The man wore civilian clothes, the neatest and cleanest trousers and shirt that Ruslan had seen in days, but his flat-cut hair and flatter gaze told Ruslan who he was. Military intelligence. He had the bearing of a senior officer.
Ruslan and Sarah followed him to the big green tent. In a stifling corner of the tent, the man ordered Sarah to sit on the single stool in front of a plywood sheet that served as his desk. Ruslan stood to the side.
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “I didn’t mean to hit you. I didn’t see you.”
“No problem,” the intelligence officer said in English. He seemed to be softening up to her. In fact, all he wanted to know was why a Westerner would be in the clinic. Ruslan interpreted for the both of them, relaying the officer’s questions, giving him Sarah’s answers.
“My dad’s still on Tiger Island,” Sarah said. “Can you organize a search party for him?”
The man extracted a half-smoked cigarette from his shirt pocket. He held it up. “More precious than gold right now,” he told Ruslan, speaking in Acehnese, although he wasn’t from the province. The refined features of his face suggested he was a Javanese. He lit the cigarette with a lighter and took a deep and reverent swallow of smoke. He carefully pinched out the cigarette and tucked it back into his shirt pocket. “She wants a rescue party? Does she know how many people are missing? We don’t have enough people to bury the dead, let alone go searching for the missing.”
Ruslan nodded and turned to translate for Sarah. She looked at him with expectant eyes. “He will try,” Ruslan said. “He will do his best.”
She exhaled in relief. “Thank you.” She reached over the plywood desk to shake the officer’s hand. “Thank you so much. My dad is pretty tall—” She stopped and snorted. “God, what am I saying? You won’t be able to miss him. The only tall white man on the island, hobbling around on a broken leg. He can start fires with just sticks, like a real caveman, so look for smoke and stuff. I’d like to go with you, but I should stay with my brother. Um, can I go back to Peter now?”
The officer shooed her away with a friendly gesture.
After she’d darted out of the tent, the man said to Ruslan, “So I will try, will I?”
“Shouldn’t you?”
“How? Phone lines, power lines, radio, everything down, all the roads cut. We’re our own world here.” He shook his head and chuckled without humor. “Typical Western arrogance. Think we ought to drop everything to go look for one of their own. Do Westerners deserve something special that we don’t?”
Ruslan looked down at the plywood, warped from water. “She’s alone with her sick brother and is very brave.”
A grunt, then in a softer voice, “Those blue eyes. I knew several people in Lamno and the hill villages around there with blue eyes. Portuguese ancestors. Every once in a while a kid’s born with blue eyes.”
“May I go now?”
“Your mother had blue eyes. Not as blue as this girl Sarah, but blue enough.”
Ruslan forced himself to keep his head bent. He manufactured a puzzled frown before lifting his gaze to the man’s coldly amused one. “What are you talking about?”
“Not that I ever met her. Your father told me. We had a few talks, your father and I.”
The man was military intelligence. He must have been one of the officers who’d interrogated his father over the years. Still, it was safest to play dumb. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yusuf the mechanic. I suppose you’re on your way to Ie Mameh to join him, are you? Come up all the way from Meulaboh?”
“I’m helping Sarah,” Ruslan said stiffly.
The man’s half smile disappeared. “You’ll have to do body-gathering detail before you can get your rations. Commandant’s regulations. That’s me. Temporary commandant, like everything around here. The officers had the best quarters, the ones on the beach. They all drowned. Many of the enlisted men, too. I’ll assign you to the central sector. By the gasoline pumps.” He called over one of the soldiers and told him to take Ruslan down to his assigned sector. As Ruslan left the tent, the temporary commandant called out, “Make sure you do a good job. Lots of smashed-up cars around that area. Remember to look inside them. Don’t want to miss anybody.” That amused half smile was back on his face, back in his voice.
The bulldozer had cleared a road all the way to the ruined Pertamina fuel station. A private in charge of the corpse-gathering detail told Ruslan to find a rag to cover his mouth and plastic bags to put on his hands. A bearded man in a filthy robe worked with this particular crew. Even clerics weren’t being spared this gruesome task.
The stink of death clogged the air. Ruslan breathed shallowly through his mouth. He found a clean cloth, the flag of a local sports club somehow still flying on a short pole. Plastic bags were everywhere in the rubble. He picked out two of the cleanest ones. As he did so, he kept glancing up at the range of distant green hills. He’d have to sneak out of town sometime in the night. The cleric would know where Ie Mameh was—they were always going off and preaching at various towns and villages.
The cleric and a man who had the pudgy appearance of a wealthy merchant slung a body onto the back of the truck. Ruslan joined them. He murmured to the cleric, “Excuse me, sir, do you know where Ie Mameh is? I know it’s up in the hills there, but I don’t know where exactly.”
