Submerged

By Yusrizal K.W.

Nearly all of the houses in the village had been abandoned by their occupants. Cik Ledo and his wife were the only residents left. They were still in mourning. The week before, their only daughter, Sarmi, had died. She was buried beside the house.

Yet, nine days after Sarmi's death, it was "recommended" that Cik Ledo should immediately leave the village. The "recommendation" was conveyed in a letter of instruction signed by a certain government official.

The reason given was that in the next few days, Cik Ledo's village would be submerged for the construction of a dam, which would later be used for a hydroelectric power generator. The villagers finally had to comply.

But it was difficult for Cik Ledo to accept this. Despite terror and persuasion, he refused to believe that his house and his village would be submerged.

"Whatever happens, I will never move out. For God's sake. I am not willing!" he told a uniformed official, who suggested that he immediately pack up and move to a chosen resettlement site, or to any other place of his own choice.

When he learned that the compensation given to the remaining villagers for their land, houses and crops was not up to their expectations, Cik Ledo held his ground and refused to receive the money. He emphatically stated that the village was the life he had inherited from his ancestors. He could not endure the fact that his village, his and his fellow villagers' houses and their fields, would be turned into an arrogant expanse of water drowning all of his dreams, changing them into a tale of sorrow. When he remembered the grave of his daughter, he refused even more.

Many had come to persuade Cik Ledo. Each person coming to persuade him was different from the other, and he had never known any of them before. However, these people gave him the same reason: development in the interest of the people at large and a love for the country.

"In short, Pak, I will never leave this village. Let me, my wife and the grave of my daughter be submerged along with the rest of the village," he snapped.

Finally, these people who had come to persuade Cik Ledo just left him. And one night, the village became still, lonely. Only Cik Ledo and his wife were left. Cik Ledo was seized by a pang of dejection. If he were to leave the village, what could he do?

The rice field on which he depended would be under a great expanse of water. The thought of starting a new life in a new place, or receiving a set compensation to find a new place to live, made Cik Ledo nervous. Even bitter.

He found it very difficult to close his eyes. The image of Sarmi, his only daughter buried beside the house, strengthened his conviction that he would never move out of the village. He would never leave. No, he would never let things simply take their own course.

If he were to move out, this would mean taking Sarmi's body out of the grave and burying it in a new graveyard. This would be a very hurtful, sad task.

Why wouldn't it? The child was already dead but she had to move out too. Sometimes he felt he was not strong enough in his faith, feeling that God had been so unfair to him. Sometimes he felt that development always set aside poor people, people as helpless as he was. He became all the more unwilling to move out and let his daughter's grave vanish with his village.

Sarmi's grave was a reminder, proof of his profound experience as a father.

The nocturnal wind blew. No more night watchers. There was utter silence but for the sound of Cik Ledo's breathing and the sobbing of his wife, now overwhelmed by a great fear that water would suddenly inundate the whole village and drown their house and their lives.

"We'd better comply. We should dig up Sarmi's grave and rebury her in a place where she can rest in peace with God ... We'll court trouble if we live here ourselves," Cik Ledo's wife pleaded. Cik Ledo became lost in thought for a long while.

Slowly he opened the door and walked to the side of the house. He stood a while near Sarmi's grave. Then he knelt down.

"Your mom is right, Sarmi. Forgive me, for your peace must be disrupted. I'll take you out tomorrow and we'll move to a new place," Cik Ledo said in a low voice. He turned back to the house and went into his bedroom. Sarmi's grave made the silence more prominent, a gripping stillness.

Before going to bed, he embraced his wife. Several minutes later, they were lost in sleep.

From afar, from the height of a roadside, Cik Ledo's house shown bright red. Fire was ablaze on top of the roof. The flame reached higher and higher, twisting in the blowing wind. Embers shot up, sometimes spurting out black smoke. A tense night crawled, carried by enraged drops of dew.

Realizing his house was on fire, Cik Ledo woke up his wife. He dragged her out of bed and jumped out of the window. As soon as he landed in the yard close to his daughter's grave, his body weakened and he collapsed. His vision became black. Seeing her husband on the ground, his wife became hysterical and she, too, fainted.

