The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  (3)

  Broese was an old orphan. Yet we called him Uncle Broese, just like we called that other solitary soul Aunty Lique. He had no one but his former school chum the Eagle for company. But the Eagle did not go easy on his old friend.

  ‘You graduated from college, but you do the work of a coolie!’

  ‘I like it this way! It’s quiet at night. Gives me a chance to think.’

  ‘Think? What about?’

  ‘Let my thoughts run free, you know?’

  ‘So you let your thoughts run free… You should be putting your mind to good use, man! I work for the government, the Civil Engineering department. And you? All your qualifications and the best you can do is night-watchman!’

  Sometimes Broese watched by day. Crouching by the water’s edge, he would keep a desultory eye on us kids while we splashed around. Lozerlaan, around 1960, rough terrain on which the city has run aground, strewn with the skeletons of new homes under construction. In the photograph, I am standing close to Broese, and even as a little lad there’s an air of nostalgia about me, as if I am sharing Broese’s memory of the kali from his youth somewhere in Surabaya. If I was unable to sleep at the end of such a day, I used to picture him making his nightly rounds of ghostly construction sites, carrying a torch, killing time by hunting rats and talking to them. Sometimes he came out with a story I only half understood, about a pair of lovers caught in the act. Did he ever regret growing old as a boy because the Japanese had castrated him?

  On a Sunday afternoon, the Eagle took me with him on the back of his moped. The old boy with wisps of hair on his round, stained head lived somewhere on Loosduinseweg, in a ground floor flat with windows so dirty you could barely see through them.

  The doorbell wasn’t working.

  The Eagle took out his hanky and tried to wipe a clean spot on the window, but the dirt was on the inside. He knocked. It took a long time for Broese to open the door. Perhaps we had roused the night-watchman from his sleep. Awkwardly, he let us in, flustered by these sudden guests. His flat was all but empty. The trunk from his voyage from the Indies was in use as a coffee table. The only chair was assigned to me.

  ‘So, this is where you live…’ the Eagle said.

  He paced restlessly through the empty rooms, hands thrust casually in the pockets of his Terylene trousers, muttering, sneering, poking fun. Broese clumsily handed me a smudged tumbler of orange squash, hairs clinging to the glass. He kept apologizing to the Eagle for not having anything better to offer us. Yes, his flat was certainly due for sprucing up. He was planning to buy new furniture, some decent crockery and yes… curtains.

  If all you can do is apologize for your life, why would death take the trouble to come and get you?

  Castrol Oil

  The Eagle had an uncontrollable urge to bring home cans of Castrol Oil, as if he were buying kecap for an Indo family with a whole slew of cousins, aunts and uncles to feed. He seemed to be addicted to the thick motor oil in those round green cans that bore the name Castrol – red letters on an L-shaped banner encircled in white. Mama Helmond detested the stuff, hated anything that left a stain. One drop of Castrol Oil on her scrubbed lino was enough to send her into a cleaning frenzy. Given half a chance, she would have tidied us out of the way too. Back in 1961, her mother had done exactly that in the house above Grandad’s cobbler’s workshop in Helmond, rounding up me, Phil and our younger brother Arti and locking each of us in a different attic cupboard.

  Castrol Oil. Only one letter removed from the infamous castor oil, the remedy for all manner of ills in the Indies of yore. Parents used to threaten their kids with castor oil if they didn’t clear their plate. As a boy, the Eagle must have been plagued by that spectre too. Following in his mother’s footsteps, he would spoon cod-liver oil into us every autumn and winter, a surrogate for the potions she used to brew in her own back yard.

  The Castrol Oil was for his moped: Zündapp, a German make, and cobalt blue, the colour favoured by Indos of his generation. Every Saturday afternoon he was hard at work to keep his most treasured possession ticking over. The Eagle saved the empty oil cans and when he had a pair he filled them with plaster and stuck them on either end of a pole to make barbells. First thing in the morning and last thing at night we had to build up our muscles by lifting them. When they got too light for us, he made new ones, mixing scrap iron with the plaster. If he was in a playful mood, he would lay our mattresses on the floor and we’d practise basic judo throws. Later we advanced to jujitsu and he taught us to parry attacks using knives from Mama Helmond’s kitchen drawer. If he was in a rotten mood, he would scream at everyone till they let him be. No martial art offered a defence against that onslaught.

