Island of Shadows

Mark stepped onto the balcony of his room in the Queen Harbor Hotel and clasped the rust-covered railing with both hands. He planted his legs firmly and faced the stiffening breeze off the Indian Ocean.  “I loved Lina de Fretes,” he shouted with all the strength he could muster. ”and I loved her archipelago,” he said whispering while sliding to the tile floor, pushing his back up against the balcony wall. Then he pulled his knees to his chin and released a flood of tears from depths he didn’t know existed within him.

It was true. Mark Walcott had loved the archipelago. He had loved the humid air and the rapid equatorial dusk that painted a faint, fading pink above the horizon. He had loved the many hues of green in the clear light of dawn. He had loved the smell of the fumes the buses belched out along the congested streets. He had loved the waving of coconut leaves against a black sky just before the storm. He even thought once that he could love the General’s smile. 

“No one can love the archipelago without hating what it has become,” his friend Abang was fond of saying.  If pressed to explain what had become of it, this is what he might have said:

“On September 30, 1965, during the hottest and stickiest time of the year, before the start of the wet monsoon, several generals were killed in the capital. One more hid in his garden, and another saw a clear path to the presidency through the ensuing chaos. Some say the Communist party had taken a stab at a coup that day with the help of the Red Chinese. Others claim the opportunistic general successfully orchestrated events to his advantage.  What is known is that in the following year hundreds of thousands of bodies turned the brown streams of Java into deep maroon and for a decade and a half tens of thousands of villagers languished on prison islands of the archipelago.

Just four months after that fateful date my parents disappeared from the Javanese countryside. A month later an exile from the archipelago named Suwanto visited the Walcott residence in Cambridge and made an indelible impression on young Mark. Shortly thereafter Lina de Fretes saw her father cry for the first time, after returning from a raid in a village on Java. This prompted her to write “Tears of a Soldier,” her first song.

In December 1975, in the same year the last American helicopter had left Saigon and peasants dressed in black and red had emptied Phnom Penh, the Indonesian paratroopers of Operation Komodo landed near retreating guerrillas in a colonial outpost of the decrepit Portuguese empire known as East-Timor. During the following two decades approximately a third of the territory’s population perished.

In June of 1982, during a twilight raid there on the slopes of a mountain known as “Mundo Perdido,” Indonesian army captain Albertus de Fretes, father of the famous singer Lina de Fretes, vanished without a trace.  In November of 1991, after Indonesian troops opened fire on a group of mourners at the Santa Cruz cemetery in the capital Dili, some reported seeing Albertus’ ghost there, in civilian clothes, among a crowd. 

In May 1998, rioting students occupied the Indonesian parliament building in the capital Jakarta. I tried to join them, but was promptly arrested, only to be released the next morning for no apparent reason.  On May 17, a few days after, our Lina was found lifeless below the veranda of her villa facing the Indian Ocean.  

Four days later, the General, one of the world’s longest serving heads of state, resigned the presidency, thus bringing to a close the thirty-three year reign known as the ‘New Order.’” 

“Everything came together, or rather, everything fell apart,” was all Mark could say later when asked to describe what had happened that weekend in May. Since then he had come to think of his friend Abang as a driven man and of himself as dangerously afloat, like a prow he spotted from the hotel balcony, bobbing helplessly away from the entrance to the harbor.