Zeng Hai Wong came out of the darkness and found her; groping, he found the bundle and guessed from its shape. “You—you did it—”
“You came to do it? Did they hit you?”
“No, I groaned to fool them, I wasn’t where the sound seemed to come from, I thought they were shooting at my false voice. What’s this—you’re bleeding—?”
“No, it’s his head.”
“It’s not. This is warm.”
“Just a scratch.”
But her cough betrayed her, though she choked it to a gasp which carried no more than a yard. “How’d you know me?”
“I knew you’d left. And then that flashlight, though the perfume made me sure.” So he remembered her perfume, what little of it he could have picked from the reek and smoke of her father’s house. That was the happiest of all her extravagances.
“It’s my feet,” she explained as she stumbled. “I bound them.”
Zeng Hai Wong half-dragged, half-carried Mu Lan and her proof of victory. When she lagged hopelessly, he set her on his shoulder, and jogged along like a porter. He knew what a race he was running with the enemy, but he was too intent to realize what a race Mu Lan was losing.
At the dawn rest, she toppled, and would not mount his shoulder. “You can’t go fast enough. Unless you go alone. Hurry, Hai Wong, take the proof or we both lose face—” The feigned rattle in her throat tricked him. Without a backward glance, he swung into a trot. When he was almost beyond her sight, she struggled to her feet, and tottered on. She knew that she could never reach Ching Pao, yet she had to walk as long as she could.
The small bullets lengthened her torment, yet in the end, she blessed them. Had they been larger, she would have dropped many li further from her goal. There was no chance of being buried among her own people; that was clear, and she was resigned to reality when she knew that she could not again pick herself up.
Finally she raised her face a little from the flagstones. The height of the embankment above the fields gave her a small advantage, and the rise of a crest furthered it.
Though she could not see Ching Pao, she saw smoke, and ever spreading flame. Mu Lan twisted a little. The men of Yin Pao were not being shamed by their rivals. She saw the smoking fields of the neighboring settlement, and she had even a moment to be glad for that, and for Zeng Hai Wong’s fast march.
ALLAH MADE THEM AS THEY ARE
Originally appeared in Short Stories, December 1944.
CHAPTER I
Ahmat had plenty of time to get the people of his village organized to welcome the Japs when they came to take over the most important town in Northern Sumatra; and when the invaders landed in Kota Raja, he said, somewhat for the benefit of all of his waiting people, but mainly for his lovely young wife, “Praise be to Allah! This is my day of days!”
Zeynab answered, dutifully enough, “May Allah make it happy for you!”
The yellow scarf which all but hid her sleek black hair was caught about throat and shoulders, and with an instinctively achieved elegance. Gilt embroidery adorned her blue blouse, but then, everyone had that; Zeynab’s real triumph was high-heeled red shoes. They murdered her feet, but they were worth the pain.
“Don’t forget,” Ahmat said to the betel-chewing group of elders who crowded about him, “to yell banzai when you wave the flags.”
White-haired Saoud, who wore an ink and pen case at his belt, left off polishing the silver-rimmed spectacles which served no purpose other than to make it clear that he was a schoolteacher and a scholar. “By Allah, that banzai is nonsense! Ten thousand years for what?”
“For the Emperor,” Ahmat snapped; he’d explained everything the previous evening.
“No man lives that long. The Japs are doubtless an absurd people, the one who used to come to take our pictures was.”
“Yell it anyway! They like it.”
Ahmat scowled fiercely, but seeing that the teacher did not flinch, he turned his bitter gaze on the others.
Ahmat was a brown and wrinkled man in blue silk jodhpurs, gold embroidered jacket, and European shoes which tormented his feet. His eyes slanted slightly, his nostrils flared like those of a stallion scenting a rival; the beetling of his brows made dark depths from which his eyes gleamed as challengingly as the topaz eyes of the red-and-yellow plumed fighting cock he carried in a wicker cage; Merah, the local champion, stood next to Zeynab in Ahmat’s affection.
