The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  THE

  INTERPRETER

  FROM

  JAVA

  In which the recollections of a heffalump and the memoirs of a wartime interpreter, hammered out on a typewriter, are interrupted by the stories, letters and mutterings of their eldest son, with commentary from his brother.

  ALFRED

  BIRNEY

  THE

  INTERPRETER

  FROM

  JAVA

  Translated from the original Dutch by

  David Doherty

  AN APOLLO BOOK

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in Dutch as De tolk van Java in 2016 by Uitgeverij De Geus

  This is an Apollo book. First published in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Alfred Birney, 2016

  Translation © David Doherty, 2020

  The moral right of Alfred Birney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organisations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Cover design © Kari Brownlie

  Author photo © Eddo Hartmann

  ISBN (HB): 9781788544320

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781788544337

  ISBN (E): 9781788544313

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  www.headofzeus.com

  This publication has been made possible with financial support from the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

  In memory of my parents,

  who were once Baldy and the Heffalump.

  There are no mistakes in life

  Some people say

  It is true sometimes

  You can see it that way

  Bob Dylan

  (‘Man in the Long Black Coat’, 1989)

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I

  Dissonants

  Guitar and typewriter – At the pictures – Cesspit – Recollections of a heffalump (1) – From Baldy’s memoirs (1): Soil of the Fatherland – Recollections of a heffalump (2) – Matagora – Recollections of a heffalump (3) – Incubator – Recollections of a heffalump (4) – Heads – Guitar Indo (1) – Pah Tjillih – Hello, Papa! – Weighing out nails – Recollections of a heffalump (5) – From Baldy’s memoirs (2): Regarding my birth – Horoscope – From Baldy’s memoirs (3): Near death – Wolf and Bear – Baldy goes to European Public School – Karel teaches me to fight – My twelfth birthday – The deaths of Bear and Wolf – Shooting practice – The death of my father – Jayabaya and Nostradamus

  II

  Samurai

  From Baldy’s memoirs

  Bombs land on our house – A portrait of the Queen – Bike, bricks and turtle meat – Bamboo spears and Japanese lessons – Betrayed by my family – Torture – Christened as a Protestant – Resistance – Ella’s lover is sent to hell – My Indonesian friends – Sabotage at the bicycle factory – Another round of torture – Chaos

  III

  Shadow on the Wall

  Snow – Aquarium – Aunty Lieke – Guinea pigs – Broese – Castrol Oil – Ghosts in the hall – The silent Dutchman – Amerindo – Guitar Indo (2) – Hey, Ma! – Guitar Indo (3) – Operation Gourami – Dudok’s kali – Surabaya – The headlight – The dagger – Herring in tomato sauce – 26 November 1964 – Voorschoten – Pleased to meet you – The raven’s tale – In walks a Chinaman… – Abode unknown – The days, the weeks, the months – Guitar Indo (4) – Care home boy – Weekend in The Hague – Island – Weekend in Delft – The park – The band – Welcome – Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone – The dispersal – Willem – The trunk in the basement

  IV

  The Interpreter from Surabaya

  From Baldy’s memoirs

  Merdeka – Captured by pemudas – Allied troops in Surabaya – The banks of Kali Peneleh – Guide – In the service of the AMA Police Forces – Hotel Brunet – ‘You know what you need…’ – Regarding my background – Interpreter with the Dutch Marine Brigade – On patrol with the Marine Brigade Security Service – Head of Prisoner Interrogation at Surabaya HQ-II – Tinned cabbage and Bali – First Police Action – Away from the front – Operation Harlot – Landmine No. 2 – A son returns from the grave – Buried alive – The giant – Ill-fated prisoner transport – Court martial – Bodyguard – Your dreams of the babu… – Flash Gordon and the Jungle Princess – The ravine – Counterintelligence – One-man war – Hadji – Crocodile fodder – A hole in the ground – On patrol with brother Karel – Non-active duty – My old school pals – Blacklisted – Evacuation – Farewell to my brothers – Choices – In cahoots with the enemy – My mother’s parting shot – A Dutch subject – Springtime in Holland

