a different boss, that was all. Small cogs still turned even though the big wheel above them was slowing, halting, then — without ever being entirely motionless it seemed — beginning to grind in a different direction.

‘Sit tight,’ said the operative who manned the Institute’s phone — this was long before the days of the twenty-four-hour hotline and computerised information: the operative back home would be sitting at a desk with a list of handwritten instructions to pass on if Harper called in. ‘When the situation has stabilised, we will want your analysis of how the economy will recover.’

‘I would welcome the chance to gather more information on that as soon as I can,’ Harper replied.

A few days later, Harper went for a walk around the side streets, just for a few minutes, to taste the air. It was a relief to be out, even briefly, away from the claustrophobic world of the hotel. As he rounded a corner on the way back, he saw a group of young men ripping down a set of handwritten posters from a wall. As they did, he glimpsed a Communist slogan. The young men were tearing the posters into shreds and jumping on them.

What surprised him was not that the young men were ripping down the posters but that the posters had been put up at all — a pointless act of provocation on the part of the PKI, he thought, if anti-Communist feeling was now at boiling point. It didn’t make sense.

Daily, the radio broadcast detailed reports of the terrible things the Communist traitors had done before the brave, loyal army had succeeded in restoring order and saving the nation. After the heroic Generals had been abducted on that night, the wicked Gerwani women had cut off their testicles and danced naked in front of them, to torment them. Women Communists were even worse than the men, it would appear.

Death to the Communist traitors, the newscasters urged.

*

The following week, Johnson finally made contact. They met in a street behind the hotel, walking towards each other for a long time along an uneven sidewalk with the road on one side and a high, fissured wall made of concrete on the other. The wall was defaced with graffiti and torn posters, litter gathered around the base of the palm trees that lined the road and there was an unnatural silence in the cloudy air. Johnson nodded to him as he approached, casually, as if they had seen each other only the day before. As they drew near, they both stopped, facing each other. They folded their arms.

‘Pak Parno,’ Johnson said, looking from side to side as they talked.

‘Who’s he?’

‘You don’t need to know. He’s well connected, that’s all you need to know. Here’s the address.’ He handed Harper a small, folded piece of paper.

Harper opened it: Pejompongan, a street called Jalan Danau Maninjau, not far from the Naval Hospital. Harper knew the area a little, a mosque, a Catholic church, middle-class bungalows: a lot of civil servants lived round there. A naval attaché of some sort, perhaps? The navy had been heavily infiltrated by the Communists, though, and this man was presumably on the side of the military so maybe an army or air force connection more likely?

‘Go and see him this afternoon, visiting hour, get a feel for him and let him get a feel for you. If it goes okay, you’ll deliver a list of names to a general who will be at his house some time next week.’

‘What’s the point of this visit?’

‘Nothing, it’s a social call, oil the wheels, you know how people here are. Buddy up to him a bit. Act like you’re honoured to meet him.’

The street was empty. It seemed to be making Johnson nervous. On the other side of the road, there was a parked car with his minders in it, but he glanced around as he talked. Then he looked at his watch, said, ‘Be there five pm,’ and turned away.

Later that day, Harper got a betjak from outside the hotel. He leaned forward with his forearms resting on the bar in front of him as the driver began to pedal.

‘Pejompongan long place, sir,’ the driver said over his shoulder. He was an older man, wrinkled face, thinning hair, still out plying his trade, despite what was going on — if you didn’t ply your trade, you didn’t eat. Most of the betjak drivers were young men but this one had an air of being both aged and ageless.

‘Just head that way, I’ll tell you where to stop,’ Harper said. He never told the betjak driver the exact address.

It was the densest, hottest part of the day; the air close, the sky hazy. The betjak driver had large bony knees that seemed disproportionate to his skinny legs: as he pedalled, they rose up and down alternately, like shiny balls in an arcade. Harper felt exhausted just sitting there. That man must be three times my age and half my weight, he thought, but look at him. Darkness wouldn’t fall for hours, yet it already felt as if the buildings and the ground were exhaling the heat they had been absorbing all day. Even the swift pedalling of the driver couldn’t rustle up a breeze.

With the streets still quiet, the journey was a lot quicker than he had anticipated. He got the driver to drop him by the river and decided to take a look around, get a feel for the area. The water was high, the colour of milky coffee; a few pieces of refuse floated in it. The monsoon season was upon them and the rain was getting heavier every day now. This river would flood soon, as most of the rivers in Jakarta did, the colonial drainage systems having long fallen into disrepair.

He hadn’t been into a kampong since the coup and counter-coup. He crossed the rise of a precarious bridge made of bamboo and old planks, towards the slum where tumbledown shacks lined the bank, overhanging the water in places as if they might fall in at any minute. The cement wall of the river was broken in one place and a soil bank led down to the water, where women were washing clothes. Laundry was strung up everywhere around the shacks: an inside-out way of living, he always thought, in these tiny little houses, everything done communally — privacy just one in a long list of things denied the poor.

He strolled round a few squares of the kampong, nodding to the women sitting on steps with their children. In between the shacks and the dirt paths were small ditches intended to forestall the floodwater, with concrete slabs to allow people to cross into the shacks. The ditches were only half full now but as the daily downpours increased in intensity, the inhabitants would be first ankle-deep, then knee-deep in the brown water. A few people stared back at him, mildly, without hostility. Despite the city in ferment — the tortured Generals, the fear, the persistent tension in Merdeka Square and on the wide boulevards of central Jakarta, there seemed to be no changed atmosphere here. No one rose from a doorstep and went inside at his approach; people nodded and smiled.

A coup only happened to the people it happened to, that was what struck him then: that was what the likes of Johnson forgot. The grand events were Johnson’s whole world, and his, to a certain extent, and yet to the people here, those events were a mere backdrop against the perpetual problem of where to find rice that day, how to pay for it, where to put your belongings when the river rose.

At the end of his circuit, on his way back to the bridge, he came across a group of elderly people, milky-eyed and skeletal, who stretched out their hands but were either too weak to mutter entreaties or too pessimistic to think him worth the effort. He brushed past them. A man like him giving out coins would be the talk of the kampong. At the sound of calling and chattering behind him, he glanced back to see he had acquired a posse of small boys, jumping and smiling. He smiled back, shook his head. They followed him, nonetheless, until he reached the bridge. As he mounted it, he looked behind to see that they had stopped on the kampong side, as if the river was an invisible wall that they could not pass through, although they carried on jumping and smiling and calling.

On the other side of the bridge he was immediately in the area of middle-class bungalows where this Parno man lived. He was hot and thirsty now, regretting his walk around. He hoped Parno would serve something cold.

Only two minutes from the river, the streets were quiet. The bungalows were long and low with the same terracotta-tiled roof running the length of the blok. Parno’s building was at the end, tucked into a corner. As he approached it, he could hear the distant, hypnotic gongs of gamelan, fading — it was a sound that filled him with a strange calm. He must have heard it as a child, he thought. This had been a quirk of his few months on Java: new sights, new sounds, new smells, but so many of them tugged at something in him, some unconscious memory, or maybe he just felt as though they should.

As he pushed through a little wrought-iron gate and stepped into the courtyard, the door swung open. A young man in a beige shirt, a civil service clerk, possibly, stood behind it, head bowed. As Harper stepped over the threshold, the young man held out his hand for his hat.

He handed the young man the panama he wore when he wasn’t trying to ‘pass’, as Gregor would have put it, and turned to see that behind the door was a stuffed tiger fastened to a wooden plinth, a whole tiger, somewhat battered, in an unnatural position, sitting up with its teeth bared and glass eyes staring in the way that only glass eyes can, motionless but somehow not entirely inanimate.

‘Is there anything more sad than a stuffed tiger?’

Harper turned to see a light-skinned mixed-race woman in a Western cocktail dress, oiled black hair drawn back from carved features and gold drop earrings hanging from her earlobes.

‘All that power, now just sand inside,’ she said, and turned away from him. He followed her into the room to their left. As they entered she turned to him and said, ‘My husband is here,’ then went through a door on the other side of the room.

Pak Parno was seated behind a large desk wearing a batik shirt in purple and gold. He stayed seated as Harper walked towards the desk and gestured at his wife as she left the room. ‘My wife is very beautiful,’ he said casually. Harper watched Parno’s wife as she walked out of the room. From behind, she was as skinny as a garden rake; no arse to her at all. ‘She’s from a good family, too.’

This observation seemed to amuse him and he chuckled to himself, rose and came round to Harper’s side of the desk, extending his hand. He was as rotund as Harper had expected, although not as short. ‘A wife is a great blessing, Mr Harper, although I understand you are as yet unmarried.’ He smiled broadly.

Harper gave a small bow. ‘That is true.’

‘Perhaps you will find a nice Javanese wife.’

Parno gestured to a three-piece suite arranged Western-style. They seated themselves and Parno’s wife returned with a silver tray on which were two heavy crystal glasses and a carafe. When she had placed it on the coffee table, she poured for them both, then turned to the mantelpiece above the fireplace where there was a cigar box.

