The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  I was soon exhausted from bearing the heavy weight on my shoulders in the full glare of the sun, so exhausted that my legs gave way beneath me. But when my knees started to bend, the pressure from the broomstick was agony. The only way to ease the pain was to straighten up and lift the dead weight of the beam. Whenever I moved, the Japs beat my ribs, my back and my stomach with sticks. I lost all sense of time and could think only of death coming as a release. Then I went out cold.

  I woke up to find myself lying on a thin layer of coal in a box that was around six feet by three feet by two feet; wooden planks on all sides, sheets of corrugated iron above me. The sun was still shining and the air in the coal box was stifling and getting hotter by the minute. Sweat poured from my body, and my mouth was dry as sand. Again I lost consciousness. Later I woke up shivering and saw through the cracks between the planks that evening had come. I tried to get up and banged my head on the iron sheeting. I tried to lift it but could not find the strength. I collapsed onto the coal and fell asleep.

  The following afternoon I was dragged from the box and given another beating. Then two Javanese women who worked in the kitchen were ordered to wash me as the grinning Kenpeitai thugs looked on. With tears in their eyes, the women wiped me clean of dirt and blood. When they were done, I was sent back to the welding shop to continue my work. In all that time I had been given nothing to eat or drink.

  Chaos

  August 1945. The streets of Surabaya were full of Japanese soldiers looking worried and disheartened. Uncle Soen told me that the Japs had lost control of New Guinea and that Allied troops had landed at Balikpapan. Not only that, but the Americans had occupied the Philippines. Uncle Soen spoke of a shift in the Indonesians’ attitude to the Belandas and those who sympathized with them, and made me promise to watch my words whenever I was in Indonesian company.

  Around this time, I struck up a bit of a friendship with a sympathetic chap of around twenty from the kampong behind our house in Undaan Kulon. Soedarsono was his name and I regularly used to drop in to see him and his family. He and his father were members of the Indonesian National Party. Soedarsono was honest with me. He knew about my loyalty to the Dutch and my love for the House of Orange. Like Uncle Soen, he warned me to keep these feelings to myself. Soedarsono told me that if Japan capitulated, the Indonesian people would never again allow themselves to be colonized by the Dutch. Instead, Sukarno would declare an independent Republic of Indonesia. I did not know who Sukarno was, and Soedarsono told me a few things about him. Such was my ignorance of all things political.

  Among the workforce at the bicycle factory, relations between the Indos and the Indonesians had taken a serious turn for the worse. The situation was explosive. I sided with the Indos. Before long, heated exchanges flared into fighting and of course the Indos were very much in the minority.

  As tensions ran high, I found myself squaring up to Redjo, the workshop foreman. A notorious pendekar fighter, he went as if to walk away but in fact he was gathering himself for a jumping scissor kick that could break my neck. I saw what he was up to and grabbed a big, rough file in my left hand and a sledgehammer in my right. I leapt to the side to dodge his attack and spun round in a flash to bring the hammer down hard on his back. He fell forwards. I jumped on his back and stamped his face into the ground. I heard bones break. His friend Soedjarwo jumped me from behind. I hit him hard with the file and just about ripped his face open. When the other Javanese saw this, they made themselves scarce.

  In the meantime, fights had broken out with the other Indo boys. I called on them to make a move. We quickly formed a group, lashing out with anything that came to hand, and ran out onto the main road. There we scattered in all directions and fled for home.

  As the sixteenth of August dawned, I was walking through Pasar Besar armed with a fighting knife. On the roof of the government building, I saw the Japanese flag being lowered and, a little later, the red, white and blue of the Netherlands was flying proudly. From the windows of apartments above the shops, I heard the strains of the Dutch national anthem blaring from the radio. I cried out with joy, but before long I was surrounded by a bunch of hostile Javanese, bellowing their cry of independence. ‘Merdeka!’ As they bore down on me, I drew my knife and struck the first man in the face. When the others saw the blood, they shrank back and warned each other. ‘Watch out for that boy. He is a dangerous fighter!’

