Sundahl sent letters from California. Later they were accompanied by photos of Sundahl’s toothy grin at the wheel of a Chevrolet Convertible. One blonde in the passenger seat, another two on the bonnet. A guitar in back. A Gibson, a genuine American Gibson, the favourite make of every Indo of that generation. The guitar my father once had, until its neck was snapped by a passing convoy. Sundahl’s Chevy girls wore tight, quarter-length jeans with a checked pattern. Spotless white blouses with turned-up collars and two buttons open. Sundahl later sent us the very same denims by post. But they were too small. For Sundahl we remained the little boys from way back when.
‘Oh, what a pity!’ my mother wailed. ‘You would have looked so American!’
Guitar Indo (2)
The Hague Southwest. Late fifties, early sixties. Long avenues of endless tenements, lined with rows of weedy saplings. A sorry sight compared to the jungle of which my father speaks. Us kids criss-cross our way through our own brick-and-mortar jungle, playing tig and hide-and-seek in the side streets. On the avenues you can’t help but bump into one another. Dutch boys are big and strong, but relatively harmless. They give chase but they’re easy to outrun. Indos are often smaller but they are a danger: they all know how to fight. Even worse, they all play guitar. And the same question is always burning on their lips.
‘Hey, do you play?’
Some random Indo, a boy I barely know, asks the feared question and calls me over.
‘Yeah, ’course I do,’ I answer.
He scrutinizes my fingers. ‘How many songs can you play? What about “Hello Mary Lou”?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘You have to play A-D-E, you know.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘My uncle plays C-F-G. Barre chords, tricky stuff. He’s in a band. Hey, is your dad in a band?’
‘No, he plays alone.’
‘Alone? Where’s the fun in that? Hey, I live on Zwartsluisstraat. Come over Wednesday afternoon and bring your guitar, okay? Number 9.’
He saunters off. I watch him go and I can tell by his walk that he really can play guitar. That’s what I want my body to say. That’s how I want to walk down the street from now on.
First, I have to run all the way home, where my mother opens the door and nearly bites my head off. It’s nice weather, I should be playing outside. I make up some excuse, wait for my chance and sneak into the forbidden bedroom. I feel my way across the fretboard on the neck of the guitar and wonder how long I’d need to practise before I can hold down the strings without hurting my fingertips.
‘Leave that guitar alone! Your father will kill you!’
Zwartsluisstraat, a street to avoid from now on. If I don’t watch out, that Indo will be calling me to come in. I have to steer clear of Indos until I can at least play ‘Hello Mary Lou’.
There’s no escape. On a Sunday afternoon, my father takes me to visit the Van Mouriks, a big, friendly family who live on Erasmusweg. Their house smells of fried tofu and ikan teri, dried anchovies. The playing cards on the coffee table are greasy to the touch, the windows fogged by cooking. I think I’m in luck when my father sends me through to the bedroom to play with the other kids. They are all crammed onto a bunk bed, and one of them has a guitar on her lap. They open their mouths and a song rings out in three-part harmony. I steal glances at the fingers of the girl who is leading the company.
The final chord sounds and she hands the guitar to me.
‘Your turn.’
I grin and wave an apologetic refusal.
‘Wah!’ somebody shouts. ‘He don’t know how!’
‘Course he does,’ the girl says. ‘Every Indo knows how. Itu malu. He’s shy, that’s all.’
Hey, Ma!
Hey, Ma… Mam! Maa-maa!! Maa-aaa-aam!!! I get it now, Mama. I heard it, felt it, perhaps I understood it all along. Suddenly there she was, Mam, singing the song you always sang at the washtub or in the kitchen. Young and haunting, she danced on the tightrope of despair and expectation, like you when you had a moment to yourself in the kitchen that smelled of mopped floors, detergent and cigarette smoke. All that granite made it a fine place to sing, eh Ma? ‘Stranger in Paradise’. 1960. I can still hum the tune, picked up mostly from you. I carry it with me, deep in my memory. Just the other day, a Belgian radio station played the version you were so fond of, announced it in good old-fashioned, deferential style. Caterina Valente was the singer’s name, and yes, I remember, she was a favourite of yours. She sang the song with an accent, a vague mix of German and French, betraying her background on the international variety circuit. Perhaps off stage she really did feel like a stranger in some paradise or other. How much did Caterina Valente identify with the prayer for love that warmed the valve of our Bakelite radio? Did she fall prey to that unattainable angel whose praises she sang? Did you understand the words or was the melody enough for you? For me as a little boy, music promised a future as lovely as your voice and the voice of Caterina Valente. Perhaps that’s why an old woman’s rasping cough can bring me to the verge of tears.