He knew this routine: whisky, cigars, a little manly talk. Parno was the kind of bureaucrat who prided himself on living a westernised lifestyle but a reasonably modest one — there would be no gold taps in the bathroom. It was his relative modesty that would allow him to do deals to the benefit of friends and relatives. You didn’t hand a man like Parno a briefcase full of cash; he would be insulted. You offered a job opportunity to his nephew. That way, he got to feel munificent, not corrupt. There were always ways of corrupting those who didn’t want to feel corrupt. In many ways, they were the easiest to corrupt of all.

‘So, Mr Harper,’ Parno said as they sipped their drinks. ‘What do you think? If it comes to a fight with Malaysia, what is your view?’ Parno had already done two things: let Harper know he knew some personal information about him and indicated that they would not be discussing recent events in Jakarta. He was sticking to a safe subject. Konfrontasi: the political classes here liked to discuss it in the same way the Brits discussed the weather, as a polite opener.

Harper’s view was that the sabre-rattling across the Malacca Strait would come to nothing. ‘I wouldn’t like to say. .’ he replied politely, raising his hands. ‘The British are famously stubborn. The only thing they really understand is when other people are stubborn to them in return.’

‘That is true, Mr Harper, very true.’

He let Parno lead the conversation but hoped that the point would soon come when he would move things forward, and eventually, Parno leaned towards him and lowered his voice, a little melodramatically Harper thought, and said, ‘So, how soon can your friends provide us with the list?’

He paused. He had learned a thing or two from Gregor. ‘The list is already prepared.’

Parno’s face gave nothing away. ‘How many, Mr Harper?’

‘Eight hundred. Individuals, not families.’ The Americans had been working on the lists of Communists and their sympathisers for years — eventually the names would run to thousands, from the top down. Aiding the provision of such a list would ensure Parno a secure position in the new regime. He imagined that however calm the man’s exterior, he must be quite excited. But then Parno surprised him.

‘And how accurate, do you suppose, is this list?’

Who would think a man like Parno would concern himself with accuracy? Surely it was quantity, not quality, that mattered here.

‘That isn’t my concern,’ Harper replied. Nor yours.

Parno paused. His face became heavy. He was, after all, a man who allowed shadows to cross his heart, Harper thought. Perhaps I have misjudged him.

‘When?’

‘The end of next week.’

‘And who will bring it?’

‘I’ll bring the list myself. But the handover has to be personal, to the General. My employers want an assurance from me about that. I am here today to receive that assurance from you so we can proceed.’

Parno raised his eyebrows very slightly. Officially, Harper had come as supplicant: unofficially, they both knew that the power in this conversation worked the other way around. Harper sensed in Parno a keenness that their transaction should be about more than the practicalities. He was a conviction bureaucrat, it would appear, not just a man on the make.

‘You’re an American. How did you learn Indonesian?’ Parno said.

‘I was born on Sulawesi, in forty-two.’ Harper offered. ‘Spent a bit of time here in Jakarta after the war, then my parents and I emigrated to the US. My father had relatives who sponsored us. Chicago.’

‘Ah, great pity, great misfortune not to be Javanese.’ Parno was chuckling again. The Javanese thought the only island worth being born on was Java: on other islands, the Javanese got blamed for everything. ‘Your parents did well to get out, considering what the Dutch did to us after.’ There was some none-too-subtle point-scoring in this remark: Parno would be wondering why Harper’s parents hadn’t stayed and fought for independence but it would have been risky for Harper to invent a cover story like that. Parno had probably fought himself, been imprisoned. If Harper claimed his parents had too, Parno would want to know all the details of what they had done, where they had done it and with whom.

‘You know how backward Dutch thinking is? A few of them get locked up by the Japanese and afterwards they think that means it’s justified to take our lands all over again. .’ There was genuine hatred in Parno’s tone, as there so often was when Indonesian conversation turned to the Dutch. Harper’s cover story never went near his Dutch roots. He would have had a bullet to the back of the head down some alleyway long before now if it had. Parno tossed back his whisky. ‘They got off pretty lightly.’

Harper wondered if his father felt he was getting off lightly as he was forced to kneel on the dusty ground by a screaming Japanese soldier — or his mother, for that matter, who had been a starving young widow when she gave birth to him in a flooded shack full of cockroaches.

‘But tell me something. .’

If he uses the phrase we are both men of the world, Harper thought to himself, I will get up and leave right now.

‘Tell me, is it true that there are people still out there hunting Nazis, after all these years? There is always something bad happening in the world. And yet there are men hunting down those Germans all over the world twenty years later, is that true? Even in South America, I believe?’

‘I believe so,’ Harper said.

Parno shook his head. ‘The Jews, you can bet they won’t ever forget. Hasn’t it been proved half those stories were made up?’

‘Well,’ said Harper, mildly, ‘the documented evidence is that it was pretty bad.’

A look of scorn crossed Parno’s face. ‘Why is it Westerners think a Jew child being murdered is worse than a child of ours, ha?’ He lifted his fingers and rubbed them together.

Harper looked at Parno’s face, which was a mask of certainty — and then it came to him what this conversation was really about. Parno was thinking of what would happen to the people whose names were on that list, them and their children. That was what was behind all this; the man had a conscience and he, Harper, was supposed to relieve it in order that they should get the deal done. Perhaps he should mention another name to Parno: Stalin. Maybe they could talk about what might happen in the Soviet Bloc now they’d kicked out Khrushchev. Perhaps if they discussed the people trying to scramble over the bloody great wall that had sliced Berlin in half, then Parno wouldn’t feel so bad about handing over a list of Commies to the military. While he was at it, Parno could usefully dwell on what would have happened to him and his family if the Communists had pulled off their coup — whatever his official post, his connections to the Generals would be well known; the army and the civil service were full of PKI informants from top to bottom. It was easy to have moral qualms about people who were going to be arrested when you were on the side that was in power. Such qualms were a luxury allowed only to the winners. If Parno was in a football stadium now, on his knees with his hands tied behind his back, would he be worrying about the health of the youth in the red bandana who had the pistol pressed against his temple? He’d be lucky if a pistol was how they did it.

He felt weary. He hadn’t eaten much that day, it was too sweltering, and the whisky — quite good whisky — was swimming in his head, and he had smoked a cigar even though he didn’t particularly like them. Parno wanted to inveigle him into a discussion that would make himself feel better: he felt like grabbing Parno by the lapels and bringing his face up to his, nose to nose, holding him there and saying, don’t you understand, it’s not my job to make you feel better and it’s not your job to feel bad in the first place? It isn’t our job to think or feel anything. Haven’t you got it?

They talked for a little more, then he began yawning conspicuously. He knew it might cause offence but the afternoon was getting late. He didn’t want to end up here as dusk fell, curfew — the last thing he wanted was to be stuck here for the night.

Parno said, ‘You are welcome to stay, have dinner with us, stay the night.’

‘Regrettably, I must decline. I am expected elsewhere.’

Parno smiled broadly, as if they were old friends. ‘My wife will be disappointed. Say goodbye to her at least,’ he said, clapping him on the shoulder as they rose.

They went out into the hallway: across it was another sitting room. Through the doorway, they could see Parno’s wife, waiting in a chair. Her forearms were resting along the arms of the chair in a pose that he guessed she had adopted when she heard the door to the sitting room open. She looked at them but did not rise. Her gaze was as glassy as that of the tiger. He looked back at her but she showed no sign of recognising him as the man she had greeted just over an hour ago. She opened her mouth, and from her wide, glossy lips, a small but dense cloud of white smoke came, an exhaled haze. Then he saw that between two fingers of her right hand, a hand-rolled cigarette of some sort was resting, drooping a little, the ash at its tip in a perilous downward curve.

Her vulnerability at that moment inspired a brief flush of desire, but he had indicated he wanted to leave and, in any case, needed to report back as soon as possible. He and Parno had arranged a handover. He bowed to her, a little, and turned back to the ornate wooden hallway, where Parno was smiling broadly and pointing at the stuffed tiger, on top of whose head Parno’s wife had rested his slightly battered panama hat.

He took another betjak back and got it to drop him on the other side of the Hotel Indonesia roundabout. The traffic had picked up again and he walked alongside the slow procession of cars wheeling round the roundabout and past the ruined bulk of the British Embassy, now boarded up and deserted, the graffiti on the walls, CRUSH BRITISH IMPERIALISTS, scrawled and faded. He wondered how long it would be before that was scrubbed off and the embassy reopened, now the military were back in power.

In the lobby, two German businessmen were smoking and talking loudly — from their gestures he guessed they were arguing about whether or not it was safe to leave the hotel that evening.

As he walked down the corridor to his room, where, he knew, the air that was waiting for him would taste as though it had been breathed in and out again by a hundred previous occupants, he thought of Parno’s wife and wondered, briefly, if he should try ordering up a working girl, like so many of the journalists and businessmen did. In the bar downstairs, they bragged about which antibiotics they preferred. But then he thought of the glassy, stuffed-tiger look in those girls’ eyes, looks that were undisguised by their toothy smiles and chatter, and what was the point of having something that was handed to you on a plate? The whole point was the chase, wasn’t it? The act was fifteen minutes, tops. Prostitutes were for middle-aged men, fat men, men who couldn’t get a woman any other way. Surely it was demeaning to pay? He’d rather sort himself out: at least you didn’t have to worry about making stilted conversation with the handkerchief.

