Angels of Mercy and Death

Fauzi Husaini is lying on his belly under the collapsed house, clawing at the dirt with his fingers to get the dead man’s skull free, when his cellphone rings.

He slides out into the open air to shut off the ‘70s Indonesian pop music ring tone that has pierced the silence of this lifeless seafront village. It’s his boss, wondering what he’s doing.

“I’m evacuating,” Husaini says laconically, using the local term for collecting bodies. Same thing he’s done every day since the second day after the tsunami.

“This area was supposed to cleared,” he complains to his boss, who is the head of the local Red Cross. “How did they miss this one? The feet are sticking out of the house.”

More than 10 weeks after the massive tsunami roared out of the Indian Ocean, Indonesian army units and the local Red Cross are still finding the dead, until recently more than 200 a day across Indonesia’s Aceh province, where the waves hit hardest and the death toll now tops 125,000.

But in the last week, the number of bodies found has plunged.

Although 95,000 people are still unaccounted for across the province, most of those are believed to have been swept out to sea or submerged in slimy black pools carved from the landscape by the tsunami’s violent retreat.

What was an exercise in collection has become a hunt. No longer reeking so strongly of decomposition, the dead are harder to find. They are underwater or camouflaged against an unrelenting gray-brown collage of snapped wood, mud and toppled concrete that is as desolate as Hiroshima was after the atomic bombing.

The body under this house in Cot Langkeuh, just outside Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, was not picked up on earlier sweeps, probably because it is pinned under concrete and mangled iron. It won’t be freed easily.

Recovering this one body won’t make much of a dent in the tally of the missing, but statistics aren’t everything. There may be a family that wants to bury this man, Husaini points out. Anyway, he can’t be left here.

So the 37-year-old Husaini and his team of seven body hunters go to work on this scorcher of a morning. The Red Cross gives them about $3.25 a day and not much in the way of supplies: white plastic coveralls and yellow gloves, a stack of blue body bags. No tools. Not even a shovel.

First, they need to prop up what remains of the house to get better access to the body. They scavenge the surrounding wreckage for wooden beams, jamming them into the rubble to try to lever the debris free.

One after another, the beams snap. Concrete beats wood.

“Of course, we could use a big digger, but it’s impossible to call one every time we find a body like this one; they are needed elsewhere,” Husaini says, dripping sweat.

He is used to this job, finding bodies through instinct, and the others defer to his experience. Before the tsunami, Husaini spent five years going into the jungle to pull out victims of the shooting war between the Indonesian government and the province’s separatist rebels.

There has always been a demand for body collectors in Aceh.

The dead man’s left arm comes apart at the elbow and a worker drops it into a body bag.

Husaini and his team seem sanguine enough about the grim way they earn their wages. Nobody confesses to nightmares, though some of the men say they have had dreams in which strangers thank them for finding a loved one’s body.

“I’m happy to do it,” Husaini says. “It’s my life and I am good at it. I’m alive, so I help.”

The men follow their noses and their instincts, though “sometimes when we can’t find any bodies, we pray to God to show them to us,” Husaini says.

God does not always comply, he admits.

The men have pulled and strained at the debris for an hour and, finally, more body parts are pulled from the wreckage: The skull is handed from one man to another and carefully placed at the top of the body bag where the head would normally go. The right foot below the ankle.

They are amazed when they find the dead man’s watch, caked in mud, still ticking. It is cleaned and eagerly checked for accuracy -- 11:04, perfect time. A quiet argument breaks out between two men over who will keep it. It goes into a pocket.

Ten minutes later, the torso is pulled free of its tomb. In the pants, they find ID cards, a cellphone and a phone book. The man’s name is Hanafiah Ilyas. He was 31 and married.

The crew quickly goes to work thumbing through the phone book and calling numbers. The watch is ungrudgingly transferred to a plastic bag holding the man’s possessions. Husaini dials the numbers in quick succession and, after a couple of dead ends, reaches a man who says he knew Hanafiah Ilyas. He was a driver, the man says.

“Please try to get hold of his family,” Husaini tells him.

“If we don’t hear from them, we will bury him in a mass grave at 5:30.”