Guitar Indo (3)
On Sunday mornings, the radio played Dixieland from the Dutch polder. It was hard to find a foreign station that showcased the guitar in all its glory, something my father was apt to complain about. He wanted to hear kroncong and, above all, Hawaiian music. He told us about his brother Karel – our uncle, a man we had never met and would never meet – about Karel winning second prize in a Hawaiian steel guitar contest in Surabaya. The Hague was home to a couple of Hawaiian dance bands, often with a woman taking centre stage, the guitar laid across her knee, pressing a lipstick tube to the strings if there was no bottle neck or metal bar to hand. I never got to see those bands live, but whenever I heard a Hawaiian song on the radio, I listened open-mouthed to the beautiful things a guitar could do. I had a toy car with a wonky wheel and I dreamed of a guitar. My father had a guitar he barely touched and he still dreamed of America. Or was it Mexico by then? My father was no guitarist. My father was a drummer, banging out a rhythm on his Remington.
Operation Gourami
The Eagle’s aquarium was undoubtedly inspired by his nostalgia for the Indies. He made a point of calling it his ‘tropical’ aquarium. A cold-water tank would never have been colourful enough for him: why settle for sticklebacks when you could have angelfish? Besides, you needed a tropical tank to pit two Siamese fighting fish against each other. We cut out cardboard coins and placed bets on the red or the blue fighting fish, one of which was bound to die. A cruel and objectionable Indo pastime in the eyes of Mama Helmond, not to mention a waste of money: the fish cost one guilder twenty-five a pair.
The object of our headmaster’s nostalgia was a mystery to me. Though he was hewn from the clay of Holland, he too kept a tropical aquarium in the hall of his wretched school. It was a beautiful tank, a very beautiful tank, a tank of unparalleled beauty. Our grubby little home aquarium was unsightly by comparison, and one fish after another departed this life for the endless fields of tubifex. Gouramis were the only fish that survived our tank, creatures from the country that had emerged victorious in the colonial war.
As luck would have it, our headmaster had a deep loathing of children from an Indo background. Once a week a small group of pupils would learn English, a lesson taught by the headmaster in person. When I was handed my umpteenth eight out of ten for a faultless English assignment, the Eagle, still dreaming of America, reckoned it was time to take revenge on this Indo-hater. His aquarium might be impressive, but that wouldn’t stop our Indonesian ploppers chomping their way through its residents within a week.
And so, with due pomp and ceremony, we presented the headmaster with a gift: a jar containing five gouramis. This made him so happy that the following week he gave me a nine for an error-free English dictation, still one mark short in the Eagle’s eyes.
To our dismay, the gouramis failed in their secret mission. They seemed to shrink and fade into the vastness of the grey dictator’s school aquarium. But then m
y twin brother and I were summoned to the headmaster’s office. Had our tropical death squad sprung into action after all?
No, the headmaster had got wind of our artistic endeavours: flogging portraits of our favourite cartoon character Wilma Flintstone to our fellow pupils for five cents apiece. Saucy, topless portraits. We spent evening after evening producing these drawings, much to the hilarity of our father and the exasperation of our mother, who had no time for his roguish take on sex education and was utterly bewildered by his unpredictable responses to the conduct of his offspring. The desks at school were soon full of soft porn of our making, and although these masterpieces went unsigned, the headmaster soon suspected us as the artists. We were both told to pack our bags and leave. We trudged home with lead in our boots, convinced that the Eagle would knock lumps out of us, hit us so hard that for weeks we wouldn’t be able to show our bruised and battered faces.
How wrong we were. By coincidence, the Eagle had come home from work early that day and he sent us straight back to school to fetch the rest of his children. The headmaster didn’t lift a finger to stop us.
We stood there in the hall waiting for Arti and Mil – Nana was still at nursery school – and watched our gouramis make lethargic circuits of the school aquarium.
‘Typical Javanese,’ the Eagle grumbled that evening. ‘Not to be trusted. No good to anyone.’
As kids we were happy enough to believe his words, which is not to say we understood them. He came from Java himself, didn’t he? But a topless Wilma Flintstone inflicting more damage on the headmaster than a jam jar of tropical fish was something we definitely grasped.
Thanks to this episode, we wound up at three different schools. The Eagle did not see this as a bad omen.