He could go down to the bar, perhaps, but at this time of the evening it would be rammed with journalists. They had become unbearable recently, full of self-congratulation: they were the right men in the right place at the right time, war heroes for just being in Jakarta even though they had spent the days of the coup stuck in the hotel like Harper and the worst hardship that had befallen them was the temporary failure of the air conditioning. Luckily for them, the hotel had its own generator and things had been fixed in a jiffy. Crisis over. Now it looked like the situation might stabilise here, they were all desperate to get to Vietnam, talked gleamingly of how dangerous it was, as if there weren’t enough danger in Jakarta still, as if the Indonesians being rounded up on the streets and loaded into trucks weren’t newsworthy in comparison with the next large political event elsewhere. He pitied their wives when they got back home. He would rather spend an evening with Parno than with the hacks, any day. For all his vanities and prejudices, Parno was at least a man living in his own country and making his decisions, good or bad, within that context. Parno would rise or fall by those decisions. While Parno was facing the consequences of his chosen allegiances, one way or another, the hacks would be in another bar somewhere in another international hotel, visiting another country’s tragedy. In fact, weren’t all men repellent, really? That was why they went to prostitutes. It wasn’t just physical relief they were after — it was relief from the company of their own kind, from themselves.

He stood in the corridor and felt around the doorframe to his room, checking that the small piece of paper he always left in different positions between the door and the frame was still in place. So, he thought, as he located it, after all these months, I’m actually getting something done, maybe even meeting a General.

Inside the room, he went over to the dial and turned on the air conditioning, then did what he always did, went to the bed, flopped on his back and closed his eyes; breathing, waiting for the clinking, clunking air-conditioning box to stir the air and quell his claustrophobia.

It was Johnson who gave him the list, the last time he would see that strange blank of a man. The handover took place in a cemetery.

Harper had his canvas holdall with him. He had checked out of Hotel Indonesia and bought a moped so small he had to bend his long legs high like a cricket. In the shimmering air, the stink of gas was intensified — whenever he kicked down on the ignition, he did so gingerly, as if the hot metal he was perched on might burst into flames. Considering how much danger there was on the streets, it would be damn stupid to be immolated by your own motorcycle.

After delivering the list to Parno’s house, he was going straight to the airport — they were posting him to Bali so that he could take over from the operative there, who was being sent to check out the smaller islands. He would have to make a phone call before he left to ensure the road was safe — he might need to ditch the moped and go in an army jeep: an Indo in Western clothes on his own on a moped would be a little too intriguing for the militiamen who had set up checkpoints all the way along the road. Officially, the airport was still closed but there was rumoured to be a flight some time in the afternoon and he had enough dollars on him to bribe his way onto it if he ever got there. His instructions were clear. The Americans wanted him off Java when this job was done — that was the whole point of the embassy using a middleman. The next list would be someone else’s problem. He was just one of many middlemen.

His holdall was slung diagonally across his chest and the strap was rubbing his shoulder where he was sweating through his thin shirt. He drove down the lane that ran alongside the cemetery wall — scrubby fields with bushes and trees on the other side. The lane was deserted at this hour. As he turned the corner along the path to the cemetery entrance, he saw a battered Borgward van parked at the far end, close to the junction with the main road. That would be Johnson’s minders.

Harper bumped the moped into the cemetery, a little way down the path, so he could park it where he could keep an eye on it. On the far side, there was a small family group around a grave, some women with covered heads, but they took no notice of him. He dismounted and sat on a nearby bench, lit a cigarette and waited. The cemetery was walled on all sides — there was a gate in the middle of each side and the wall was no more than head height. The wall gave the illusion of seclusion from the rest of the city and here, amongst the graves and the palm trees lining the wide paths, he experienced a moment of calm, a chance to draw breath from the tension of journeying the streets.

Johnson appeared in the gateway before Harper had finished his cigarette: he had a canvas bag slung over his shoulder and his bald head gleamed in the heat. He glanced around, saw the moped first, then Harper, acknowledged him with a brief nod as he walked towards him and sat down next to him on the bench. Harper offered his cigarette packet. Johnson declined by pulling a face. Harper wondered what Johnson’s vices were. He was suspicious of men who made a show of not drinking or smoking or womanising — the ones who wanted everyone to observe how clean-cut they were. What secret desires was Johnson suppressing beneath that shiny skull? What sort of heart beat beneath that shirt, cleaner and less crumpled than any shirt should be in this heat (apart from his bald head, the man didn’t even break a sweat)? Boys, perhaps? Maybe he liked to be whipped while wearing women’s underwear. Whatever it is, Harper thought, I bet he prays afterwards.

Johnson reached into his bag and brought out a small leather case, like a satchel without a strap, and handed it over. ‘Don’t look inside.’ It was said genially enough. ‘You’re getting out this afternoon?’ Johnson added.

‘Yes,’ Harper said, ‘that’s the plan, depends on how long the handover takes, maybe tomorrow or the day after, it’ll be tight. You?’

‘They’re keeping me here till things are stabilised.’ Johnson sighed. ‘It’s bad out there.’ He was looking towards the cemetery gate but he meant out there in the world, in the backstreets of Jakarta, out in the towns and the villages in Central and East Java where people were being rounded up, anyone who was or who had ever been a Communist, anyone connected with anyone who was or who had ever been. Harper didn’t think about it. It wasn’t his job to think about it.

It occurred to him that Johnson and Parno had a great deal in common. He wondered if Johnson was about to launch into a man-to-man chat with him in the same way Parno had, if the thought of the men and women kneeling next to ditches by the sides of the roads with their hands tied behind their backs was bothering his conscience in the same way the thought of them bothered Parno.

Johnson rose from the bench. ‘Don’t fuck up,’ he said, then turned and walked down the path.

Later, when he was being debriefed back in Holland, they asked him about Jakarta. They asked him about the things he had witnessed, how he had had to abandon the moped, the chaos and danger of getting across town and the delay in the handover and leaving Java. Two of them came to visit him at the Rest Home in the country, the big house with light, airy rooms that had floor-to-ceiling windows and views across the fields. They sat holding clipboards and filled in sheets of paper as they asked him for a detailed account of everything that had happened, first on Java, then on Bali. They understood, they said, that he didn’t feel up to writing the report himself.

‘Why did it take you two days to get to the airport?’ one said.

He looked at them blankly, trying to keep the disdain from his face. ‘The purge had begun by then. Two days was a miracle. I was lucky to get there at all and even luckier to get on a plane.’

Then they asked him about what had happened in the rice fields on Bali and he told them what they needed to know.

‘And why did you disappear, then?’ one of them said softly. ‘You were off the radar for weeks, then came home via California. Why not the usual route? Why not contact us and let us get you out via Karachi?’

He had had to lie low in the highlands for two months, after what had happened at Komang’s house — and it was true, in all that time, he had made no effort to contact the Institute, not even to let them know he was still alive. ‘I had business in Los Angeles, personal business.’ They hadn’t pushed him on that one.

The men from the Institute were mostly interested in the facts, what he had done when. The doctors were interested in the pictures. The doctors asked him about the severed heads he had seen by the side of the road as he passed through Balinese villages. They asked him about the charred corpses hanging from trees with signs around their necks that decorated crossroads everywhere in Jakarta. On his way to the airport, he had seen one such corpse being beaten by a young man holding a collapsible chair. The doctors, so urbane: each of them had an air of practicality that, at times, bordered on scepticism, especially that bearded one, what was his name? In the middle of Harper’s businesslike description of a row of shops that had human hands on strings dangling from the front of the overhanging roof, the bearded doctor had looked at him and said, ‘Hands on strings? How is that possible?’

Later, Harper was to pretend that was what it was, the body parts; that was what was troubling him, that was where they had come from, the images that made him wake in the night, snapping from sleep to full consciousness in a split second, as he did for two years after his return home: lying there, his eyes wide open in the dark.

He decided to take the backstreets to Pejompongan. The sun was high, the air close, a storm was brewing for later that day: the stink of sewage from the canals stirred up by the monsoon rain and the burning rubbish from the backs of shops and houses, the humidity, all created a miasma that slowed traffic, slowed movement. Jakarta’s daily thunderstorm was gathering. If it broke before he made it out to Parno’s, his chances of getting to the airport later were slim, even in an army jeep.

He had only been riding for fifteen minutes or so since he had left the cemetery, not exactly sure in which direction he was headed, following his nose down the twists and turns of side streets. At the end of a narrow road, he eased the moped to a halt and left the engine running while he lifted the edge of his shirt and wiped his face.

He dropped the shirt and looked up — and it was then that he saw them, four young men at the end of the road, no more than fifty metres away, facing him, staring at him, in positions of aggressive query. One of them, a tall one on the left, was holding a club; another was holding what looked like a table leg. Behind their tableau, at the end of the street, people were running past, a group of young women, a mixed group of men and women, two men — all his age and younger, and from somewhere in the streets out of sight came the unmistakeable sound of panic, the murmur of a crowd in danger, the occasional pop of gunfire, a shout or a scream. In the second or two it took to absorb all this, he was also making a calculation: in the time it would take him to kick the moped into action and turn in the narrow dirt road, which was covered in loose scree — the scree would make it impossible to do it too quickly without the risk of falling off — the young men, poised, tipped forward, could reach him.