  One day, Mama Helmond once again felt the urge to test his limits, though she knew damn well where they lay. She went too far. The Eagle – thug, madman, twisted and deranged devil that he was – threatened her with one of the barbells we lifted to punish our bodies. And still she wouldn’t shut up. In the hall, on the coconut matting under the bare lightbulb that hung from the ceiling, he slammed one of the barbells into her arm. For weeks she was unable to wring out the sheets she had boiled in the washtub, so the Eagle bought her a second-hand wringer and persuaded us that she had a bad case of thrombosis. Only Phil refused to believe him. When we started quarrelling, Mama Helmond soon reached the end of her tether and used her good arm to whack us on the shoulder with a wooden coat hanger. She broke one coat hanger after another, till we got a fit of the giggles. This was nothing compared to the beatings we took from her thug of a husband and before long she was laughing right along with us.

  Ghosts in the hall

  They say us humans cannot decide to hate, just as we cannot decide to love. But then my mother always swore my twin brother wasn’t human. Nor was I, for that matter. We were from another planet.

  I witnessed the moment when my twin brother decided to hate the Eagle. It was in the hall of number 1394, our flat on an endless post-war avenue that was supposed to lead to happier places as yet unknown. I saw it from our bedroom, the boys’ bedroom. The hall was a strip of hell you had to negotiate to reach another place: the kitchen, the living room, the shower, another bedroom, the front door… When evening came, the hall fell under the leering gaze of the Wheel-a-Wheel, who watched from the dark corners. None of us had ever seen the Wheel-a-Wheel, yet we knew that this ghost not only moved on wheels at lightning speed but was itself a wheel. Even so, it was possible to escape the Wheel-a-Wheel’s clutches. If you ran and jumped fast enough, you could make it from bedroom to toilet before the Wheel-a-Wheel grabbed you.

  The hall floor was covered in thin yellow lino decorated with a sorry-looking pattern of orange flowers under a long, rough stretch of coconut matting that curled at the edges. It was easy to trip if you didn’t watch out. The matting hurt your knees when you played there during the day. There was something wrong in that hall, day or night. A place where things always seemed to happen.

  I shared a room with my twin Phil and Arti, who was two years younger. We had a single bed next to a bunk bed, and always argued about who should get the top bunk. We scared each other witless by summoning the Wheel-a-Wheel whenever one of us had to go to the toilet. Our little brother got so scared he would pee his pants sometimes, and then we would have a go at him for having to sleep in a room that smelled of piss. If Mama came in to see what all the noise was about, we kept quiet. We knew she could report us to the Eagle if she was in a bad mood or if there was a film or a musical on TV, and he would come in and give us another thrashing. This gave her the chance to play her role, trying to hold him back like one of those swooning heroines of hers, acting the victim. When she became his target, she could be incredibly stupid: the more aggressive he became, the more she would needle him, till he went completely mata gelap. Perhaps part of her kept wanting to see it, spurred on by a fascination with the incomprehensible.

  At the age of eight, I could sense the ghosts. Hours in advance I would feel them
gathering around the paranoid ex-marine stalking through the house, the man with the black photo albums full of war graves and portraits of comrades who had been killed or who had killed themselves. Once a fight broke out in my parents’ bedroom. Mama fled into the hall and even the Wheel-a-Wheel made itself scarce. The Eagle came after her, beat both her shoulders black and blue with a barbell. The next day he ordered us twins to do the washing. Mama was back in bed, he said. Another attack of thrombosis.

  We washed the sheets by hand in the washtub, ran them through the wringer three times and hung them out to dry. Curious housewives peered at us from behind their curtains. Why didn’t they come and rescue us from that house full of beatings, ghosts and war stories? A week later, Mama regained the use of her arms and the Wheel-a-Wheel was back at its post.

  On his days off, the Eagle would use the hall as a workshop and suspend our bikes there on hooks and pulleys. Then the Wheel-a-Wheel would make way for a ghost that was even more terrifying. The Tultuh. Only us twins knew about the Tultuh. We kept Arti in the dark, for fear he would piss his pants even more. The Tultuh was invisible and could fill the hall all at once, paralysing you with fear. Unlike the Wheel-a-Wheel, he had no need of movement. You never knew when he would come. He could stay away for ages and appear again out of nowhere. That was the nature of the Tultuh.

