The Thing by the River

 

Sometimes the dead don’t stay buried. Sometimes they come back, marching in formation with their heads tucked neat and tidy under their arms like lunch pails on a Monday morning commute to hell.

The monument squats there on Ir. H. Juanda Street like a guilty secret made of iron and stone, its back turned to the Bekasi River as if it can’t bear to look at what happened there. Dark as dried blood, that monument, and shaped like half a chimney—the kind you might find in a crematorium if you were the sort of person who thought about such things on sleepless nights when the bourbon didn’t work anymore.

Built in 1962, seventeen years after the screaming stopped. Seventeen years, but that’s nothing to the dead. The dead got all the time in the world.

October 19, 1945. Remember that date, because the river sure does.

The train came rolling into Bekasi that morning like a fever dream on steel wheels, packed tight with ninety Japanese sailors who just wanted to go home. Christ, didn’t they all want to go home? The war was over—the big one, the one that ate the world and shit out nightmares—and these boys from the Land of the Rising Sun were heading for Kalijati Airfield with nothing but surrender papers and the hollow eyes that come from losing everything that ever mattered.

But hate? Hate doesn’t read surrender papers. Hate doesn’t give a tin shit about official documents signed by presidents and foreign ministers. Hate just sits there in your belly like a cancer, growing and growing until it needs feeding.

Zakaria Burhanuddin—now there was a name that would echo through the years like a gunshot in an empty church. Second Lieutenant, they called him, though titles don’t mean much when the blood starts flowing. He was the kind of man who carried his anger like other men carried their wallets, always knowing exactly where it was and how much was in there.

When word came down from Major Sambas Atmadinata that the train was to pass through unmolested, Zakaria heard something else entirely. Sometimes the mind plays tricks when it’s been soaked in occupation and humiliation for too long. Sometimes orders get lost in translation between what headquarters says and what the heart demands.

The railway switch clicked from track two to the dead-end spur with the finality of a coffin lid closing. Three cars. Thirty men each. Ninety souls who didn’t know they were already ghosts.

At 10 a.m.—and isn’t it funny how these things always happen when the sun is high and honest, as if evil needed good lighting to do its work—Zakaria jumped aboard that stopped train with his pistol drawn and righteousness burning in his chest like acid reflux.

“Show me your papers,” he demanded, and they did. Legal as Sunday morning, signed by Achmad Soebardjo himself, with President Sukarno’s signature flowing across the bottom like spilled ink. But legal doesn’t matter when the mob gets hungry, and the mob was very, very hungry.

Hidden weapons in the rear car. That’s what broke the camel’s back, snapped it clean in two with an audible crack that echoed across the years. Because if there’s one thing worse than your enemy, it’s your enemy who lies to your face while reaching for his gun.

The Japanese commander’s shot went wide, whining past Zakaria’s ear like a very large, very angry wasp. Zakaria’s return shot didn’t miss. The commander dropped like a sack of wet cement, and with him went any chance of talking their way out of what was coming next.

Panic is a living thing. It spreads like wildfire through a crowd, jumping from person to person until everyone’s dancing to its tune. The Japanese scattered like startled birds, some running for the rear car and their weapons, others heading for the countryside and the illusion of safety.

But there was no safety that day. Not in Bekasi. Not by the river.

The militia had bamboo spears sharpened to needle points, machetes that could take a man’s head off with one good swing, knives that knew their business, and cleavers still sticky with the morning’s butchering. They herded those ninety sailors like sheep to the slaughter, which, when you get right down to it, is exactly what they were.

The abandoned pawnshop behind the station became a holding pen. What went on in there during those four hours? Nobody talks about that part. Some stories are too dark even for the history books, and the survivors—well, the survivors learned real quick that some memories are better left buried.

But the dead don’t stay buried. Not here. Not by the river.

At 2 p.m., without waiting for approval from anyone who might have had second thoughts, they marched all ninety men down to the Bekasi River. The water was running clear and clean that day, the way rivers do when they haven’t tasted blood yet.

It didn’t stay clear for long.

“The Bekasi River turned red,” old Dullah remembered years later, his voice carrying the weight of witnessed horror. Eighty-nine years old when he spoke those words, but his eyes were young again, young and terrified and full of the kind of red that never washes out.

The bodies went into the river like offerings to some hungry god, and the water carried them downstream toward secrets darker than the bottom of a well. But water has a long memory, and sometimes, on certain nights when the moon is dark and the wind is just right, you can still see that red threading through the current like veins in a bloodshot eye.

Admiral Maeda was furious when the news reached him. Protest letters flew back and forth like angry birds, full of diplomatic language that meant nothing to the ninety pairs of eyes now staring up from the riverbed. President Sukarno himself came to Bekasi six days later, standing in front of crowds that still had blood under their fingernails, preaching discipline and obedience to people who had just learned what their hatred could accomplish when given free rein.

But it was too late for sermons. Too late for apologies. Too late for anything except the monument they’d build seventeen years later, turning its back on the river because sometimes even stone can’t bear to look.

And on certain nights—ask anyone in Bekasi, they’ll tell you—you can see them marching across the old bridge. Ninety sailors in formation, their heads tucked neatly beneath their arms, keeping perfect step to a drum only the dead can hear. They march from the monument to the river and back again, an endless patrol through a landscape of memory and regret.

The living have their monument of iron and granite. The dead have their parade route of flesh and bone.

And the river? The river remembers everything.

It always has.

It always will.

Sometimes dead is better.

But sometimes, dead don’t get a choice in the matter.