And then it was happening. They were running at him — and he had no idea who they were or who they thought he was, only that they were a pack and if he hesitated for a second, they would be upon him.

He was still taking the decision to abandon the moped as he swung his leg over and ran back down the alley, still thinking maybe he should stay on it while his long legs sped to and fro with the satisfying speed endowed by adrenaline — and despite the sudden and apparent danger, there was a kind of joy in that run. He had spent two years in the Dutch army, he was a trained man with a long stride, these were just boys. He was nearly back at the other end of the narrow road, nearly out into the crowded main street, when one of the boys was on his heels and must have grabbed at the holdall on his back because he was flying backwards, turning as he did, landing on his side in the dirt and in the same moment, a blow — it was so sudden and ferocious he could not tell what or who from — landed on the side of his head and slammed the other side of it into the dirt. There was a moment of blackness, and when that had passed, he was curled in a ball on the ground, his arms crossed over his head to protect it, and they were beating him with the clubs and kicking him and shouting.

‘Ampun-ampun!’ he shouted, and for another moment or two, they did not hear him and continued — one landed an excruciating blow in the middle of his back that made him snap back, reversing the arc of his body in one swift movement.

Then they stopped and were shouting at each other, speaking with such speed he couldn’t understand what they were saying, and when he opened his eyes he saw that one of them, the tall one, had his arm across the chest of the one next to him, holding him back — they were having a ferocious argument of some sort. Harper rolled gingerly onto his knees but he knew that if he tried to rise, they would beat him to the ground. He tried to think of a whole sentence, brothers I am with you, I am your cousin, but his mouth wasn’t working. He lifted a hand and touched his chin, which was swollen and covered in dirt. He spat and there were strings of blood amidst the spittle.

Then they were gone. They had run off down the alley, back the way they had come. As he watched them go, he saw one of them stop by the moped and lift it from where it lay on its side, the engine still grumbling. It was the smallest youth — thirteen or fourteen years of age, perhaps. He sat on the moped and tried to kick it into life and was shouting at the others to come back and help. Harper hauled himself to his feet and loped off in the other direction, the holdall bumping against his back. He didn’t look back.

The main street was still busy with fleeing people but nobody stopped him as he walked against the tide, head down. When he glanced up, he was careful not to make eye contact with anyone. He glimpsed a huge pall of smoke rising from a few streets away. Any building with Communist associations was being set on fire, and sometimes just any building. There was the stink of burnt rubber from somewhere: then as he was looking at the smoke, a herd of young men similar to the ones who had attacked him ran down the street — they were slightly older than the others; students, he guessed, dressed in trousers with white shirts, waving objects in the air, sticks and batons, and shouting gleefully to each other, shoving each other. Driving behind them was an army jeep with six soldiers in the back, waving and smiling. It was a hunting party and their prey was PKI. Such a group became more than the sum of its parts. They wouldn’t care about any list.

Harper moved closer to the wall but kept walking, looking at the ground. He could smell paraffin. Buildings set alight almost always meant people set alight too.

The moped didn’t matter. He could find some other way of getting out to Parno’s. He had the holdall, covered in dirt and battered, but intact, and with the leather case still inside it, that was all that mattered. His bruises would heal. And he didn’t think his back was broken — but every time he moved his left leg, arrows of pain shot up his side, torn ligaments perhaps? With each stab of pain, a wave of nausea and dizziness gripped him.

He needed to get off the streets. A man who looked as though he had barely escaped with his life from a beating was offering himself up to the next lot who wanted to finish the job.

He turned a corner: a side street, a small mosque on the corner, an administrative building next to it, at the end of it another corner, and at once he was in a quieter district, on the edge of a kampong but still adjacent to the main roads. Safe for a moment, he paused at the end of a street that was, when life was normal, a small, local market. It was closed and unnaturally deserted. The stalls were boarded with whatever might have been to hand: some with properly constructed wooden shutters or doors. Other families had made makeshift attempts to protect what little they had by nailing broken boards and bamboo poles in criss-cross patterns across the front. Yet others, who could not protect the open area of their stalls, had simply stripped every object from the shelves. In the back rooms, plastic buckets and wooden carvings and boxes of fruit would be piled high and, amongst them, he guessed, families cowering, waiting for things to become calm again. The stink of burnt rubber and paraffin drifted over this area too. Amidst the chaos, though, lives still had to be led, children calmed and fed. Somewhere further along the market street, someone was cooking: beneath the stench he could smell coconut oil and dried fish, smoke and spices.

Without warning, rain dropped from the sky, falling in a sudden solid waterfall. He tipped his head back and opened his mouth to catch the water, letting the hard fat drops wash the dirt and blood from his face. He would have liked to stay there until he was soaked but couldn’t risk the rain seeping through the tough canvas of his holdall and into the leather case.

At the end of the market street was a ragged shack, sloping and derelict. Through the empty porch area, there was a broken door that wasn’t even boarded — it opened easily, half on its hinges. Behind the door was a small square room of the sort a large family would sleep in, head to toe; a dirt floor, an empty wooden crate and a single broken plastic sandal in one corner — recently abandoned, he guessed. Given how overcrowded the kampong were, it was unusual to find anything empty. He wondered why the family had fled.

At the other side of the room was a narrow open doorway for ventilation, with no covering. He went and looked out. The room backed onto a canal, not one of the grand ones built for the smarter areas of town or even the river that delineated Parno’s area from the kampong but a small, shallow one, little better than a drainage ditch. To the left, it stretched back along the length of the market street: to the right, it bent away, the view blocked by other shacks. He wondered how many men, women and children had slept here unprotected from the mosquitoes, the bad odours from the still water, the diseases it harboured.

As he stepped back, he felt his knees start to shake. It was kicking in. It had been an elementary part of training, both when he did his national service and at the Institute. One of the most dangerous parts of danger comes when you think you are safe again: that is the point where the adrenaline will drain away and you will feel hungry, thirsty and completely exhausted. He had thought he was just finding somewhere to shelter from the rain, but he realised he had crawled like a wounded animal into a hole.

He pulled the holdall over his head, dropped to his knees. He was beginning to shiver. He opened the holdall and found the few balls of klepon, wrapped in paper, that he had taken from the hotel restaurant that morning. They were already collapsing and had leaked through the paper. He unwrapped them as best he could and crammed two of them into his mouth, the sweet stickiness of them dissolving into glue. He pulled out a cotton jacket and put it on: it was clean but could be sacrificed. There was the thin towel he had taken from his room, too small for his purposes but better than nothing. He put the towel down on the dirt floor and lay stretched out, tucking the holdall underneath his head as a pillow, closing his eyes.

When he stirred again, it was dusk. Everything hurt. He moved his left leg, carefully, but it was so stiff he felt he might break a bone trying to shift it. His arms both ached — why his arms? He couldn’t even remember being struck there. When he arched his back, he could almost feel the vertebrae cracking. His head throbbed. The thought that he had to raise himself and complete his mission made him want to throw up. It was still raining. Darkness would fall soon. There was no chance he could make it to Parno’s now. He would have to shelter until dawn broke. The delay wouldn’t cause alarm at Parno’s end; with the streets in chaos, it was touch and go whether the General himself would have been there today, or at all. He might have got to Parno’s only to find he had to wait there for a week.

The dirt floor of the shack was slightly raised from the street, otherwise he would have woken in a mud bath. When he went to the opening in the back, the rain was still falling onto the brown water of the canal, but it was easing. It would stop soon, then there would be a little dull light before darkness fell and the huge yellow moon of Jakarta rose in the sky: it always stayed low it seemed, like a mother keeping a close eye on her children.

He went back into the shack, ate the rest of the klepon, then sat on his backside and did a slow inventory of his body, starting with his left foot and working his way up each of his legs in turn, checking for swelling and bruising. He kept a tiny round mirror in his toilet bag, half of a woman’s powder compact that he had detached from the other half after one of his short-lived liaisons had left it behind at his apartment in Amsterdam. He remembered snapping it in two, after she’d gone, tossing the powder half into a wastepaper basket and thinking, a tiny mirror, that could be useful. He cleaned it with the edge of his shirt, which made it more dirty, spat on it, cleaned it again, and then, in the indistinct smear of his own spittle, examined his face. His chin was misshapen. There was a long graze on one side, near his hairline — but he didn’t look nearly as bad as he felt. He probed his left cheekbone in an exploratory manner, decided it wasn’t smashed. He would wash his face properly the next morning, when dawn broke, in the canal. There was a clean shirt in the holdall. He would change into that before he set out.

Once his inventory of himself was done, he checked through each of his belongings, then, perhaps because he was feeling scornful about Johnson and Parno and all those men he dealt with who did most of their business sitting in the safety of houses or offices, he did something unprofessional. He pulled the leather case out of the canvas holdall and unzipped it, and took out the list of names.