  The next day I pinned my badge with the flag of Nationalist China to my shirt and, armed with my knife, I walked from Undaan Kulon to Jagalan and on to Contong Square, where I had a good view of the government building. To my amazement I saw the red, white and blue sliding down the flagpole and the red and white flag of Indonesia being raised in its place. The Indonesian people who crowded the streets were beside themselves with joy. The cry of ‘Merdeka!’ rang out everywhere. The few Japanese soldiers on the streets with a rifle slung over their shoulder looked on in bitter resignation.

  The terror against the Japs began that same day, across from the Luxor cinema on the main square. I saw a Javanese boy attack an unsuspecting Japanese soldier from behind with a takeyari. He drove the spear right through the soldier’s body, shouting ‘Senjata makan tuan!’ Their own weapons were being turned against them.

  A deafening roar burst from the crowd and in no time every Japanese soldier on the street had been speared to death. Even after they were dead, people continued to hack at them with klewang. Those Japs were maimed and mutilated by the raging crowd of Javanese, their guns and equipment seized. It was a terrifying, sickening sight.

  I was surrounded by a group of screaming, bloodthirsty Javanese. ‘For over three hundred years we were colonized and trampled underfoot by the Belandas. Then the Japs did the same. Now we are the boss! We want independence! That is what President Sukarno has promised us. We heard his declaration on the radio. Once the Japs have gone, it will be the Belandas’ turn. Death to the lot of them!’

  I nodded and slipped away from the massacre. I walked in the direction of Sulung viaduct to get a view of what was happening around the government building. What I saw was total chaos. The police had lost all control. Young rebels had even seized the policemen’s weapons. They forced Japanese soldiers to hand over their guns and then shot them in cold blood. Even a handful of Indo men fell victim to the frantic mob. I felt panic rising and hurried back to Pasar Besar and on to Baliwerti. There too, I witnessed murder and mayhem. The crowd had taken leave of their senses.

  Out of nowhere I was seized by a group of five bloodthirsty rebels. They wanted to know if I had any NICA money on me. I did not know what they were talking about and swore on my life that I had none. I pulled out my ID and when they saw I was Chinese they let me go. On the way home from Baliwerti I thought to myself, ‘I am a peranakan, armed with a fighting knife. I can take any side, join any movement. Yet there is only one path open to me.’

  I think I’ll spare Ma these tales of yours, Pa. Leave her in peace with the crap she watches on TV. Too much cruelty could rip the lid off the cesspit of her memories, and I’ve been hard enough on her already. Perhaps I should ask Phil what he makes of it all. He severed all ties with you a while back. Even smashed one of Grandma Sie’s Chinese vases to smithereens in a fit of rage one New Year’s Eve in Geneva. But that was long ago.

  III

  SHADOW ON THE WALL

  Snow

  Surabaya Papa has found himself a bargain: a second-hand sled. But he will not come outside with us. He feels the cold. He comes from a country so warm it never snows. I share the sled with my twin brother. We have to share everything, right down to the mandatory bottle of school milk. We take turns pulling each other along, argue about whose turn it is and peer into the distance, down a lane that is fading to white. The snow over in Zuider Park must be thick as pillows.

  A man in a grey hat and a Loden overcoat passes us by and tells us we need a good wash. We nearly rub our little brown eyes out of our little brown heads and stare after him in amazement. />
  ‘Oh, let those folk say what they like,’ says Mama Helmond without looking up from her granite kitchen counter.

  We were too young to understand the narrow-minded quip of a man born and bred in The Hague, let alone Mama’s dismissive response. To us it was all deadly serious, like the snowflakes turning to powder, the runners on our sled scraping over bare paving stones. A polar expedition turning intractable, boring and wet.

  We sat back to back on the slats of our sled and swore we would wait as long as it took for the snow to start falling again. The thickest snow was always over yonder, a place where you never had to lug your sled over rasping pavements, where you could sledge on and on and on. What would it be like to get there at last?

  One day, dragging our sled behind us, we walked to the very end of Melis Stokelaan, all the way past Zuider Park. Walked until we could no longer see the block of flats where we lived.

