Prophets and Loss (A Johnny Ravine Mystery) Read online

  Chapter Six

  Every funeral brings your own closer. Nowhere was that truth more evident than in the mountains of East Timor.

  When I was a young recruit I mourned all our martyrs. Each funeral was a sacred occasion, a time to pledge that I would redouble my efforts to liberate our country.

  I remember the first death among our men, when I was just fifteen and had been less than nine months with our unit. We attacked a small tree-rimmed command post by the river at the old capital of Manatuto. The Indonesians were still not well organized. They had not been expecting such strong resistance to their invasion of our land. With our rifles we killed four men. But a few hours later a truckload of soldiers arrived to hunt us down. We fled, and as we did so a bullet caught Celestino, a twenty-one-year-old seminary student who had quit his studies in order to join the resistance.

  We couldn’t retrieve the body, but we honored his death with a solemn memorial service. I was stricken with grief. Later I visited his family to pay my respects, and I vowed to remember him every year on the anniversary of the shooting.

  But then the Indonesian killing fields began. The enemy began its siege of our island, with mortars, napalm and carpet-bombing. They eradicated whole villages. Bodies became almost as common as coffee trees.

  It was just a few years after Celestino’s death that our unit was sitting around a campfire one chilly evening, eating corn stew, when a stray dog turned up carrying something in its mouth. It was a human arm. And no one cared.

  Most of my friends were killed in the jungles of East Timor. Usually their funerals were sparse bless-the-Lord-and-pass-the-ammunition affairs. I became numb to death.

  But then Jacinta was murdered, and my numbness metamorphosed into red-hot rage. I commemorated her death with an orgy of violence and murder. Maybe a funeral would have forestalled that. After all, we need ritual in our lives. It helps create meaning, and a funeral is one of the most profound rituals of all. The most godless among us feel the need for some kind of send-off - even just a flower tossed into a swirling river - some acknowledgement that the deceased will live on, at the very least in our memories: an attempt to touch the transcendent; a recognition of the mystery of death.

  And then I had come to Australia, and somehow I had seen my arrival as marking a new beginning. Somewhere in my subconscious I had imagined that death might no longer happen, or at least not to my friends. That the normal rules didn’t apply any more.

  But of course they do. As I walked slowly to church for Grant’s funeral I realized that his death was a wake-up call. The same old rules still applied. And in a strange way that made me even more depressed than the death itself. I cursed Grant for dying. I cursed Melissa and the pastor for reasons that eluded me. And as I walked into church I found myself cursing God as well.

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