Bits of leaves and dirt stuck to the cleric’s beard. He peered at Ruslan as though looking at another Ruslan underneath the outer one. “What do you want there with those rebels, boy? Has not God punished us for our warmongering?”
“Get to work!” the private shouted at them.
This area was still richly veined with bodies. Ruslan’s gaze wandered past crumpled adults to the small, fly-covered form of a toddler upon a wash of fine gray sand. He would retrieve her first. As he bent to pick her up, he noticed that crabs had eaten her eyes.
He threw up.
The private laughed.
Ruslan wiped his mouth, glowering at the private. “Why don’t you help?”
“Let’s make sure you’re completely emptied out,” the private said, and slammed the butt of his rifle into Ruslan’s stomach.
Ruslan doubled over, gasping for breath.
The merchant whispered, “You dumb boy, don’t you know not to talk back to them?”
Another soldier, one with an additional stripe, had seen the private’s assault. He said quietly to Ruslan, “My men are just as traumatized as anyone. They’ve lost many comrades.”
After that, Ruslan kept silent. He and the others gathered bodies, carting them off to the truck to be unceremoniously dumped on top of other corpses. His mind retreated to a corner, and his senses became dulled to the crabs and flies, the greenish abdomens, the mottled skin that often slipped in his grasp, the rising smell, the stirrings of maggots.
Whenever he or another found a holy Qur’an, pages damply plastered together, the book would be put on a high place in the sun, upon a hedge, a remnant of wall. Beside a pile of sodden fabric that might once have been curtains, Ruslan spotted a drawing pad, open to a sketch of a horse. A heavy, childish hand, much erasing, no talent, but done with enthusiasm. Beside the book was a box of crayons. He put the drawing and the box on top of an overturned car, wondering as he did so if he would ever draw again in his life. Art seemed such an insignificant thing, a part of his life that had been swept away for good.
Make sure you look inside the cars, the intelligence officer had said. Ruslan peered inside the overturned sedan. Empty.
A minute later he found a brass plaque engraved with the Bismillah, the graceful Arabic proclaiming Allah’s compassion and mercy. He picked up the plaque and studied it before propping it beside a Qur’an. The slaughter made no sense, but who was he to question God, who was not only the Merciful and Compassionate, but also the Destroyer and the Killer?
Together with a young man who might have been a schoolteacher, Ruslan hauled the body of a man in business clothes to the truck. Who had this man been? Had he been a liar and a thief? A good and faithful Muslim? A loving husband and father? A wife beater?
“A cubic meter of water weighs one ton,” the young man said as though he were in a classroom. “A column of water one meter square and twenty meters high weighs twenty tons. If the water came in at forty kilometers an hour, the force would be…” He droned on and on, calculating the mathematics of death.
The corpse gatherers entered one of the few buildings that still had a second floor, although much of the roof had collapsed. A woman was trapped in a small prayer room on the second floor. Perhaps she’d been praying and giving thanks for surviving the earthquake, reciting from the gilded Qur’an near her hand. A gold band glinted on her soft and well-manicured finger. Perhaps she’d been a new bride. Ruslan lifted the roof beam that had fallen across her head, soft black hair poking out from underneath her headdress. Her eyes were partially open. Light blue irises peered unseeingly at him. She looked fresher than the other bodies he’d gathered, her skin firm and taut.
And even a bit warm to the touch.
A horrible understanding dawned—she had just recently died. Perhaps only minutes ago.
He squeezed his eyes shut and took several deep breaths. When he opened his eyes, the Qur’an by her hand swam into focus. He picked it up, weighed it for a second, and then hurled it to the ground.
The others near him stopped and stared. The schoolteacher stepped back, as though God were about to fling a bolt down from the heavens.
“Now, young brother,” the merchant said, his voice uncertain.
“Why?” Ruslan said.
The merchant sighed. “An ancient question, old as man’s first sorrow. Who can understand? The one thing we know for certain is that we are slaves to God’s will. All we can do is submit and strive to become better Muslims.”
Ruslan was aware of his scowl but unable to erase it.
“Do you think me a sermonizing hypocrite, young brother?” the merchant said. “I lost my wife and one of my children.”
Shame drove Ruslan’s scowl away. Without another word he and the merchant lifted the woman onto a mat and others carried her to the waiting dump truck.
He was thinking about that woman, and regretting that no one would be saying the prayer of the dead for her, when he turned a corner that the bulldozer had recently plowed, pushing off a chain of cars blocking the way.
And there, on its side ten feet in front of him, its blue and white sides badly battered and its windows smashed, was an ancient Ford.
His father’s car.