  Another man in a grey hat and a Loden overcoat asked us where we were going. We told him we were lost. He was friendly and, hoisting our sled on his shoulder, he walked us all the way back to our little tenement flat. A place where war was raging, mostly at night, when the shadow of Surabaya Papa and his dagger played on our bedroom wall as he fought an enemy we could not see.

  ‘He sees ghosts, that father of yours,’ was Mama Helmond’s daily refrain. ‘He thinks those ploppers from Indonesia are coming to kill him, and us along with him.’

  ‘What are they, Mama? Ploppers?’

  ‘Bandits. That’s what they are. They fight in camouflage so you can’t spot them in the jungle. They chased your father out of Indonesia. He won’t even let me say the word Indonesia. All he can talk about is that precious Indies of his. But your father’s from Java, and Java is still Java. Now go to your room and leave me in peace. Can’t you see I’m busy in the kitchen?’

  *

  ‘Hey, we should have told the nice man in the grey hat that we didn’t have a home to go to. We could’ve said the ploppers kidnapped Papa and took him back to Java. Maybe he would have taken us to church. That’s where the nice people go, the ones that help children. The church gave us blankets. Those warm, prickly ones, they’re from the church.’

  ‘Yes, and the nice man in the grey hat’s big footprints would have confused everyone. He was carrying the sled, so it left no tracks. They would never have found us.’

  ‘But then what about Mama? And the others?’

  If only it would keep snowing, on and on, then maybe the miracle might come, the one that will take us far beyond the end of the lane. Away from the war on the bedroom wall, forever and ever and never again.

  Aquarium

  A black-and-white photo from the late 1950s. Wavy edges, yellowing, but without the haze of nostalgia. A small aquarium on a rickety table draped with a checked tablecloth. Still Life with German Torpedo. The torpedo being the cylindrical light fitting on the glass lid. Mama Helmond curses the aquarium. It stinks, she says, with its filthy plants, its filthy snails, its filthy algae and the filthy worms crawling through the sludge at the bottom. The filthy worms have a name: tubifex. The madman opens a jam jar full of worms and shoves it under the noses of his wife and all his children so they know what tubifex is supposed to smell like. The jar is left on the windowsill too long and everyone becomes acquainted with that smell too. The worms turn green and brown. Death and decay, the madman calls it. His children need to learn what death and decay smell like, God help us!

  ‘It’s the stink of the Indies, if you ask me!’

  Mama Helmond complains the whole day long. She wants a bit of peace and quiet but finds none. What a life, cooped up with her Indo family in a miserable little council flat in a miserable post-war neighbourhood of The Hague.

  One day Surabaya Papa makes a clumsy move and electrocutes the fish with the heating element. He gets rid of the small tank and enlists two of his Dutch colleagues to carry a bigger tank up to our flat on their Saturday afternoon off. Mama Helmond retreats to the kitchen and puffs her way through half a pack of Miss Blanche, but us kids are enthralled. The hulking great thing is half-rusted and layers of putty have been pressed into service to shore up the glass sides, which are scratched in places. The tank is mounted on a steel rack and can hold over fifty gallons of water. The next day we cycle from our cramped little home on Melis Stokelaan to Kijkduin and spend a day at the beach, fuelled by thermos flasks of cold, sweet tea and white bread slathered in jam. A poor family with a brown father, a white mother and five children ranging in colour from dark to light brown. I am the eldest and darkest, little Nana is the lightest. The dilution of the Indies: a profligate culture born of colonialism can be read in the skin of its children, you might say. We sit on a flowery tablecloth in our ill-fitting shorts, Surabaya Papa’s hand-me-downs stitched to fit our scrawny backsides. The Dutch bathers eye us up with the same deadpan expressions as those hypocrites at church.

  That’s what Surabaya Papa calls them: hypocrites.

  At close of day we cycle home with saddlebags full of sand from the dunes. Surabaya Papa thinks he can rinse away the sea salt. He fetches the big tin bath Mama Helmond uses to wash the bedsheets and bathe the little ones, and empties the saddle bags into it. He pushes a garden hose in among the sand and the water flows abundantly, like the old days in the Indies, a place of waterfalls. Here there is no such thing. Life in Holland is dull as ditches.

  ‘If only you’d stayed there!’ Mama Helmond’s daily mantra.