He had expected it to be handwritten — you wouldn’t think there were any typists left holed up in the American Embassy with its rolls of barbed wire outside. Instead, the list was typed on lined paper torn from a large notepad, the sort of very thin paper where the dot on the ‘i’ key had made pinprick holes. There were around thirty sheets, held together on the left-hand side by two small bulldog clips. He unfastened them and held up one of the sheets of paper: the tiny holes in it created minuscule white beams. There were twenty-five to thirty names on each sheet. The names were on the left, then underneath them was a one-word note. Member for a PKI party member. Official for someone they thought was higher up in the party. The names didn’t appear to be in any sort of order. The officials might be conviction Communists, Harper thought, but most of the members were probably peasants and workers who thought it might get them a few hours off corvée labour. A couple of names had PRIORITY typed in capitals underneath — they would be the ones the military really wanted. Priority could mean, to be shot immediately, or to be kept alive for questioning. After the names were numbers in brackets, (4) or (2) or (9). Sometimes, there was just a question mark, (?).

In the middle of the page was a list of addresses or sometimes just the single word for a street or district. After the addresses, there was a third column that had handwritten annotations in fine pencil. Harper peered at them but couldn’t decipher the tight scrawl. Eight hundred names, on this list alone: eight hundred people.

It was only after he had clipped the sheaf of paper back into place, brushed at a little dirt that had transferred onto it from his hands and replaced it in the leather case, that he realised what the numbers in brackets probably meant: family members, wives, children, cousins or servants, anyone else in the household who might be of interest.

He stood and walked towards the opening, the leather case still in his hands. Outside, the rain had stopped and darkness had fallen. The moon would rise soon.

He crouched down on his haunches and rested his back, wincing as he did, against the precarious wall of the shack. He wrapped his arms around the leather case and clutched it to his chest. He closed his eyes.

The sheaf of paper he was holding against his heart, his beating heart, the list of names: he was holding death. He was death.

He kept his eyes closed. It was still unnaturally quiet for early evening in Jakarta but around him, he could hear people stirring in the shacks; a woman called out and then was silent, a baby or toddler let out a half-hearted, old-sounding cry.

He thought of Parno, waiting in his bungalow, with his wife and his stuffed tiger. He thought of the people on the list, who were somewhere eating a meal or sleeping or talking to their children. He thought of the secretary who had typed it, the one whose fingers had come down so firmly on the clacketty typewriter that the ‘i’ key had made those holes in the paper. He thought of a room full of men in suits, all seated around a big oval table, with coffee and ashtrays on it, clipboards, an expensive watch that the man in charge had detached from his wrist and placed in front of him in order to keep an eye on the time because he didn’t quite trust the wall clock, which was no way near as expensive as his watch. He thought of a soldier, somewhere in a barrack, here in Jakarta, cleaning a gun. Someone, somewhere, was checking the oil on the engine of the jeep that would transport that soldier to the addresses now in Harper’s possession.

He opened his eyes. The moon had risen. Its glow lit the surface of the canal. If he leaned out over the water, he would be able to see a version of himself, reflected.

Of all the people he had just thought of, he was, as far as he knew, the only one in possession of the list. Perhaps there was a copy somewhere, perhaps there wasn’t. It would be egotistical to think of himself as the sole possessor of it, surely? He was nothing more than a courier. He wasn’t going to kill anyone. But put all the people he had just thought about — and him — together, and collectively they were going to kill all eight hundred people on this list, and their families: (4) or (2) or (9).

Those people were going to be killed anyway. The list might speed things up a bit, that’s all — and think of all the people who would have been killed if the Communists had succeeded in taking power. A man like him wasn’t a policy-maker. The big decisions could only be made by people who had all the facts. He, Harper, only knew a tiny percentage of the story — you had to look at the big picture, after all. He had been hired to pick up a leather case and deliver it somewhere else. If he hadn’t been hired to do that job, then someone else would have been.

He stared at the surface of the canal, flat and black as oil, glossy in the moonlight, and it came to him that he did, after all, have a choice. He could stand up and with one swing of his arm, using hardly any force at all, toss the leather case into the water in front of him, where it would float for no more than a second. In the chaos of Jakarta, it was easy for a man to fail in what he set out to do. In the time it would take for another list to be drawn up or copied, another handover to be arranged, perhaps a handful of people would be warned and disappear, escape to the country — who knew?

Further down the canal, there came the laughter of some girls. They would have slipped out under the cover of darkness to protect their modesty, now the mobs had quietened and the smell of burning had been dampened by the rain. They would be bathing and washing their hair in the black water where everyone urinated and rubbish was thrown, where the canal was opaque enough to hide all manner of secrets.

He stared at the water. The only secret the canal would hide that night would be that he had realised he had a choice. He went back inside the shack. He put the leather case back into his holdall and then bunched the holdall up so that it formed a pillow. He laid his head on it and slept for some time, opening his eyes later while it was still dark, then lying there, waiting for dawn.

Two days later, handover done, he was having a beer with Abang by the Bali Beach Hotel and thinking that it was the best beer of his life. Blood sinks into sand really fast.

Afterwards, Abang drove him to his bungalow in Denpasar, only ten minutes from the centre of town but in a wide, tree-lined street behind some of the old buildings, now closed and boarded. Few people were out and about: two elderly men, shirtless and wiry, in bamboo hats and sarongs, digging at something in one of the ditches by the side of the road; a woman walking with a huge cloth bundle balanced on her head, her compact figure swaying a little with the effort, her hands loose by her side. As they drove past, he glanced back, to see if she was beautiful, but she was older than she looked from behind. Denpasar struck him as unnaturally quiet.

Abang had stayed with a family in the Chinese district for a bit — it was a good way of finding out what was happening on the ground, he said, but it got too dangerous after a while. ‘The British have this phrase, you know this one? A bird in a coal mine. The little yellow birds.’

‘Canary. Canary in a coal mine.’

‘That’s it.’

Abang made a point of moving lodgings every three months. People forgot their suspicions about you once you moved — even if they remembered you, your absence rendered you innocuous.

The bungalow was set back from the road, hidden behind a head-height wall in its turn obscured by tall bushes. The doors in the narrow stone entranceway were thick carved wood — the hinges creaked as they pushed their way through. Never oil the hinges, always scatter gravel beneath your doors and windows: these were the ways you made yourself secure without anyone knowing that was what you were doing. As they crossed the small lush garden and approached the front porch, he saw there was a young woman kneeling on the step preparing an offering. She smiled at Abang and Abang smiled back, then said something to her in a language Harper didn’t know. The young woman bent over the offering, eyes closed, for a moment, then rose from the step and, in a bowed position, backed away down the path.

Inside, the bungalow was clean and plain. Abang extended his arm and Harper sat on a low, wooden two-seater with woven cushions. Abang went out back and returned with two bottles of beer — he handed one to Harper, they gestured cheers! at each other, then Abang went over to an old filing cabinet against one wall that had a wide, shallow bowl on top full of incense sticks and limp petals with curled brown edges. He tilted the bowl and from underneath it withdrew a thin notebook, which he tossed over to Harper. ‘Back inside page.’

There was a name and the description of a village, a diagram sketched lightly in pencil.

‘That’s the village, Komang lives just outside it,’ Abang said, walking over to and sitting next to him. He pointed at the page. ‘He’s our contact in the district. He’s very well connected with the neighbouring villages, sits on the Irrigation Committee and his cousin is Big Man in the next village. His brother-in-law is a civil servant over in Klungkung Town.’

‘Why’s he working for us? What’s in it for him?’ Harper asked.

Abang shrugged. ‘Decent type, family man, worried about PKI land grabs. The peasants are worried too because they are loyal to the old landowners. They don’t really get the idea of parcelling up the land even though they are going to get some. Komang isn’t a peasant though, far from it, and he should have been fine, he has status, but trouble is, his brother joined the PKI last year, it’s widely known. Once the round-ups of Communists start here, that whole family is in trouble.’

‘Can’t we get a message to the military? Leave him alone?’

Abang shook his head. ‘Doesn’t work like that here. It’ll be the local militia comes for him. Once that lot get going, they work pretty much on their own initiative.’

‘Ah.’ Harper took his own small, leather-bound notebook from his back pocket and a stub of pencil and, holding Abang’s notebook open with one hand on one knee and his own on the other, began to copy down the details in the tiny, illegible scrawl he had developed for himself, a personal mix of English, Dutch, Indonesian, some Javanese he knew and a few words and abbreviations of his personal invention. If his notebook fell into the wrong hands — well, good luck to the man who had to try and decipher it.

When he looked up, he saw that Abang had gone to the open door that led out to the front porch and was leaning against the doorpost, looking out, silhouetted in the light from the garden, a bulky man with something of a paunch, a half-distracted air. He gave the impression of solidity, trustworthiness — even geniality in different circumstances, Harper thought: a favourite-uncle type. Abang lit a kretek and then stood staring out towards the street, smoking. Harper had a feeling he was thinking about the young woman who had beaten such a hasty retreat as they arrived, wondering what would happen to her once he had left, perhaps? Then Abang glanced back and caught Harper looking at him.

‘Sorry.’ He patted a pocket.

