He emerged from the booth and pulled his wallet from his pocket as he went over to the reception desk. The deputy manager had gone but a young woman took payment for the call.
As he turned back to walk through the gardens, he stopped, patted his pockets and regretted that his cigarettes were sitting on the low table next to Rita. He was right, he knew it: things could go either way, but the oddest thing of all was that his suspension wasn’t official. As far as his colleagues were concerned, he was still out in the field.
As he walked back along the tiled path, back to the beach, Harper thought, the rest of the day is spoiled now. He had brought the real world into the bubble he and Rita had been in during their encounters so far. He had liked the bubble: the enclosed space of a room in a guesthouse, the car — they could exist as long as they had a wall of some sort around them. They existed best of all beneath the fine gauze of a mosquito net.
As he sat down next to her, she said, ‘I’ve ordered.’
Summoned by her words, a plate of satay with a sticky coating arrived, some rice cakes and a bowl of water spinach.
They ate in silence. ‘This satay is really good, spicy,’ he said at one point but it was such an obviously small-talk remark, she ignored him. She ate the satay and the spinach but only picked at the rice.
After they had eaten, they walked along the beach. They talked about whether it was worth going for a drive around Sanur and decided it was mostly hideous and touristy. It grew greyer; the light was dull as they returned to the bar — as though the sky’s heaviness matched his mood.
Without discussion, they sat down in the same seats and both ordered soft drinks: she had watermelon juice and he a Coke, then they sat in silence, looking out at the sea where the waves crested apricot, the beach almost empty. He noticed a long trail of ants that were processing up the leg of the small table between them and clustering around a speck of satay sauce. The table hadn’t been wiped down properly while they were on their walk and he considered calling the waiter over.
In front of them on the sand was a pair of loungers in a reclining position. Between them was a standard lamp with a wooden stem and white lightshade of the sort you would find in any domestic sitting room. Even though they were still some way from dusk, a white-coated member of the hotel staff approached and turned the lamp on, and only then did Harper notice the cable that led from its base to the bottom of a nearby coconut palm. There was an electricity feed in the palm tree, a socket in its trunk. He glanced at Rita and saw she had noticed too and was also amused by how that small patch of beach had been transformed into a lounge. They smiled at each other. He wished he hadn’t made the call to Amsterdam, or asked about Jakarta. He wished he was no more than what Rita thought him to be.
*
As they walked back to the car, Rita perfectly happy, he felt annoyed with himself, and so did what most people do when they are upset about their own behaviour — he got upset with the person he was with. In the middle of a conversation about her work training secondary-school teachers, he interrupted with, ‘Of course all the good stuff here was built by the Dutch. The irrigation ditches in the fields used to be wood and bamboo but they went rotten. There’s a stone aqueduct in the highlands above town, you know, transformed the villages. You should go and see it.’
Why was he provoking her? He didn’t even believe it was true.
‘You mean the aqueduct above Keliki,’ she replied, her voice light. ‘I’ve seen it, of course, irrigation is everything. Only us Westerners take water for granted.’
‘Yes but the point I’m making is that if the Dutch hadn’t. .’
‘Oh, c’mon,’ she responded.
When he unlocked the car door for her and opened it, she slid herself down diagonally without looking at him.
He jammed the key in the ignition. She worked in education, so what? How about looking a little deeper? What about that caesarean scar on her abdomen, where was that child? He imagined a boy, a small boy, dying young perhaps — whatever it was, some common but excruciating tragedy that had led her to flee cold northern Europe and end up here, in a country so hot and full of flowers that sweat smelled sweet, deep greens and monsoon rains and slowly swaying people — the sort of country a white woman could run to because it was beautiful — because yeah, that’s right, I’ll go and live somewhere with lots of frangipani then I can convince myself the world isn’t ugly after all. He thought this last thought in a high-pitched voice in his head, a mockery of a female voice, of optimism of any sort.
They drove in silence.
They continued to drive in silence for an hour, the ribbon development along the road thinning little between villages: the open shacks with people sitting on the steps selling wooden tools and carvings and beads. They were most of the way back to town when Rita spoke and when she did, all at once with no preamble, it was obvious that throughout that hour of driving she had been continuing the debate between them to herself in just the same way he had. It was the worst kind of arguing: the silent kind.