  V

  Coda

  Paper in a munitions chest – Webcam chat – Esteemed Smart Arse (1) – My Dear Inquisitor – Esteemed Smart Arse (2) – Waiting – The night – Hack – Special Service Employees – Arto, come unto us – An announcement in HTML – Sura & Baya

  Glossary

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  I

  DISSONANTS

  Guitar and typewriter

  As a young man in Surabaya, my father saw the flying cigars of the Japanese Air Force bomb his home to rubble, he saw Japanese soldiers behead civilians, he committed acts of sabotage for the Destruction Corps, was tortured and laid in an iron box to broil beneath the burning sun, he saw Japanese soldiers feed truckloads of caged Australian prisoners to the sharks, he saw Punjabi soldiers under British command sneak up on the Japanese and slit their throats, he learned of the death of his cousin on the Burma Railway, heard how his favourite uncle was tortured to death by Japanese soldiers on his father’s family estate, he betrayed his ‘hostess’ sister’s Japanese lover, he guided Allied troops through the heat of East Java, where Indonesian rebels were hung by the ankles and interrogated while he – an interpreter – hammered away at a typewriter, he helped the Allies burn villages to the ground, heard the screams of young rebels consumed by flames as they ran from their simple homes into a hail of gunfire, he learned to handle a gun and, at a railway station, riddled a woman and her child with bullets when a Javanese freedom fighter took cover behind them, he led an interrogation unit in Jember, broke the silence of the most tight-lipped prisoners, he was thrown 250 feet into a ravine when his armoured vehicle hit a landmine, he was ordered by a Dutch officer to supervise the transport of inmates from the municipal jail in Jember and, arriving at Wonokromo station in Surabaya after a nine-hour journey, he dragged the corpses of suffocated prisoners from the goods train, he found the body of an Indo friend who had blown his brains out because his girl had slept with a Dutch soldier, and, amid the chaos of Bersiap, he killed young men with whom he had a score to settle. But for him the worst thing was when the neck of his guitar broke.

  Or did that last detail slip your mind, Pa? Perhaps because you made it up?

  It happened during the First Police Action. Two convoys travelling in opposite directions passed at close quarters. Some squaddie left t
he barrel of his machine gun in harm’s way and you the neck of your guitar. The make of the machine gun is unknown, but your guitar was an original US Gibson: every Indo’s dream, played by all the greats. A prize you’d have given anything to own, even the sweetest girl in all Croc City.

  You were a big man in my eyes, a fearsome figure, and you smiled as you told me this tale in a chilly Dutch living room. The guitar had been a faithful companion to you and your soldier buddies, though you never mention it in your writings. And, as long as that instrument survived, the war still resembled a Boy’s Own caper: tearing around, feeding your face, serenading the village girls, spying on women as they bathed in the river. Night after night as a kid, I had to listen to those ripping yarns of yours. While your Dutch mates in their green berets plastered their tanks with pin-ups, you hung a portrait of their queen at the foot of your bed in Surabaya. Your lofty dream of Holland was just a decent pay packet to most of those guys or, to the psychos among them, an adventure. That first batch of Dutch Marines had been trained in America – to you they were heroes. And, pig-headed as you are, you continued to watch those mindless American movies all your life, films in which war is for heroes and peace is for cowards. Refused to grow up, didn’t you, Pa? You always remained that boy of twenty.

  At the pictures

  Out of the blue – I must’ve been about eighteen – you decided to take me out one night. A rare occurrence. Granted, it had been five years since we’d lived in the same house, since Child Services had taken me from you at the age of thirteen and – in your words – ‘deported’ me to the children’s home. Dutch grub was all they fed us there, but when it came time to leave, the authorities saw fit to lodge me and my brother Phil with a family steeped in the ways of the Indies. Our landlady swanned around as if the sun had never set on the empire. What the hell were Child Services playing at? Five years of knuckling under to a Dutch regime only to be handed over to a family stuck in the colonial past.

