For as far as Ruslan could see, Meulaboh had become a lake, clogged with floating debris. Rooftops dotted the foul water, many with people stranded on top of them. In the distance survivors packed the flat roof of an unfinished three-story shopping mall.
Cries of horror and desperate prayers filled the air.
Beside Ruslan, the fishmonger gabbled a mix of Qur’anic verses and nonsense words.
The lake began to drain, the water returning to the sea at a slow, triumphant pace. The fishmonger’s wooden table drifted past him, this time upside down, two of the legs broken off at the base. Another woman lay crumpled upon the overturned table, her hands clutching one of the remaining legs, her sarong partially torn from her body.
Ruslan had no idea how long it took for the water to subside. Time had become meaningless for him. There came a point, though, when the killing sea had departed, revealing a stilled and savaged town. Across the way, Ruslan could see dozens of bodies crumpled on the second-floor stairs of the shopping mall. Several of the survivors on the roof began nudging the dead off the stairs, their bodies spinning over the sides.
The street below Ruslan was filled with rubble and crushed cars and smashed furniture and a thousand other things big and small that had been torn from their proper places, all glued into place by greasy black mud.
Directly beneath him were at least a dozen bodies half-buried in the mud.
He thought of the way the oil tanker had charged out to sea. The captain must have known what was going to happen. Ruslan felt an enormous rush of gratitude to this unknown man for having saved his father’s life.
Perhaps his father was already looking for him. He had to get down and make his way to the water-front. He lifted tiles off the roof to make a hole, stacking them to the side so that the owner could replace them. Fortunately, this house had no insulation. He could climb straight down into the attic.
“I’ll help you down,” he told the fishmonger.
She stared at the bodies below them and moaned again. She refused his hand.
There was nothing more Ruslan could do for her. At least she was alive.
Reaching the first floor of the shop house, Ruslan waded through knee-high sludge stinking of sewage. His feet stumbled against something soft. One of the shopkeeper’s family. Beyond the doorway four of the bodies lay twisted with their faces exposed, their mouths filled with the black muck. One he recognized as a trishaw driver who sometimes took him to school. Long black hair covered a girl’s face. There was something familiar to the cheeks. He brushed away the hair and rocked back on his heels as Tjut Sari, the beauty of the photocopy shop, stared up at him, her black eyes no longer flashing. He looked away for a moment, the horror of it almost too much to bear. He began to pull her out of the mud, to at least give her that dignity, but stopped tugging when he saw that she was nude, the water having stripped her of her clothes.
Finding his father. That’s what he had to concentrate on. There’d be time enough for the dead later on. First, though, he needed something for his feet to protect them from all the broken glass and ripped metal. One of the nearby corpses had a pair of sandals that looked like they would fit, but he shuddered at the thought of taking them. Instead, he waded into a nearby shoe shop and plucked a pair of running shoes out of the mud. They were already ruined, so he didn’t think the shop owner would mind. In fact, the shop owner was probably dead. Ruslan hoped not. When all this was over, he’d make a point of finding out, so he could explain why he took the shoes.
A Batak building contractor whom Ruslan vaguely knew lay crumpled in the basin of a water fountain. The man held a small Christian cross in his outstretched hand.
Half an hour later Ruslan had picked his way past hundreds of bodies clumped together or scattered individually. So many of these dead he knew. Some with torn limbs and sheared heads, their bodies mutilated by the smashing and swirling of cement blocks and wooden planks and tin sheets and heavy vehicles.
Half an hour—that was all it took for his emotions and senses to numb, for a corpse to become just another obstacle to make his way around. Other survivors appeared, searching for family. Here and there wails of grief rent the air. Ruslan saw one distraught father holding a limp toddler close, and then holding her out again to examine her face before pressing her to his chest, as though his own beating heart could give life back to hers.
How was it possible that the sea could tilt on itself to destroy the land and its life?
The peninsula of Ujung Karang looked as though houses and people and vegetation and lampposts and wires and cars had been dumped into a giant mixer, ground up, and poured back out. The ugly, mottled water of the harbor lapped against the twisted pier.
And on the curve of shore lay the hull of the big oil tanker, sunken on its side, its enormous brass propeller glinting in the sun. Five sailors floated in the water by the propeller. Even wearing life jackets, they had died.
One of the bodies had on a mechanic’s overalls.
Ruslan’s blood thinned to vapor, and all the colors around him faded to the gray of those overalls.