‘How many killed in the Holocaust?’ she came out with. ‘How many? Six million, right? Everyone knows that. Even you know that.’
Thanks for that ‘even’, he thought. Thanks a lot.
‘Want to take a guess on how many of that six million were babies? Go on, take a guess. Of course the total dead was fifty million, in total I mean, everybody on all sides I mean, biggest category probably Russian soldiers but let’s stick with the babies shall we, the babies gassed and burned, out of six million people who just happened to be Jewish, no, how many babies?’
He conjured the image of a family being rounded up by the Gestapo. He watched the image in his head, like a flash of archive news footage in black and white, a sturdy father in a long black coat, a mother white-faced with fear, six or eight children, perhaps? A baby, clutched in the arms of the eldest daughter because the mother had her hands full helping the smaller children into the back of a truck with its tailgate down. The father and the eldest boy were lifting up suitcases and then turning to assist a group of elderly people who were waiting patiently behind the family. A young soldier stood next to them, holding a rifle. One baby, perhaps, in a group of twelve or fourteen?
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ he said, allowing — and that was a mistake — the hint of a sigh to enter his voice. Six million divided by fourteen. Did she really want him to do that particular calculation? Why was she bringing this up anyway?
‘Guess,’ she insisted.
‘I don’t know, three hundred, four hundred thousand. Are you serious?’
‘One million,’ Rita replied. ‘In the war on our continent in the middle of the century we happen to live in right now, the continent of the Renaissance and mass industrialisation and the vote and penicillin, we killed one million babies. Not out of ignorant prejudice at all, it was perfectly knowing and industrial. We put all that progress we’re so proud of to very good use. In living memory.’
Harper allowed a silence to speak the phrase, and your point is?
The village street was busy and he had slowed the car to a crawl because there was a man on a bicycle just ahead and to his left. The bicycle had two wooden cages of squashed chickens with dirty-white feathers slung either side of the saddle, held together by string. The man was standing up on the pedals as he cycled in his sarong and as they drew level, he glanced over his shoulder, slowed, then wobbled and fell against the side of the car. The cage scraped against the car door, sending the poor skinny chickens into a constrained flurry of panic.
‘Fuck!’ He braked more savagely than he needed to. He was flung against the steering wheel then back in his seat, momentarily winded.
Rita was wearing her seatbelt. She jerked forward a few inches before it caught her and pushed her back again. She sat while he recovered his breath, then said in a low, conciliatory voice, ‘A million of them, John, in living memory, and with industrial efficiency. Do you really think Europeans are in any position to lecture any other culture about barbarism?’
He drove straight through town and out the other side. She did not question where he was going. The road remained good for twenty minutes after town and then he turned the car off onto the poor, potted track. He wouldn’t be able to drive right up to the hut. The track ran beneath, and then they would have to cut up on foot along a narrow path that joined the one down to the river.
When he parked the car, she was still silent, so to break the tension he said, ‘Here’s where I am staying.’ He was about to ask, politely, if she wanted to see it or go back to town but before he could, she had opened her door. He had parked on a steep camber and she had to lever both hands against the doorframe to clamber out.
The hut loomed above them, a dark shape visible through the trees at the top of the steep path, about to disappear into dusk. She paused for a moment, turned to the valley. He thought, she feels it too, the singing stillness, alive with so much that is invisible
After a while, she said, ‘The villages are like this too. A short drive, and suddenly. .’ She was feeling the isolation of the place — and yet, for him, bringing her here had made it much less isolated. That was all you needed, one person, newer than you, to make a strange thing feel owned.
They looked at each other in a moment of truce. He gestured up the path.
As she walked ahead of him, he watched the slow side-to-side movement of her hips and wanted, very badly, to put his hands on them. He wanted no more talk.
On the veranda, he stood for a moment, looking around for any sign of Kadek, but he rarely came late afternoon or evening unless by prior arrangement. There would be a basic meal left on the desk, under a banana leaf.