Smoke from the ruined airport, the docks, and the railroad yards reddened the setting sun, so that by contrast it exaggerated the green rice fields which terraced the Acheen hills; but Ahmat’s village a few miles away from the river, was untouched.
The soldiers disembarking from the barges wore dirty and sweat-stained uniforms. Though no air attack menaced, each had leaf and grass camouflage on his helmet.
Ahmat waved the small white flag on which Zeynab had stitched a rising sun. “Banzai! Banzai!”
The villagers followed the mayor’s example; all, that is, except Saoud, and Zeynab, outstanding examples which did not improve Ahmat’s disposition. Certainly the country had gone to the devil under Dutch rule!
The invaders tramped past, a dirty ragged, reeking column of tired but triumphant soldiers from Singapore. Some grinned at the cheering Malays; most, however, walked in their sleep, since they had time only for advancing from one victory to the next. There was nothing clean about them except their rifles, which were as well kept as the straight-hiked swords the grimy officers carried.
“These be fighting men,” Ahmat said to Saoud when the villagers broke to trail after the column for a way.
“So are the Dutch.”
And now that Zeynab was out of earshot, Ahmat released what he had kept to himself, lest his wife overhear it, when the elders met at his house, the previous evening.
“These men are not ruled by a woman! We are free of the Dutch Sultana, and once more a man is chief.”
Though Saoud’s smile kept the day from being what it should have been, Ahmat carried on, “It is unmanly to be ruled by a woman, it is against adat, it is not fitting, it is not proper!”
They followed the troops to the plaza of Kota Raja, where Dutch officials formally surrendered the town. Loud-speakers blared warnings in Malay and Japanese, repeating the text of the notices which, posted on all the buildings, set forth the rules of the new regime.
The townsmen chattered, gaped, craned their necks. All but the Chinese had turned out; they kept under cover. Ahmat’s villagers, well in the background, had to tiptoe for a look. Then, despite the cordon of soldiers who kept the crowd from the plaza, those in front surged forward, driven by the curious and the impatient in the rear.
An officer yelled a warning. The thin line of soldiers plied rifle butts. Thus far, it was no more than the khaki-clad Malay police were doing in their effort to maintain order; but native curiosity was not to be controlled, and those in the rear could not hear for the crackle and snarl of loud speakers.
There was another general surge.
Ahmat frowned. He smelled trouble as well as Japs. His early disappointment became acute uneasiness.
“We have seen and heard enough,” he said to Zeynab and the nearest elders, “let us go home.”
“Oh, but it’s just becoming interesting,” Zeynab insisted, smiling impishly. “I want to see the Dutch lurah make a speech.” Then, whispering in his ear, “It’ll look bad, leaving now, you told us to cheer.”
“Very well,” he had to concede, though grudgingly, for she was uncomfortably right in her logic.
Ahmat got up on the hub of a kerbau cart wheel. Dignity or no, he had to watch this. He did not like the Japanese faces; it was not that they were offensive, as such, but that they showed all too plainly weariness and tension. They weren’t men to be crowded or startled. “Sleeping dogs,” was the thought that came to him, an odd comparison for their w
elcoming committee, yet he could think of nothing else. They’d bite without thinking.
No one seemed to share the uneasy foresight that had become almost a premonition. No one seemed aware that the officer nearest Ahmat’s side of the square was worried, and fearful lest he neglect his duty. A soldier was knocked sprawling by the billowing of the crowd. The captain saw this, shouted, waved his sword.
The machine guns at the entrance of the city hall snarled, a short burst, needling the crowd, stabbing here and there; the gunners cared little whether they hit or missed their widely separated fellows who tried to maintain the cordon.
The fire was high. Not more than half a dozen spectators dropped. The soldiers plied bayonet and butt, and without doubt in what they called moderation.
The sightseers broke in panic. Ahmat, diving for the ground at the first burst, led the retreat.
The firing ceased as quickly as it had begun. It had not been intended as a massacre; it was merely a warning to hotheads who might have considered rushing the handful of soldiers.