The crew puts the remains in the back of the truck and strikes out to look for more victims. The truck bounces along crumbling pavement barely recognizable as the residential streets they once were. The men fan out, stepping across tiled kitchen floors where families once told stories and infants learned to crawl. They gingerly skirt the edges of the ominous black pools of water that are now the main source of bodies.

“Nobody likes the water,” says Ilyas Ibrahim, 24, a cheerful university student who has joined the Red Cross teams and says he otherwise likes the work.

The day has grown overcast, with thunder rumbling in the distance, and the others have stopped for lunch. They squat at the edge of a tsunami-made marsh, eating and joking. They whistle loudly at two young women who ride by on a moped.

Ibrahim is the last to join them. He has plunged into the water in just his shorts and high rubber boots. As he wades toward them, it is soon obvious that he is floating a blue body bag behind him.

“Normally I find them by the smell,” Ibrahim says later.

But this time, he spotted a glint of white flesh and, getting closer, could make out the exposed head of a young girl. Bodies in the water are usually in worse shape than those found on land, the men agree.

In this case, Ibrahim has had to scoop some of the girl’s bones out of the water and into the bag. But her jeans are intact. The crew finds a cellphone in her left pocket. The waterlogged phone doesn’t work, but they pop the SIM card out, plug it into Husaini’s phone, dial the last number called and, in seconds, have Siti Bahrena Humaira’s father on the line.

He shows up 10 minutes later. Samsul Bahrul’s story is as sad and terrible as the thousands of others. The family lived about a mile and a half from the sea, easily within the tsunami’s deadly reach. That morning, 12-year-old Siti had gone with her mother and younger sister into the center of Banda Aceh, away from the water, for a painting competition.

“Siti was very creative, a very active girl,” says her uncle Dek Gam, who has come with his brother-in-law to collect the body.

When the earthquake hit, Bahrul jumped into his car and drove toward downtown Banda Aceh to find his family. They, in turn, were running home, directly into the deadly wave.

Bahrul looked for his family for four days, he says, then gave up, though for a week or so longer he continued to drive to orphanages to see whether his children might have been saved.

He had searched farther inland, assuming that the wave would have carried them away from the shore. He was looking in the wrong area. Siti had been swept back out by the retreating tide. Her body was snagged on a snapped branch of a coconut tree in the tsunami marsh about 400 yards from the sea.

A hasty funeral is planned in a flurry of cellphone calls, and the crew calls off the day’s search. They put Siti’s body in an ambulance and drive her home. Her family no longer has a house, but it does have a burial plot, its headstones toppled and broken by the water. With a borrowed hoe and a shovel, the body hunters dig her grave in the sodden clay.

Bahrul is stoic. His neighbors say he used to cry as he watched children go to school after the tsunami, but there are no tears now. It has been more than two months since the wave changed his life.

Siti’s remains are transferred onto a white cloth, seven layers thick, then carefully wrapped and tied. The men gather. Siti’s stunned teenage cousin shows up, along with a neighbor and a village imam, who prays over her body.

Her remains are carried to the grave. There are more prayers, and the crew lowers Siti’s body into the earth’s embrace. Then they join Bahrul, who is ferociously shoveling the dirt into his daughter’s grave.

An hour ago, he was a man whose family had vanished. Suddenly his older daughter had been found and buried. The job done, he weeps.

“She had white skin and was tall,” he says afterward, holding his hand at shoulder height, a proud father. He exhales. “It feels better.”

The neighbors disperse and Husaini and his workers say their goodbyes. Another truck is taking away the day’s haul of bodies -- just five today, down from 35 the day before -- and the workers jump into the back for the ride into Banda Aceh.

Some pedestrians cover their noses as the body truck drives by. It’s instinct now. But the crew doesn’t care. They are exuberant, hollering at moped drivers to get out of their way as they speed home, making clucking sounds at good-looking women. It’s quitting time.

Back at the Red Cross depot, they wash the day’s mud from their boots. Husaini is smiling. He’s done a good thing today, he is told, given solace to a broken father. The body hunter smiles but says he sees this all the time.

At 5:30, another Red Cross team drops the body of Hanafiah Ilyas into a mass grave. His family calls two hours later.