The ornate doors were kept padlocked — not that that would make much difference to a determined intruder, or intruders. He took the small silver key from his trouser pocket, unlocked the padlock and placed it on the veranda table, pushed back both of the narrow doors and gestured for her to go in. She stepped over the threshold.
They were silent while she wandered around the hut, casting her gaze slowly over each object and item of furniture, looking round and seeing how it all added up to a kind of comfortable barrenness. He remembered what Francisca had said the first time she came to his bachelor flat in Amsterdam, many years ago. ‘You know, you should have tidied up, don’t you know what a woman thinks when they see a man’s habitat, is this the kind of life I would lead with this man?’ What was Rita gleaning about him from the few objects in the room?
‘It’s only a forest toilet outside I’m afraid, and a bak mandi, although I usually just wash with a bowl on the veranda in the mornings, to watch the sunrise. Kadek brings water from up the hill, there are streams that feed into the river.’
She looked at the ceiling. ‘No fan?’
He indicated a rusty desk fan that sat in the corner. ‘Only that, but the electricity is pretty poor. I have a couple of kerosene lamps if I need them.’
‘I love the smell of those.’
Stay with me, he thought. Stay here tonight. We can share the food that Kadek has left. We can sit cross-legged on the bed, facing each other, and I will feed you rice balled up between my fingers.
‘You know I can’t stay the night,’ she said, as she turned.
He thought of the possibility that he would be visited during the hours of darkness by a killing squad. This was ridiculous, this fantasy of his, that she was looking round the hut and imagining a life with him. They hardly knew each other. She knew nothing, nothing about the world and certainly nothing about him. A million babies. Who the fuck did she think she was? ‘I wasn’t going to invite you.’
‘Okay, there’s no need to be rude about it.’
And suddenly, it was as if they were having a full-blown marital row, facing each other full on, speaking too loudly and too quickly; as if they had, all at once, reached the stage that couples who have known each other for many years eventually reach, where the arguments are always the same argument and the victor merely the one who is most vehement on that particular occasion.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you today and I don’t know where your cynicism comes from,’ she said, ‘but most of the people who live in this country are lucky if they eat each day, and maybe we should. .’
At that point, without any conscious decision to escalate things between them, Harper shot out his hand and grasped her upper arm and spat, ‘How can you be afraid of some dog in the street, some starved dog you could kick aside, one foot, in your strappy sandals, and he would slink off? Some mangy little monkey, who would run away backwards just if you. . if you. . lifted your hand? Do dogs and monkeys have knives or guns? You think your Ni Wayan is so charming or your driver so kind because he takes you to the water temple? How can people like you be so stupid? Now? At this time? Don’t you know what’s going on in Jakarta and the other cities? People have been burnt to death in shopping malls, beaten to death in the streets. You live in this country. Don’t you even follow the news?’
This speech poured out of him and all the while he continued to grasp her upper arm, just to ensure her attention he thought, but then he realised that instead of wrenching herself away and spitting back — something like of course I do — she had let the arm go limp in his grasp and cast her gaze to the ground. Francisca would have been yelling at him by now, jabbing her finger in his chest — for all her mild manners, she was snarly and argumentative enough when she chose. Rita was behaving quite differently. He saw the neutral look on her face and realised it was the look of a woman who had extensive experience of a man with a temper, a woman who knew how to become perfectly still.
The scar on her belly, the absence of any mention of her past or a child dead or alive and her reaction to him now conjoined to form an image of her particular tragedy. It came to him in one piece: a man who hit her, a child taken away or left behind, the price she had to pay for her own freedom and sanity, perhaps — and he thought, oh no, and let her arm drop, expecting her to turn away or rub the arm but instead she stood motionless before him, still staring at the ground, as if she was waiting to see whether there was any more where that came from. He had done much worse than this, as well as witnessing worse and doing nothing — but watching this large, soft woman standing carefully in front of him, he could not have felt more ashamed.
He took a step back, to indicate that he was not going to touch her again. Please look at me, he thought. If you look, you will see it in my face. I am not like him. I think men who hit women are scum, beneath contempt.
She would not look at him and he did not want to speak until she raised her gaze. When she did, she did not look him in the face. Instead, she stared into the corner of the room behind him, then said very quietly, ‘John, what happened to you?’