  Why can’t she keep her trap shut? Much more of that and he’ll beat her senseless again.

  Surabaya Papa has painted the back pane of the aquarium the colours of a guerrilla uniform and plugged the leaky corners with yet more putty. He spreads a layer of potting soil on the bottom of the tank so the water plants will grow and dumps the sand on top. Lugging buckets of water, we fill the aquarium to the brim. From the ditch that skirts the playing fields across from our flat we fetch waterweed, which Surabaya Papa says grows almost as fast as bamboo. Almost. In Holland everything is almost.

  Surabaya Papa is impatient and gives his budding paradise no chance to take root. He insists on seeing fish swim in the water. We are sent to the ditch with our little fishing nets and return with a couple of sticklebacks. Next day we find them floating belly up in the brackish water. Surabaya Papa shrugs indifferently, but we give them a solemn burial in the communal back garden while Mama Helmond looks on behind her newly cleaned windows, fiddling with her hairdo.

  One Sunday afternoon I have to accompany Surabaya Papa to an obscure address somewhere on Hengelolaan, where a man does a shady trade in tropical fish from his top-floor flat. Wall-to-wall shelves groan under the weight of aquariums. Air pumps sing. There are plenty of young Indos among the customers. Indos don’t dress like the Dutch. They wear bomber jackets and stroll around with one hand in their trouser pocket. My father only puts his hands in his pockets when he stands still. When he’s on the move, he’s on his guard, arms swinging close to his sides, ready to defend himself at every second. The Indo boys in their jackets are quick to mix English words with petjo, their blend of Dutch and Malay. In that respect they are a good twenty years ahead of the urban rebels who will pepper their conversation with English hippie-speak in the seventies, while the Dutch mainstream will only catch up decades later.

  Surabaya Papa selects his fish by the pair. He buys two zebra fish, which only thrive in shoals, not in pairs, and later has to invest in another ten. All the while Mama Helmond wonders out loud how on earth we are going to make it through the week when half his pay packet is going straight into the pocket of the tropical fish dealer.

  ‘What good are those stupid fish if we have nothing to eat? It’s all right for you, swanning off with your scumbag friends, gobbling down your filthy fried rice and noodles and treating yourself to a salted herring on your way home. Wasting good money on sausage rolls for lunch, while I’m sending the kids to school with dry bread and dishing up half an egg each for their dinner. All because you had to br
ing that stinking aquarium into the house for me to trip over all bloody day.’

  ‘Ah, but just look how those fish brighten up the place. Beautiful, especially after dark.’

  But when it gets dark she watches films, peering through the snow on a black-and-white TV that only shows one channel. We sit and stare at the aquarium, where life is beautiful and death is never far away.

  ‘I think the water’s poisoned,’ says Joop Stokkermans, a Dutch acquaintance from Westland, an ex-marine never mentioned by name in Surabaya Papa’s war stories. He plunges his arm into the tank and scoops sand from the bottom. ‘Look, the previous owner covered up the rusted bottom with a lick of paint. That’s what’s killing the fish.’

  ‘So why do the gouramis survive?’ Surabaya Papa asks, and we share his wonderment.

  Gouramis. Indonesian fish. Indonesians were once the enemy to Surabaya Papa and Joop Stokkermans. Dutchmen fighting Indonesians we could understand. After all, we always had to be the Indians when we played cowboys with our Dutch friends. But Indos fighting Indonesians was something my twin brother and I could never fathom, however hard we tried. President Sukarno of Indonesia, whose face we saw on postage stamps, looked far more like our father than anyone we saw on the street. The Indonesians had won the war. Surabaya Papa and his fellow marines might as well not have bothered torching all those houses in the desa.

  When his old marine chum Stokkermans has left, Surabaya Papa spends a long time staring at the gouramis. If the toxic water doesn’t kill off the guppies, they are eaten by those blasted gouramis. There are five of them, the biggest fish in the aquarium. Those gouramis are pelopors, extremists, enemies of Queen and Country. The fish visit Surabaya Papa in the night, growing into huge monsters that swim through his blood-soaked dreams. Images of hate, fear and destruction congeal into a gourami batik.