Cik Ledo's house soon became a mere heap of debris highlighted by small islands of fire and smoke.

From the height of the roadside, four people with flashlights piercing the blackness made their way to the village to carry out Cik Ledo and his wife.

After going uphill a while, they put Cik Ledo and his wife, both still unconscious, into a car.

The village had just witnessed the house of Cik Ledo, the only villager refusing to move out, burned to the ground. The village was quiet. The sound of an owl echoed, but no one knew where it came from. The shrill sound of crickets joined in, no one knew where they came from. Mysterious sounds of nature simply came and went from nowhere.

Now the village was dead. There was not a single human being left. Cik Ledo and his wife were no longer there. The flames and the dark figures had forced them to give up.

The sun rose in the east. An expanse of water, thousands of hectares, indicated the presence of fresh life. Some birds flew low, and then left, flying far away. Silence reigned.

The village, once alive with people tilling their plots of land, was no longer there. The great expanse of water was a lake created by a dam which spelled the death of hopes nurtured by the people who used to live there. The great expanse of water had submerged living trees, plants and animals.

At the side of the huge expanse of water stood a disheveled man. Beside him was an equally disheveled woman. Two pairs of eyes stared at the expanse of water. A sort of luminescence of bitterness was in their eyes.

"We have been defeated," the man said.

"If only you had accepted the offer to leave the village much earlier, we would have been able to take Sarmi to her new grave. Then our suffering would not be as great as it will be now."

"Forgive me. But before the fire broke out, hadn't we decided to comply with the "recommendation" the next day?"

"Perhaps God had different intentions."

Silence followed.

The two remained still until dusk. The man, and the woman, let tears flow.

When darkness slowly descended, from afar, from around the edge of the dam, the two saw a strong and intrusive building with poles standing erect, cables connecting them. Lights illuminated the whole area, and engines were thundering. It was incomprehensible to the two onlookers.

"I believe Sarmi is crying. I hear her moaning," said the man.

"I feel as if I saw her sailing in a boat looking for us in the midst of this expanse of water ..."

"We'd better meet her and take her to live with us."

Silence.

The two, Cik Ledo and his wife, felt as if they had been brought by God into a world they had no knowledge of.

"You'd better wait here. I'll pick Sarmi up," said Cik Ledo.

"Don't. You might not return," the wife said.

"I will," Cik Ledo replied and then jumped into the water. In the darkness, his wife let him swim on and on to the middle of the lake. The night became pitch black and she could not get a glimpse of even the slightest shadow of her husband.

The sun rose again in the east. Its rays poured on the water, glimmering in the color of gold, so beautifully.

Cik Ledo's wife kept looking at a point in the middle of the water. She fixed her eyes on the direction her husband swam the night before. She stared so long that she felt that her eyes could no longer wink.

From afar, out from the ripples of water that had swallowed her village and the villages of others, she caught sight of a small boat with two people in it: Cik Ledo and her child, Sarmi. The woman's frozen eyes brightened and then she waved. She saw flowers, flowers covering the bodies of this father and child, and the boat.

"Oh, how happy you are now, my husband. Yes, how happy you are and so is our child," the woman said.

"Sarmi ... come here, child. Your ma would like to go boating with you and your father."

She kept waving. She kept calling the names of her daughter and husband.

But her shouts went unheeded until at one point, beyond her control, she plunged into the water.

In the deep the woman felt a force stinging her heart. Then she was dragged on and on to the middle where she drowned. On the bottom she saw her husband rebuilding their house. Sarmi, meanwhile, was having a good time on a swing, the ropes of which were hung to a full moon.

The writer was born in Padang, West Sumatra, in 1969. Since 1986, his short stories have been published in national and local newspapers in his home province. One of his works, Pistol Perdamaian, was published in the 1996 selection of Kompas best short stories. His poetry collection, Interior Kelahiran, was published by Angkasa Bandung last year.

Glossary: Pak: term of respect for an older man, in general usage