In the garage below Ruslan’s bedroom, the Ford’s temperamental engine banged and chugged to life. Ruslan opened an eye and peeked at the window. Stars still twinkled in the predawn sky. The Ford coughed once or twice more before settling down to a hum. The old car was his father’s favorite. “Keeps me on my toes,” he always said. Ruslan yawned into his pillow, wondering why his father was taking his car and not his scooter the short distance to the oil terminal.
But that curiosity vanished when he realized that for the first time in a week he hadn’t had his drowning nightmare. He was sated with sleep. It felt delicious. No, more than delicious. He felt like a conqueror, full of a conqueror’s courage. Today nothing would be impossible for him.
He glanced at the sketch of the Western girl taped to his bedroom wall, her features barely visible in the glow of the streetlamp outside his window. Too bad he hadn’t been like this yesterday. She would have noticed him then for sure, a strong and handsome hero who had the courage and strength to rescue her from all dangers.
Well, there were other girls to impress. Tjut Sari, for example, a flashing-eyed beauty who worked at the photocopy shop. Today he’d saunter in with some document to copy. He’d hand it to her. “Two copies, please,” he’d say in his assured and commanding voice, and she would look at him with startled wonder.
His reverie was broken as mosque speakers all over town burst to life, summoning the faithful to dawn prayers. After washing, he prayed in the second-floor prayer room. Then, with the clear dawn sky filling with blue, he hurried downstairs and across the lane to buy several hot banana fritters from Ibu Ramly’s stand. Of all the neighborhood ibus, the mothers and grandmothers, she was his favorite. The burner roared, fritters sizzling in the wok of hot oil.
“Such a handsome boy you’re turning out to be,” Ibu Ramly said, handing him two extra-large fritters wrapped in newspaper. “Your mother would be proud.”
Ibu Ramly had grown up in the same hill village of Ie Mameh as Ruslan’s mother. Ruslan had been three when his mother was killed during a firefight between jungle rebels and the military. He remembered nothing of her, and his father rarely spoke of her.
He went up to his bedroom to change his sarong for a pair of jeans to wear to work, but he didn’t put on his shirt. He munched his warm fritters, thinking of the Western girl’s mother and the fight they’d had. Western girls were clearly different from Acehnese girls, but were Western mothers different from Acehnese mothers? He didn’t think so. Mothers were mothers. But then again, how would he know? He hadn’t had one.
He fell onto his back on the bed, thinking. How different would his life be now if his mother hadn’t been killed? How different would he be as a person if he’d had a mother as well as a father?
A curious ache that he’d never felt before stole into his heart.
And then he fell asleep again.
It seemed only a moment later that a tremendous shaking of his bed jerked him back to consciousness. His first crazy thought was that he was late for work and that his angry boss was waking him. But no one was in the room.
His bed bounced. His wardrobe skittered across the floor. The whole house shook and rattled. One large pane of his window shattered.
Neighbors screamed, some shouting in incoherent fright, others bellowing out, “Allahu Akbar!”
The bed was really bouncing now. Ruslan jumped out of the broken window into the small side yard. The ground rolled underneath him. He couldn’t keep his balance and had to crouch on all fours. Tiles fell from the house. One nearly hit his head, smashing to bits beside his feet. In the garage a tool cabinet toppled onto the motor scooter, smashing it to the floor. The air itself seemed to shudder and roar. Nothing in his vision remained stable, everything that should have been level and steady bounced and wavered. He closed his eyes to fend off nausea. Over the rattle and cracking Ruslan could hear his neighbor Ibu Ramly reciting Qur’an verses to soothe her frightened five-year-old boy.
At last the earth calmed, with only minor hiccups. Ruslan cautiously stood. Apart from several shattered windows and a few fallen roof tiles, the house looked okay, but all he could think about was his father, out on the oil tanker. Once before, a severed fuel hose had burst into flame, killing a handful of sailors. As Ruslan ran to the waterfront, he noticed that the shanties and houses on Ujung Karang had ridden out the earthquake with little damage. People milled around in shock at the powerful quake, grateful for their survival. Many began streaming to the mosque to pray, several women putting on their white robes as they hurried.
The Pertamina tanker was high on the water, its fuel already pumped to storage tanks on shore. Men moved around on the ship’s deck.
The café owner saw Ruslan on the jetty and put him to immediate work, even though he was shirtless and shoeless. Excited customers packed the café—nothing like an earthquake to get people drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, quacking to one another like ducks about the morning’s moving experience.
One of the customers perked his head up and pointed to the ocean. “Hey, shouldn’t the tide be rising?”
The tide not only dropped, it rushed out to sea, drying out the fringing coral and exposing the mucky bottom beyond for hundreds of yards. People flocked down to the seawall to watch. Many gleefully chased stranded fish. A grinning man held up a red snapper to his wife. “We’ll eat well for free tonight!” he said, laughing.
Ruslan slopped a glass of coffee in front of the wrong man. Ignoring the boss’s annoyed shout, he stared at the distant sea.
Out in the harbor the tanker’s anchor lifted clear of the water as billows of smoke poured from its exhaust stack. Black water roiled off the stern, the propeller churning up sand from the seafloor as the ship made an ungainly turn toward the horizon.
Ruslan slipped away from the café and the curious onlookers. He began to run, not knowing exactly why, but instinct making him head away from the sea. His bare feet hurt, so he stopped at the house for a pair of sandals and snatched a yellow shirt from the front table as well.
He almost overlooked the letter on the table that he had already missed seeing once that morning. It was addressed to him in his father’s handwriting. He stuffed the envelope into the shirt pocket.
And in the distance, along the seafront of Ujung Karang, screams rose from a hundred, a thousand, mouths.