‘It’s okay,’ Harper said. ‘In a bit.’

Abang drew on the cigarette. ‘I’m not sorry to be getting out of Denpasar before it all kicks off here, you know.’

‘I’ll be up country by then.’

‘Yeah, I wouldn’t count on it being much better up there, you know. Once you’ve warned Komang, it’s up to you, take whichever route you like, scout out the highlands, observe and take notes, just make sure you don’t stay more than two nights in any one place. I would say you’ll be here for a few weeks at least, unless Amsterdam in its wisdom changes its mind. What are your contact arrangements?’

‘I’ll have to come back to Denpasar. They know I’ll be out of contact for a bit.’

‘Good one,’ Abang inclined his head.

It was every operative’s favourite kind of job; freedom of movement and using his own initiative.

Abang smiled. ‘You’re not a romantic, are you?’

Harper looked at him, a query.

‘I mean, you’re not the kind of person who is taken in by the landscape? Sorry, of course you’re not.’ He tipped his head back and exhaled smoke in a sharp, upward stream. ‘You’re not like Joosten and the others.’

What Abang meant was, you’re not a fool. You won’t think that because a field is green and has a pretty woman with sleek black hair bending to harvest it that that means you can let your guard down. You’re not so stupid as to believe — like all those operatives back home — that ugly things can’t happen in beautiful places. What Abang meant was, you’re not white.

‘No,’ said Harper, bending his head back to the notebooks, ‘I’m not.’

The next morning, he woke after sunrise on the low day bed in the corner of Abang’s sitting room. From the back porch, there was a clanking sound and the tuneful murmur of Abang singing a low, indistinguishable song.

He had slept deeply: the light striped through the shutter slats in bright white. He threw back the sarong Abang had given him, sitting and stretching: both arms, bending them at the elbows, arching his back, then circling his head first one way then the other. He looked down at his torso, examining a livid bruise on his ribcage — the swelling had gone down and the deep red edge of it was spreading into purple and yellow tracery, like lace. His cock rested small and limp against his left thigh and he thought, not for the first time, it could have been a lot worse. On more than one occasion in the years to come, as an older man, he was to remember the speed of his recovery after the Jakarta incident and how much he had taken it for granted: the easy belief he had back then in his own powers of survival, the rapidity with which bruises faded and the confidence, the elasticity of youth.

He stood and wrapped the sarong round his waist, pulled on the T-shirt he had left at the end of the day bed. He hadn’t told Abang about the beating. He was planning on not mentioning that in his reports. Gregor’s first question would be, why didn’t you take better evasive action if there was a riot going on? Whatever happened to any operative in the field, Gregor always liked to let them, and everyone else, know that it was their own fault.

Abang was frying rice in a wok on the stone stove at the far end of the porch. As Harper wandered out, running both hands through his hair and scratching at his scalp, Abang saluted him with the wooden spatula, then scraped the rice onto two tin plates. He took the cloth from his shoulder and used it to pick up one of the plates and hand it to Harper.

‘Here, adik,’ he said with a smile. ‘Careful, it’s hot.’

‘Thank you.’

He sat down on the step, the plate balanced on his knees on top of the cloth, and began to eat, pinching the rice with his fingers. Abang took the skillet out into the garden and turned it upside down, banging it with the wooden spatula so that the scraps would fall in the yard for the two chickens pecking in the dirt. Then he brought his own plate over and sat down next to Harper. In the small scrubby garden beyond the yard, through some bushes, Harper could see a vast and muddy pig lying asleep on its side in a makeshift wooden corral, motionless but for the long hairy curve of its stomach inflating and deflating.

‘Your pig?’ he asked, nodding at it.

Abang shook his head. ‘Next door’s pig. Can’t believe it’s still alive, not much longer I don’t think. Want to know how much I had to pay, for that bag of rice, I mean?’ He tossed his head backwards to wherever the bag of rice was hidden. ‘A thousand rupiah, last me a couple of weeks maybe, just me, no family, although I’m a big eater, it’s true. I guess a local family would spin it out the month.’

Harper nodded, balling the rice neatly before lifting it to his mouth. Abang had thrown in some lime leaves and chopped chilli with seeds: all it needed was a bit of fried fish, an egg on top, perhaps. Didn’t Abang’s chickens lay eggs? Still, he wasn’t going to complain: in comparison with the claustrophobic Hotel Indonesia and the burnt-rubber smell of Jakarta, this was like being on holiday with an old friend.

‘Want to know what the schoolteachers here get paid a month?’

Harper nodded again.

‘Five hundred rupiah.’

Next to the stone oven, Abang’s bag lay, a large cloth bag with outside pockets. He was already packed.

They both shook their heads as they ate, sitting on the step next to each other looking out at the garden and the pig sleeping pantingly; dreaming, perhaps, of kitchen scraps and unaware of its impending fate. We are like that pig, Harper thought, tucking into our rice for breakfast. Isn’t that all anyone really thinks about, where the next meal is coming from? And if you know it’s coming, isn’t it easy to believe that it is all you need? But if you don’t know when or where your next meal is coming from, then it is the only thought to possess you. One thousand rupiah for a bag of rice, when a teacher earns half that much? How did anybody stay alive? No wonder the country is falling apart, he thought. When rice is that expensive, human beings are cheap.

Now it is clear who is friend and who is foe. He travelled up country on the back of a motorbike with a driver, Wayan. He had wanted to go on his own but Abang had persuaded him that Wayan was trustworthy and knew the countryside. ‘Once you are up there, you will see,’ Abang said, ‘the paths and lanes, it’s much easier with someone who knows it. Wayan grew up round there. After you’ve seen Komang, you can go off on your own, there’s no hurry then.’

Once outside Denpasar, Harper told Wayan, a thin young man his age, to take it slowly. He didn’t want to risk an accident on the potted road but, in addition, he wanted to get the feel of how things were in the countryside. Mostly, the villages seemed quiet. There were no charred corpses swinging from trees as there had been on Java, not yet. Occasionally, he would see groups of youths sitting on steps — once a group of four older men who looked like a more organised militia, but there was none of the humming tension of Jakarta. Who knew what was happening in the more remote villages, though, up in the hills? It might have started already but they just didn’t know.

They had set off from Denpasar in the morning but were less than halfway when the rain fell. They took shelter in the porch of a shop selling woven baskets in every size from tiny to bath-shaped. The owner of the shop brought them tea in small cups and sat down next to them and they made idle chat while they waited out the rain. Opposite, there was a terraced rice field rising up in swooping green curves, deep green now it was drenched, now the soil and the plants were sucking in the deluge — the earth seemed animate when the rain fell this heavily, as if it was breathing in the water: you could imagine the field’s gentle rise and fall, as if the whole island was a sleeping giant.

The rain was solid for more than two hours. After a while, he leant against a palm tree at the edge of the step and slept, the comforting patter of water around him lulling him, the low voices of Wayan and the shopkeeper nearby.

Eventually, the rain stopped; the sun came out. Wayan smiled at him as he wiped down the motorbike — they had pulled it under the porch of palm leaves but water had dripped through onto the seat. ‘You sleep a long time, boss. You tired.’

Harper grimaced back. He felt not so much tired as calm; a job to be done, the means to do it.

They were around half an hour from their destination, passing through another small village, when Harper leaned forward and tapped Wayan on the shoulder. Wayan braked, killed the engine so that conversation was possible. ‘Let’s get something to eat here,’ Harper said. He didn’t want to spend time looking around for supplies when they got to their destination — such a process would only advertise their presence before they had a chance to speak to Komang and if the farmer was in as much danger as Abang thought then that might not be a good idea. They dismounted from the bike and Harper gave Wayan some rupiah, telling him to be as quick as he could without raising suspicion. He withdrew to a tree trunk at the far end of the street that was close to the undergrowth, somewhat back from the passing trade. This time, he didn’t want to be sitting on a shop step right by the bike, where any villager would be bound to stop for a chat.

He could see the motorbike from where he was sitting and, beyond it, the small row of shops into which Wayan had disappeared. He heard a shout from the other end of the street and turned to see three men, two of them arguing with the third. He glanced back towards the shops and noticed that an elderly couple and two other women had come out onto their steps at the sound of the man’s shout. Then the man who was being confronted stopped and leaned in towards the two others. All at once, the three suddenly had their heads together in conference.

Harper looked round. The four people who had come out to watch the argument had disappeared: the street was now empty but for a scabby grey dog who was moving to and fro across it, nose to the ground.

Of course, he thought. That man has just named someone. Now it is clear who is friend and who is foe. Well, it’s far from clear in fact, but if you want to be a friend, you have to name a foe. Neutrality is not an option. When the militiamen turn up at your door at night, eight or ten of them, in their black clothing with their sickle-shaped machetes, fleeing is not an option — you have what, four or five children? Even if you climb out of the back window and even if the leader of the group hasn’t already stationed a man there to cut you down — a swift chop to the legs, usually below the knee — then you won’t get far before they hunt you down through the rice fields. So, as you cower in the far corner of your home, watching your door shake against the blows, knowing it will hold for a few seconds more, your choice is this: you can wait until the door flies open. You can wait until the men burst into the hut and drag you and your wife and your screaming, terrified children out into the open. Or you can stand, and you can approach the door and call out, ‘Brothers!’