“You see what I mean?” Ahmat demanded, after he had explained the psychology of it all to old Saoud. “Tired men, and only a few of them, the advance guard, and our people were thousands.”
“And if we’d had krisses, we might have done them harm?”
The teacher spoke so smoothly that Ahmat agreed before he was aware of the trap into which he’d blundered.
“But there weren’t any krisses in sight,” Saoud went on. “Did you see any from where you stood?”
Ahmat spat out the cud of tobacco and lime and betel, and told Zeynab to roll him another chew. “No krisses,” the mayor growled, “because the Dutch Sultana made us quit wearing them, and we became women!”
Saoud smiled gently. “No one was angry with us. Just half a dozen shot down as a reminder. No evil in their hearts. They are as women, flaring up when there is no cause.”
The smile became thin and bitter, and then the voice deepened, surprisingly for such a frail old fellow. “Yea, but when they have cause for anger, it will not be as the clawing of women! O Man, may Allah be gentle in His enlightening of you!”
CHAPTER II
Life, however, was not so bad, back in Kampong Baharu, where Ahmat and his people were all too content to remain, after having had a glimpse of Greater East Asia’s mild discipline. The surly water buffaloes, submerged until only their noses and crescent-shaped horns were visible, enjoyed their mid-day siesta in the pools just off the hard-packed square; wiry, long-legged chickens cackled, and scratched for rice which had leaked from the thatched granaries or had been lost during the winnowing.
Of a morning, the women went to the market, carrying on their sleek heads the wide rattan baskets of bananas and mangos, fresh fish, plantains, and yams. Meanwhile, the elders, and the men not busy tilling the terraced rice fields, lounged in the shade and arranged cockfights. There was nothing to worry about, least of all about finances, a matter which the women handled, as Allah and custom had ordained.
All this was good. And it was good to be sitting in the shade, chewing and spitting. Long silence, then grave rebuttal of some previous speaker’s impressive words about nothing of any importance. Being a Malay gentleman was, after all, the ultimate of human existence, now that the Dutch Sultana no longer ruled Sumatra. And collaboration—as Ahmat saw it, a few banzais and a bit of flag waving—was a splendid idea.
Ahmat’s first doubts came a week or so later, when Japanese trucks, guarded by soldiers, and preceded by an officer riding a motorcycle side car, came to Kampong Baharu. Captain Tashi stepped briskly from the sputter-bike. He found the mayor, and he lost no time at all in announcing the number of gantangs of rice he had come to requisition.
Ahmat protested, “There is not any such amount, we have had a poor crop, there is barely enough until next harvest!”
Captain Tashi smiled indulgently, opened his briefcase, and got his records. “Honorable Mayor,” he said in excellent Malay, “the Imperial Government has records indicating figure I name. Be kind enough to load same into waiting conveyance.”
The soldiers lined up by the trucks too businesslike for argument; and Ahmat now preferred the smile of the Jap officer to the bitter looks of the village elders.
Captain Tashi went on, “Payment is in cash.”
Ahmat brightened. This was not so bad. More than that, he was able to protest enough to get Captain Tashi to whittle down the requisition by a considerable amount.
When the rice was loaded, Tashi dug into his case and said, “Here is payment, now give me a receipt.”
“Allah! Is that all? That is not what we get—”
“That is the controlled price. Government curbs profiteers.”
“But we’ll have to buy rice later! It’ll cost us more—”
Tashi was patient. “To meet a temporary emergency, you will patriotically contribute to the army liberating you from oppression. Later, everything will be cheaper.”
The trucks had scarcely left the granary when the villagers crowded about Ahmat to get their share of the cash just received, since the rice had been community property.
“What kind of money is this?” they demanded. “It is different.”
Ahmat made a virtue of necessity. “It is liberation money, naturally it is not like Dutch money. But it is good, go spend it as you need it.”