  It was the same old battle cry every time you visited us at the children’s home. You insisted you wanted your kids back, that you were fighting one court case after another, that we were ‘your blood’, that we belonged with you… there was no end to it. Phil tried to warn me, but I ignored his brotherly advice. I fled our stifling Indo lodgings and headed straight for the place you told me I belonged. A tram to The Hague, a bus from Staatsspoor station via Voorburg and Leidschendam to a brand-new housing scheme in Voorschoten, where I stood and rang your bell in a bleak and spotless doorway less than a mile from my old children’s home. You opened the door with an unforgettable welcome:

  ‘Why did you forsake me?’

  Jesus calling out to God the Father. Back then you were sleeping with the Bible under your pillow, you crazy bastard. The worst of it was, I honestly believed I had forsaken you. My photo pressed between the pages of your Bible – what was that about? Was I a bookmark in place of your dagger? You didn’t think I’d believe you were praying for me, did you? Later I became convinced you stuck pins in that photo. I told that to two girlfriends of mine after I fled your home once and for all, and it made them cry. They thought I had lost my mind, though by that time they knew you weren’t exactly sane yourself: I brought those sweet American hippies back to your place one day and you took them for a couple of floozies, sent them packing without a second glance. You turfed out an American-Dutch friend of mine too. And all because he was black, racist loon that you are. That same friend later told me you were a madman, just like Ma had always said. I didn’t want to believe it then. I’m afraid I still don’t.

  And so you took me out that Tuesday night. Who goes to the pictures on a Tuesday? We caught a bus in Voorschoten, got off at Staatsspoor station and walked to the Odeon on Herengracht. They were showing an American action flick: five death-row inmates offered one last chance at freedom if they rescued some military boffin from the clutches of the Vietnamese. Raising hell as they roared through the jungles of Vietnam on their motorbikes, the convicts were picked off one by one but against all odds the scientist was saved. You stared spellbound at the screen; you and a handful of other simple souls dotted about the cinema. You were forty-five, give or take – an age for contemplation, for self-reflection – yet you sat there like a little kid next to a son who loathed motorbikes, who squeezed his eyes shut when one of the heroes was shot to pieces, snared by a vine, strung upside down, impaled on a bed of bamboo spears. Those Viet Cong and their booby traps! Grisly tactics aside, I secretly cheered them on. To me they were the underdogs, my blood brothers on the silver screen. You rooted for the gung-ho Yanks. Unease was all I felt sitting there next to you; perhaps you felt uneasy next to me. On the bus back to Voorschoten not a word passed between us. I suppose you were trying to coax me out of my shell, stuck on my own in that suicide flat of yours listening to the radio all day while you were out at work, no clue what to do with my life. Puccini Crescent: what a grim corner of the commuter belt that was, a horseshoe of four-storey flats in a satellite town wedged between Leiden and The Hague, home to lonely men and women too timid to say hello when they passed on the street, office drones who spent their evenings watching TV alone.