You call out, loud enough to make them pause for a second. ‘Brothers!’ Then, you speak to them urgently. You give them a name.

Tanu. It is your neighbour’s name. He lives in a house just down the hill — a larger house than yours, a bit better than your one-room shack. And now comes the really difficult bit. You have to open the door. You have to smile at the men, greet them. You have to act as though you are pleased they have arrived in your village — if you are afraid of them, they will assume you have something to hide. So, summoning every shred of courage in your bones, you slide back the block. You gesture into the hut with your hand, then turn and bark over your shoulder at your wife to stop crying like an idiot, because these men are friends and might want something to eat and drink, and you smile out into the dark and say, ‘Tanu, my friends. It’s true what I say. I hear his wife is in Gerwani.’ And it is true, now you come to think of it. His wife has always been talking to your wife about the importance of educating the girls, of them being productive workers for the good of the whole village, and she may not have tried to recruit her to the PKI but it’s a bit odd, isn’t it, if she isn’t a Communist, that she’s so keen on the girls going to school?

The men don’t come into the hut. You can’t even see them clearly because the flare from the burning torches is so bright — they are just dark shapes lit by an orange glow. They talk amongst themselves and leave. You bar the door again and return to the corner with your wife and children.

And, after a while, you hear the screaming down the hill. It is the kind of screaming you have never heard before: the kind that pierces your ears. Your neighbour Tanu and his family are being dragged out of their beds. You stay huddled in the corner, your arms around your whimpering children, while the screaming goes on and on, and you know that when you see the charred bodies strung up in the village square in the dawn light you will feel horror and revulsion but what you feel right now, as the screams continue, is relief that they came to your house first, for it is only thanks to that good fortune that you had the chance to name Tanu before he named you.

The three men turned and walked off together, away from the shops. The road curved and they were soon out of sight. It could be that the two aggressors were simply taking the third man somewhere to kill him, or it could be that they were now all plotting together, the best of friends. Harper looked back down the street and saw that an elderly woman had come out of her shop with a broom and was sweeping her step, looking around, but other than her, the street remained empty.

After a while, Wayan appeared at the far end, beyond the shops, carrying two banana-leaf-wrapped food parcels. He rose.

It took longer than he had anticipated to reach the village up in the hills where Komang lived. The rain had been heavy enough to turn the tracks soggy and the route became muddy and impassable. When they dismounted to turn the bike, fat droplets of water fell from the trees above.

It was late afternoon by the time they reached their destination and he was already thinking they might end up stuck there for the night, not ideal but safer than travelling after dark. Following Abang’s instructions, he told Wayan to park the moped just off the village square. They stood by the motorbike for a few minutes, drinking from a water bottle, while Harper orientated himself. Komang’s farm was close to the village up a steep rise that led north.

As he walked up the rise, three boys began following him, calling out, ‘Hallo! Hallo!’ Soon, they were joined by four or five others, like yappy dogs, grinning and jumping, keen to announce his arrival. They fell away as he approached the house and ran shrieking back down the rise.

The house was a grand construction for a rice farmer, long and low. Three dogs ran out to greet him, snarling half-heartedly. A cockerel in the front yard lifted its head, stretched its neck upwards and flapped its wings. A girl of about twelve rounded the corner of the house, saw him, stopped dead, then turned and ran back the way she had come.

Harper waited in front of the house. He wondered if it would be impolite to light a cigarette.

A man in a shirt and sarong came round the corner of the house. He stopped a few feet away, so that they could appraise each other: from his bearing, Harper had no doubt that this was the man of the household, Komang. He was a thin man, in his thirties Harper guessed, with the dense build of someone who had worked the land since childhood: at first glance rather small but then, on closer examination, with taut calf muscles and shoulders hard as steel: not a weakling, certainly. If you needed to lift a tree trunk, you would want him to help.

Komang gave him a slow look. There was no aggression in it, no challenge, but instead, a kind of knowledge, devoid of apprehension it seemed, as if Komang had been expecting him. Harper watched Komang looking at him, taking in his open-necked shirt and his slacks, acknowledging that this stranger had come for a reason.

Harper called out, ‘How close to harvest time?’

Komang replied, ‘As usual, brother.’ It was called an identifier, in the trade.

‘Abang says hello,’ Harper added.

Komang bowed his head. ‘Welcome,’ he said, and came forward.

Komang’s wife appeared on the veranda. She was thin too, older-looking than her husband, more wary. Her face was open but strained. She and her husband exchanged a few words. He guessed she was being given instructions about hospitality.

Komang lifted a hand towards the fields and said, ‘While the light is good, shall we walk?’

Harper nodded. The light had that particular quality that came in late afternoon after a heavy rain, a dewiness still in the air, lit by gold.

They walked and, first of all, Harper asked questions. What was the latest on PKI activity in the area? How was land reform proceeding? What did the locals think? How much news of what was happening on Java had reached them here? The answers were as he had expected. On Java, both the Muslim and Christian generals portrayed the Communists as atheist barbarians; here on Hindu Bali, the anti-PKI groups said the Communists were not only against God but would destroy all the local customs, the delicate balances that had been built up over centuries, the ceremonies and worship so integral to Balinese village life. People were worried, Komang said, the omens were bad. Gunung Agung had shown anger, lava had flowed, although the gods had spared the Mother Temple.

And a teacher earns enough money in a month to buy two weeks’ supply of rice, Harper thought. No wonder people were angry; no wonder they wanted someone to blame.

They had reached the end of the field: the rice plants were a flowing expanse, rippling in the breeze like the surface of a green sea. On the far side of the field was a dense wall of palm trees. If you ran across the field, it would take you a good ten minutes to reach the row of trees, he reckoned: the field was not a solid thing. The plants stood in water. If you were light-footed, barefoot, a child perhaps, you might be quicker, but if you were normal weight and wearing shoes, your feet would stick. The mud would cling to your feet. Your only chance would be if the people pursuing you were slowed by it too. He wondered how long it was until dark.

They were standing next to each other, facing out across the fields. ‘Komang,’ Harper said, ‘Abang has told me, you must know, your brother’s political activities, you must know what they could mean for you, your family. Everything that has been happening on Java could happen here. .’ He paused, to let Komang fill in the gaps.

They stood looking out over the field, the low sun still lighting it with green and gold. At moments like this, you could believe that it was worth dying on this spot, Harper thought, because heaven was here, in this soil, in the green rice plants, the light. How would a man like Komang leave all this, give up a lifetime of work?

They walked back up to the compound. Komang’s wife emerged as they approached, holding a tray with two glasses on it. She stared at her husband.

While they sat on the back porch and drank tea, children ran in and out of the house. There seemed to be at least eight of them. Komang’s wife brought out some chopped fruit, banana and salak in a china bowl with a curled blue pattern, the glaze a little cracked, kept only for guests, probably. She smiled shyly, bowed to Harper and her husband, then retreated into the kitchen to continue the preparations for the evening meal, shooing the children in front of her. A few minutes later, an elderly woman poked her head out of the back door, looked at them and then immediately disappeared. Harper wondered how many people lived in the compound in total. As well as Komang’s family there might be a younger sibling or two around, his family, elderly relatives — some of the children were probably nieces and nephews. Too large a group to flee in a hurry; too many who couldn’t run all that fast.

Komang leaned forward in his seat, keeping his voice low. ‘I’ve been fortunate, Mr Harper, blessed, you might say. Tell me, how does a man like me stay fortunate?’

The madness would come to this village. It was only a matter of time. He knew it, and Komang knew it, but did he know how bad it would be?

He looked at Komang, then said, quietly, ‘What will they say in the village, about my visit?’

Komang said, ‘I am a farmer but, you see. .’ He glanced over Harper’s shoulder to the house. ‘It is a bigger house than most farmers’. There is talk, yes, of course.’

Harper could imagine the scenario all too clearly: the envy and resentment in the village, the whispers. Komang was probably using part of what he earned by giving information to the Institute to pay protection money to a local militia of some sort, but if that arrangement collapsed there would be nobody to protect him.

‘My brother is not a bad man,’ Komang said. ‘He wants to give people who have nothing their own piece of land, so that the hours they work feed their families and are not given to a landowner who does nothing for them. The PKI are going too far, I don’t agree with Communism, but the people themselves, they are not all bad people.’

‘I know that. Not everybody else sees things that way.’

Komang kept his face very still. Harper admired the man’s composure, considering that the rapid calculations he must be making would have such consequences for his family.

He was silent for a while then and Harper thought, he is adding up all he has to lose. His family will have farmed this land for generations: it is almost inconceivable that he could leave. Should he stay in the hope that he will be able to protect it, or pack a few things and take his wife and his children to Denpasar? What will he be in the city? A street cleaner? He has friends in this village. How could he imagine, as he sat here on his own veranda, with the golden light in the fields that his friends and neighbours down the road might advance up the rise with sickles and machetes in their hands?