  One Saturday evening my twin brother stood paralysed in the hall, in the grip of the Tultuh. The Eagle came out of his bedroom and growled at him, asking what the matter was. My twin could only stammer, fragments of words. The presence of the Tultuh could not be explained; only we knew he existed. The Eagle was angered by the stammering, suspicious at the lack of an answer. He picked up something that had been left lying in the hall after a Saturday afternoon of oil, grease, benzine and polish. A thick steel cable. He lashed out at Phil, who turned away, groaning, doubled up with pain. God only knows who the Eagle saw in front of him – some enemy from the war in Indonesia, or a vision of his own back lacerated by stick, cane or whip, depending on whether the punisher was a Japanese soldier, his father or his mother.

  Back on Java his father wielded the cane, his mother the whip. His father never counted the blows but beat him as long as he pleased. With his mother it was different. She pronounced a sentence and stuck to it. Ten lashes. Done. You knew when it would stop. The Eagle hit you until he was gasping for breath. I saw my brother’s pyjama top rip open and welts appear on his back. And at that moment my brave twin turned and shot a look of intense hatred at the thug. All at once, he dared to conceive hatred for the Eagle and to let it show. That is what made it a decision. An irrational decision, but even so: he dared to do something forbidden by God through the agency of the church minister and the Bible studies teacher. I had never seen my twin look at anyone that way and would never see him do so again. A look of hatred, intense and irrevocable enough to last beyond the grave of the man who had booted us into this world for the sake of a valid Dutch passport.

  The Eagle lashed out again with the steel cable: once, twice, three times. Then he stopped, surprised almost, now that my twin brother had ceased cowering and stood there looking at him in utter contempt.

  Mama used to tell us about the ghosts in the Eagle’s head. Ghosts that sometimes possessed him until he no longer knew who he was or who we were. He did not beat us as a father, but as a wartime marine. The beating was not meant for us but for someone else: an Indonesian freedom fighter who had refused to talk to the multilingual Indo interpreter typing up his interrogation report for the Dutch. At least that was the story he told her, and she told us. He had been nothing but an interpreter, hammering away at a typewriter while the Dutch laid into the Indonesians.

  The silent Dutchman

  Of all the names in my father’s address book, Stokkermans was the most ordinary. A name that fitted like a glove. Many of Pa’s friends from my boyhood in The Hague had European names that were out of step with their Indo appearance. The only one whose name was written on his face was Matagora. But then he was Ambonese, not Indo. It was the a’s that did it: long, open sounds. A world away from the congestion of Stokkermans, every vowel bunged up tight.

  The notion of ‘the silent Indo father’ is a myth: a dubious literary motif, a hollow cliché drawn from the Romantic Western ideal of the wise Oriental as a smiling, modest man of few words. Fatalities aside, young men go to war and return from war. One man comes home silent, the other tells stories. My father told stories, spun yarns. He screamed his war, committed it to paper. But Stokkermans, a white man from Westland, held his tongue. He looked as if his lips had been welded shut. No less than 100,000 silent Dutchmen were conscripted to defend ‘their Indies’. Stokkermans belonged to the other contingent of silent Dutchmen that included the marines. And, to my knowledge, Stokkermans opened his mouth about the war in the Indies only once.

  I don’t recall Stokkermans ever coming to visit us. But he did receive visitors. The Eagle often went to see him alone and once he took me with him. Stokkermans lived in ’s-Gravenzande, in a house so spotless it was unsettling. The floors were scrubbed, the Dutch tablecloths free of dust and there was not a single dry or wilting leaf on the plants by the snow-white net curtains that hung in perfect symmetry at the painstakingly polished windows. It must have been spring or early summer because his wife cooked asparagus. I had never seen asparagus before and did my best not to pull a face when I tasted it. Stokkermans, the Silent Dutch Father, looked at me impassively with his drawn face and thin lips clamped together, while my own father urged me to eat the bitter stalks dripping with butter because he could see I didn’t like them. Not a word was spoken at the dinner table presided over by the Silent Man and his wife. When you eat, you don’t talk. How different to the homes of my father’s Indo acquaintances, where everyone chatted incessantly about what they were eating: the rijsttafel as a twofold motive for moving your mouth.