And then he settled down to strengthen his position. His voice rang, his air was commanding, his gestures were emphatic. “As the captain said,” Ahmat went on, “thousands of soldiers who liberated us need rice. Can they stop to plant and harvest? Of course not! Perhaps we will run short, though Allah is the best provider. Certainly we’ll have none to sell. But liberation is worth paying for. Banzai!”
There were answering cheers; not quite the volume or enthusiasm he had hoped, but still, a very good response.
Despite the gutted granary, Ahmat did not feel too disillusioned by collaboration; but Zeynab’s first trip to the bazaar in Kota Raja, a few days later, gave him a shock.
She came back with an empty basket, and a handful of liberation currency, which last she flung to the floor. She screamed, “Those sons of lewd mothers! Those eaters of filth!”
Ahmat’s jaw sagged, and a red trickle of betel juice leaked from the corners of his mouth. “What’s this? Allah, what’s this?”
“I said, it’s no good!”
“You mean the merchants refuse it?”
“No, but—” She contemptuously gouged her toe into a five guilder note. “That dirty paper, it’s no good at the bank.”
“You went to the bank to ask?” he asked sarcastically.
“I did not! But Ah Ling knows, his uncle works in the bank.”
“But they’ve got to take it, it is the law.”
“Oh, they take it! They take it,” the outraged girl screamed, “but you’re lucky to get one guilder’s worth for each five in paper! Now, the Dutch paper—”
“Silence, women!” The mayor got up. “There are temporarily few things for sale, that Chinaman is trying to get rich on what stock he has. By Allah, I’ll—”
She caught his arm. “You’ll do nothing of the kind, you stay here, you’ll talk yourself into trouble with your Japanese friends!”
Her unfeigned alarm and dismay made Ahmat cool down in a hurry. “How is that?” he asked, and sat down.
“They beat Ah Ling’s neighbor for not wanting to take the money. And then some people tried to steal rice, they got their hands chopped off.”
“Both hands?”
“Oh, no, just one hand apiece.”
Neither Ahmat nor Zeynab really understood what was wrong with printing press money. While inflation was a meaningless term, they did realize that the mere difficulty of replenishing stocks had already made prices zoom, and that “real” currency went further than the Japanese kind.
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“But there isn’t any Dutch money in town,” Zeynab went on, “those fathers of little pigs took it away from the shop keepers and gave them this kind. That proves it’s not good, if our old kind weren’t better, they’d not be taking it.”
Ahmat held his hand over his eyes. His head was spinning from the intricacies of high finance and foreign exchange. “I betake me to Allah for refuge from Satan!” he groaned. “Don’t ask me to figure it out.”
“God does what He will do,” Zeynab said, resignedly.
And Ahmat was grateful that she had passed up the chance to remind him that he had had it all figured out in advance.
Voices from neighboring houses gave a hint as to what other husbands were hearing. Those gentlemen, however, could always blame it on the mayor; and toward sunset, when the usual visitors failed to show up at Ahmat’s place, he knew that he had been made the scapegoat.
This was Bad, but worse was on the way. It arrived a month later, when Major Okama, a political officer, came to Kampong Baharu. He was grim, tight mouthed, sharp eyed, and it was plain that nothing he saw pleased him.
Major Okama’s companion was a white clad civilian, a bland, smiling little man who wore rimless glasses; and his face was all too familiar to Ahmat. Mr. Hagawa, who had gone from village to village, long before the invasion, giving the natives bargain rates on the pictures he took of them, had returned.
The political officer began, “You are Ahmate, the mayor, yes?”
Then, to verify the answer, he dug into a file of pictures, selected one, squinted at it and at Ahmat. “Just as represented. You are the one who offered patriotic greetings. So I call on you first. Before any others, you benefit by Great East Asia prosperity and right thought. This is Mr. Hagawa, he is to open the Japanese language school for this village.”
The gathered elders rearranged their wrinkles, trying to conceal their skepticism. Ahmat said, “We appreciate the high honor, but it is difficult for our boys to attend two schools, we are very busy, everyone works in the field, no matter how young, there is still part time work for him.”
E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action Page 28