He looked at Komang and could see the struggle going on behind the man’s quiet face. When you belonged to a community, you felt at home, you felt safe. If he was Komang, he would hide at night at least. He would have a place out in the rice fields, a culvert of some sort, overgrown, somewhere that looked like a disused store perhaps, and as soon as it got dark each night, he would take his wife and children out there and tell them to stay there until well after daybreak. They would have to be sworn to secrecy — but the children might gab to their friends. What then? And he wasn’t Komang, of course. Komang would never leave his home empty and unprotected.

Eventually, all Komang said was, ‘My house. . this village. .’ He fell silent again.

‘I know,’ Harper replied quietly, after a while. ‘I am sorry. Komang, you must not talk to anyone, even your family members, and especially not your brother. You must make your own decision and then act. Do it soon.’

‘How soon, in your opinion?’

‘Days, not weeks. I don’t like the feel of things round here. If it was me, I’d leave immediately.’

Komang looked at him then; stared.

He walked back down the rise and turned into the lane that led to the village square. Two elderly women were in front of him carrying long bundles of branches on their heads, swaying in unison. Wayan was waiting at the end of the lane, next to the motorbike, squatting on his heels. A couple of local men were standing over him. ‘Where are you from?’ — the questions would be light enough. A few bats flitted in the trees. The gold light had diminished to grey: dusk was falling swiftly. Harper considered attempting the roads in the dark but it would make more sense to stay local — the other villages he needed to visit were north of here. Komang had offered him his home for the night but Harper knew it was best to leave the man to make the necessary decision and preparations.

As the local men saw Harper approach, they smiled but didn’t stay to speak to him, turning and wandering off. Wayan got to his feet, brushed at his trousers.

They took lodgings in the home of a local elderly woman: Wayan had asked around and found them a house with some food in it. They ate with the family, cross-legged on the floor, the children rendered silent by their presence. They drank sweet tea, then retired. Harper and Wayan were sharing the day bed in the open area of the compound, partially screened by a large cloth hanging from a line while a black pig snuffled around their feet. The elderly lady handed them each a sarong and doused the single paraffin lamp hanging from the line. It was pitch dark.

He was woken by a short shout — and was instantly, fully awake, the kind of sharp awakening a person has when something inside them has apprehended threat even though the conscious part of the brain is slow to catch up. It was completely black. He sat upright and then moved into a crouching position on the bed. Next to him, Wayan was awake too. He whispered the question, ‘Sir?’

Harper held up his hand for Wayan to be silent even though it was too dark for him to see. He blinked a couple of times and, as his eyes adjusted, saw there was an orange gleam to the left of his vision, through the stone entranceway that led out of the compound and onto the street. ‘Stay here,’ he whispered, then rose from the day bed — he had slept fully dressed this time and with his money belt still strapped inside his shirt — and crept to the doorway.

There was a large group of men in the street. Some of them had flaming torches, a couple were holding paraffin lamps aloft. Here and there, he could glimpse a disembodied face looming in the dark, appearing out of nowhere and disappearing again as the light swung away. Then the group was gone, melting into the dark. Harper stood for a minute, listening in the direction in which the group had departed: north, up the rise. There was the sudden, brief barking of dogs from a compound further up the hill, a whimper, then silence.

They could take another route to Komang’s house: Abang had told him, ‘You can either approach through the village, that’s the short way, you can do it on foot, or you can ride on the moped on a track through the fields, but then you’ll have to leave Wayan with the moped in the middle of the fields and he won’t like that.’ Many Balinese thought spirits lived in the water, the Invisibles. Tonight, he thought, they are probably right.

He stepped back into the compound and hissed to Wayan, ‘Start the moped.’ Abang had drawn a sketch of the paths and tracks around the village in Harper’s notebook and Harper’s visual memory was good, but he wasn’t sure whether he would be able to find his way in the dark.

As he returned to the day bed to pick up his bag, he fumbled in his pocket for his cigarette lighter, flicking it and holding it up so that he could see Wayan’s face, both rictus and blank. ‘We should stay here, sir?’ he said.

‘We can’t,’ Harper replied. ‘It’s not safe.’ This was not true. He doubted very much the men would come for him and Wayan, they would be too anxious that his status was unconfirmed, that he might be too important to kill.

Wayan would not start the moped for him unless he thought it was more dangerous to stay in the compound than go out into the night, so Harper repeated, ‘It’s not safe here, the men will come here. We have to go round a back route. I will direct you.’

The noise of a moped engine: so ubiquitous in the day you hardly registered it, yet a cacophony in the dark. It would alert the men to the fact that someone else was on the move — but he and Wayan would be riding on a different path, a circuitous route. Wayan’s hand shook as he tried to turn the key and for a moment Harper wondered if he should have left the man behind and taken the moped on his own. Then the engine let loose with its small ascending growl, Wayan kicked the machine into life and Harper swung his leg over. ‘To the end of the road, then left,’ he said in a low voice, in Wayan’s ear. ‘Be careful, go slow, stay in the middle.’ They couldn’t afford to end up in a ditch in the dark.

They turned left up the track that wound round the village. Gripping the seat with his knees, he held his cigarette lighter out and flicked it once in a while to illuminate the track, letting it die, then flick, die then flick. Each time, he saw no more than a few feet ahead, the mud track, the bushes either side, the shadow that the motorbike and its two riders cast, like that of a strange beast.

After what seemed like a very long time, they had crested the rise and bumped slowly along another track until it narrowed and disappeared. This, if he had calculated correctly in the dark, was the edge of Komang’s far field. Harper whispered in Wayan’s ear, ‘Kill the engine.’

There was an odd aural illusion then, as the engine died: he thought for a minute or two that there was total silence around them, only to find that as his hearing adjusted to the lack of engine sound, the night noises of the open fields rose up from the water, the click and sing of insects, the hum and shimmer of it.

‘Sir?’ asked Wayan and Harper put his hand on his shoulder to quiet him.

For a few minutes, they listened. The darkness was complete out here and he dared not flick the lighter now they were out in the open. Perhaps when he skirted the trees on foot, he would be able to see if there was a little moonlight, enough for him to get his bearings. He estimated it would be another ten minutes or so to walk along the edge of the field and pass the treeline, using the route he had walked with Komang that afternoon — if his guesses about the path had been correct.

He dismounted the moped, removed his bag from across his chest and gave it to Wayan, then said to him, ‘Turn the moped round but don’t restart the engine. Stay right here so I can find you. Don’t move from this spot, and don’t light a cigarette or use your lighter. Listen, Wayan, there is great danger, okay? So it’s important you listen to me, only listen to me and you will be okay. Stay here. Right here. I’ll be back in a short while.’

Harper turned and set off before Wayan could argue with him. Wayan would be worried about the spirits of the night, how they could approach him from behind, or any direction, all at once perhaps, if he was not allowed to use a light. But there was no argument Harper could have advanced that would have allayed that particular fear, and there was no time. And as he skirted the edge of the field, his feet sinking a little deeper each time into the soft mud, he thought that perhaps Wayan was right: perhaps the group of men approaching Komang’s house now with paraffin lamps and machetes were spirits. Wasn’t it easier to think of them, or even yourself, in that way, rather than to look at your neighbour’s face in daylight and know the truth?

The insects hummed and sang, his feet made sucking noises in the mud, but other than that, it was silent as he approached the end of the field. As the treeline ended, he knew he should be able to see across the next field to Komang’s house.

He paused for a moment to listen — and then, sailing across the field through the black night, came a single, lengthy, agonised scream.

He was frozen, a sick, light sensation overwhelming him, and then he was running forward, the mud clinging to the soles of his shoes, impeding the lifting of his feet by just fractions of a second but enough to feel as though his feet were being sucked at, pulled down.

At the end of the treeline, he ducked down, although he knew there was no danger of the men looking his way, and in a crouching position, he ran back a little then crossed the next field, towards the patch of orange light he could see at the back of Komang’s house. From this distance, it was impossible to see what was happening. Where there was light at all, it was too bright and where it was dark, too dark. He could just make out a group of men, gathered close together and illuminated by a bare bulb hanging from the veranda and the orange light from their flares. Silhouetted against the glow from the house were black shapes, rising and falling. There were no more screams.

Then there were shouts as the group of men broke apart and Harper thought he saw the flit and flicker of someone fleeing the house at running pace. He crept a little closer, wading knee-deep in muddy water now. Some of the men were pointing in the direction in which the shape had fled.

A child of around six, a girl with plaited hair, appeared on the veranda — perhaps the fleeing shape had been one of the older children making a terrified dash for it, and the girl had followed but not run. Go back, Harper thought desperately, staring at the girl through the dark, go back inside, but the men nearest the veranda had seen her and only then did the child seem to realise her own folly. She turned and ran back inside the house. The door slammed shut but the men were already swarming onto the veranda and Harper had no need to stay to see what would happen next.

He made his way back across the rice field, knee-deep again, wretched at his own failure — he had been sent to do one simple thing, and he had failed. Had he been vehement enough, as he had sat on that veranda only a few hours ago, watching the golden light across the fields and drinking sweetened tea? Back towards the house, he heard the children’s screams, high and shrill.

It was only when a man’s shout came from behind him, sounding closer than it should be, that Harper turned and saw the silhouettes of men at the edge of his field. He had been spotted.

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.