  Guess what, Pa, life in Holland hasn’t changed. Thanks for settling in this cold country where life is good as long as you have no need of warmth. Wise of you to live out your days in Spain. Or is it just cowardice? Fear we might come over and do you in? It’s still three against one, pal. Only we’re bigger now, stronger, a far cry from the little lads we once were. I’m a halfway decent jujitsuka. Phil is a killing machine with a handful of black belts. Arti is a streetfighter. Give it your best shot, old man. During your last year in Holland – South Haarlem, another desperate hole – I heard you slept with an axe under your bed, scared Arti would turn up one night and punch your lights out. I heard that from Ma and she heard it from one of your daughters, Mil most likely, your favourite, named after some old flame, an Aussie girl you picked up in your Java days. You can thank your lucky stars I only took up martial arts late in life. I’m not the killing kind, Pa, but even now you deserve a one-way trip to Intensive Care courtesy of my own bare hands. Twenty-five years of groaning under your iron fist, your paranoia, followed by twenty-five years writing it all down in an unfinished book might seem like a balance of sorts, but I’d rather have spent forty-nine years living life to the full and one year behind bars for inflicting grievous bodily harm on a former marine. No such luck: I am a noble being, a pen-wielding samurai who walks a gentler path, who strums his guitar and makes people smile. I have been cursed with an inquiring nature, naive enough to think I can fathom the inner workings of an unhinged fascist. Perhaps you deserve that too, if only because the pages that comprise your monument may yet expose Dutch history for the lie that it is.

  *

  The movie is over. The director chisels his heroes’ faces in the clouds.

  THE END

  (complete with bombastic crescendo)

  In your boyhood dreams, you must have pictured your own face up there. Forget it, Pa. The war-movie heaven those heroes fly off to only ever existed in Hollywood.

  *

  When I was twelve, you gave me a pen. An old-school fountain pen, complete with ink pot and pen wiper. A gift to assuage your guilt after you kicked me down the stairs and back up again in that sad little two-up two-down of ours in The Hague Southwest. One of those jerry-built neighbourhoods that would end up housing society’s outcasts fifty years on. Even so, you knew what you were doing when you gave me that pen. You saw more in me than you ever let on, with those oblique Asian ways of yours.

  You didn’t stop there. When I turned twelve you began to inundate me with books about the war. A slew of aircraft carriers, jet fighters and bombers in black and white. Honestly, Pa, I could see no beauty in those photos. Later, much later, I found out that not one of those history books could be trusted. Lousy propaganda, in praise of the technological advances in killing machines. They spoke of Police Actions: a veiled term for col
onial war that no researcher, journalist or writer has succeeded in scrapping from those worthless schoolbooks. Dutch colonial history is filed away in a separate set of bookcases. And then there are the hordes of Dutchmen who think history begins with World War Two and are happy to consign the rest to antiquity. These are the people I live among. How’s that for a life sentence? They think World War Two ground to a halt on 5 May 1945. Sure it did, for the Dutch behind their dunes.

  Say, Pa, your mother was Chinese, wasn’t she? That makes you half Chinese and me a quarter, following a path in my own DNA by nosing around in the I Ching, that mysterious Book of Changes. Hexagram 29 has this to say: ‘It is only through repetition that the pupil makes the material his own.’

  Critical self-reflection is hard to come by here in Holland. The Dutch bang on about slaves, coolies, migrant workers and the children of colonial love. Your lot arrived here as first-generation migrants from the Indies and the Dutch scattered you throughout the land: back in the fifties one Indo family to every street was pretty much the quota. If only they had stuck you all in a ghetto. The Hague Southwest would have become the place to be. We, the generations that followed, would be leaning out of windows and lounging on balconies, the mixed-blood remnants of the Dutch tropics, alive and still kicking. Saturday night would be one big jamboree, complete with Hawaiian music, Indo rock, kite flying and a tombola. Now the place is home to every ethnic minority under the sun and police patrol cars blight the streets.

  Cesspit

  Even before the Allies had liberated the southern provinces towards the end of World War Two, the old slogan ‘If the Indies fall, disaster calls’ echoed like a mantra through the Netherlands. The first shiploads of volunteer soldiers, recruited in Brabant and Limburg, were nowhere near enough to save a colony and a swift amendment to the constitution was needed to put conscripts in the firing line. Among them was my mother’s brother, Uncle Jan. Very much against his will, ‘Our Jan’, as they called him back home in Helmond, found himself in the self-proclaimed Republic of Indonesia, feigning stomach cramps, nausea, headaches and a complete aversion to the tropical heat from the second he arrived.