  The Eagle held Stokkermans in high esteem. For Stokkermans had been a true marine, a soldier who had made sure he was transferred to the Indies in order to restore peace and order. Had he burned down villages in the name of the Queen? He did not speak about such things. Had he mowed down Indonesian freedom fighters?

  The Dutchman held his tongue.

  Many years later, when I began to look into the story of my father’s war, my mother told me the one thing ‘that stuffed shirt Stokkermans’ had said about the war.

  ‘Well? What did he say?’

  ‘He said your father was a coward.’

  The Dutchman had spoken.

  Not what a son wants to hear about his father. But, in hindsight, perhaps it is. Could that be why the Eagle went to see Stokkermans so often? To see the hero he himself so badly wanted to be? Had he fled in the heat of battle? Was it remorse that drove him back to Stokkermans’ brooding presence time and time again? I never came across the name Stokkermans in my father’s writings. Was his absence a deliberate act of omission?

  Amerindo

  Sundahl was not our uncle but, in a way, he was the younger brother my father never had: a wave of jet-black hair slick with brilliantine and combed back, a sharp crease in his Terylene slacks, gleaming black shoes, laces immaculately tied. Like my father, Sundahl detested jackets. They often wore pullovers with the same pattern: black with a broad yellow V-neck. I was given Sundahl’s pullover as a hand-me-down, tailored to fit by my mother on her Singer treadle sewing machine.

  I always assumed Sundahl was his surname, one that betrayed a Nordic ancestor on his father’s side: a Swede or Norwegian who had once dreamed of building a future on Java. Like my father, Sundahl had sailed to Holland in 1950 after the war in Indonesia, without his family. That was unusual. Most young Indos who made the voyage were former KNIL soldiers and brought their whole family with them to Holland. And then there were a handful of Indonesians who, for their own murky reasons, had stowed away on the ships that sailed between Holland and Indonesia.

  Indos without brothers, sisters, father, mother, aunts, uncles, grand
fathers and, lest we forget, the grandmothers around whom these families revolved – such Indos were orphans of a kind, desperados some of them or, at worst, pariahs. They must have been childhood friends back in Surabaya, my father and Sundahl. Perhaps they had shared the same girls.

  Sundahl seemed to be the eternal bachelor. Like a couple of overexcited kids, he and my father could talk motorbikes, planes and wristwatches for hours on end. Style was what they admired most: ‘streamlined’ and ‘gleaming’ were the Indo’s watchwords.

  I don’t know whether Sundahl served as an interpreter with the Dutch Marine Corps and was forced to flee the Indonesians. Unlike my father, he never spoke of the war, at least not when I was around. Yet there was a nervous energy about him. He too would look up quickly or glance over his shoulder whenever he heard a noise. He was one of those switched-on Indos who could assess a situation in the blink of an eye and spring into action if need be. A slight, wiry young man who could almost certainly leap over you in a fight and break your neck with a scissor kick.

  Sundahl always talked about emigrating to America. And I do mean always. He tried to persuade my father to go with him. Surely he hadn’t given his kids American names for no reason? There was nothing doing here in Holland: too cold, too boring, too few opportunities to climb the ladder. ‘Sponsor’ was the magic word. You needed a sponsor to enter America as an immigrant. Sundahl went looking for a sponsor. Sundahl found a sponsor. And in the early sixties, Sundahl left. I have no idea why I missed him so much. Perhaps because his energy brought a lustre to our drab living room on that relentless post-war avenue that ran past Zuider Park.

  My father wanted to follow him, with his wife and five children in tow. But my mother and I did not want to go. My father spoke of a life in the sun, a job as a paperboy after school, cycling on the sidewalk and tossing newspapers onto sun-drenched lawns – you didn’t even have to stick them in the letterbox. My little brothers were sold on the idea. I was afraid of the unknown, though every day at school was grim and Zuider Park was all too often enveloped in mist and rain. Years later I felt like a coward for siding with my mother and refusing to budge. But how did we ever manage to block the move? Father’s word was law. Had he simply been unable to obtain the immigration papers? Had I been spared even more misery in America or had I missed the chance of a lifetime? What would America have made of me? A cook in an Indo restaurant somewhere in Los Angeles? A Professor of Literature at a university? A TV scriptwriter? Or a guitar teacher who gets the occasional gig, same as in Holland?