Dudok’s kali
He must have been a cold man, Willem Dudok. Only a cold man could have conceived a place as grim as The Hague Southwest. He began his career in the army, he knew barracks life, a bad start if ever there was one. The Eagle too once had ‘something to do with the army’, to use Mama Helmond’s words, so he too was a wrong ’un. Sometimes I was made to accompany the Eagle on his walks through Dudok’s brick-and-mortar jungle. My only pleasant memory of these outings is learning to eat salted herring at a little stall on the corner of Leyweg. Herring with raw onion. After lowering the herring into my mouth and chewing off a piece, I would dip it in a big bowl of diced raw onion and repeat, till the friendly Dutch fishmonger pointed out that his other customers might object on the grounds of hygiene and handed me my own portion of onions on a square of greaseproof paper. He corrected me with a smile, something the Eagle would never have done. My father was itching to give me a clip round the ear, but with the cheery fishmonger looking on he held back. Wonderful folk, the Dutch. Every lesson from an Indo who had been in the war was hammered home by physical contact. This had many variations:
a thump: a heavy blow with the fist to the shoulder, chest or stomach;
a clip: a blow to the cheek with the back of the hand;
a whack: a blow with a cane, ruler or similar;
a swipe: a slap to the side of the head with the palm of the hand;
a clout: an unexpected blow, one you don’t see coming;
a boot: a direct kick to the stomach or the backside, so hard it sends you flying down the hall or across the room;
a good hiding: the thug pulls you towards him by the hair, plants his knee in your stomach, then pummels you into a corner till you fall to the floor and finishes you off with a kick;
a thrashing: an indeterminate series of blows with a belt, steel cable or length of rope;
a slam: your head is smashed against the wall or, as described in an earlier chapter, against the head of a sibling;
an endurance punishment: being forced to do press-ups, counting out loud until you reach one hundred, followed by one hundred squats; failure to reach that number will result in a thrashing (see above).
The whip wielded by Grandma Sie in Surabaya was outlawed in Holland, which was some consolation. Unfortunately, the belts that held up the Eagle’s trousers had buckles that left welts on your back. The traditional Dutch spanking had no place among Indos. We laughed ourselves silly when a friend told us he had been put across his father’s knee to have his backside slapped. That was nothing, nothing at all.
A gym teacher asks you how you got those red marks on your back.
You tell him there are lads in your judo class who don’t cut their nails.
The gym teacher gives you an understanding nod.
Willem Dudok must have learned to eat herring too, but in his home town of Amsterdam, where they chop up the fish and fork the chunks into their mouth with a cocktail stick. Letting an Amsterdammer loose on The Hague was always asking for trouble. Dudok was a child of musical parents. By the age of thirteen he knew every Beethoven symphony off by heart. Later, he must have sat at his drawing board with a head full of bombast, picked up the pencil he had sharpened compulsively and dashed off a straight line from north to south and another from east to west. Look at a map of The Hague Southwest and it’s the only logical conclusion.
Endless rows of identical tenements, as forbidding as a Beethoven symphony. To a former marine like the Eagle, they must have brought back a familiar sense of the barracks. For us kids, they were blocks of boring stairwells but thrilling cellars. Luckily there were a few bigger blocks of flats, with lifts to play in and gangways that let you charge past dozens of front doors while a gaggle of washed-out housewives hurled the worst kind of abuse at you. Terraced houses, in even shorter supply, were the mansions of Dudok’s ghetto, complete with guard dogs and Indo-haters ensconced behind net curtains.
Those houses were the stuff of Mama Helmond’s dreams. A TV in the living room, the children upstairs in their bedrooms and that madman from the tropics out at work. She wallowed in musicals and figure skating. Documentaries got her down. History had been and gone. The here and now was all that mattered. The past was something to be left behind.
‘What is it with you two? I swear you’re from another planet.’
‘If only you’d left us there.’
‘Don’t talk daft! I’m your mother!’
‘That’s impossible. You’re terrestrial.’
‘Even back when you were little I thought you were different from everyone else. Now I know for certain.’
‘Way back when is here and now, Mam.’
‘Now you’re talking rubbish! Leave the past behind you! Now is now! Do you hear me?’
‘No, Mam. Now is the sum total of all the memories you carry with you.’
More than anything, she would have liked to see that bloke of hers go back to where he came from. But that was impossible. What a let-down it must have been, living with a brown-skinned man who fed his sons raw, salted rock-bass fished from the ditches of The Hague.
Those ditches had been dug around Dudok’s playing fields and were the focus of our boyhood games. In spring, my brothers and I would catch tadpoles with our fishing nets, and sticklebacks in the summer. We used to plead with the anglers to give us a rock-bass, silent Dutchmen who could spend hours staring at their floats. Most of them shook their heads and tossed the rock-bass back into the water after a few hours’ captivity in the keepnet. But now and then an angler would relent and mutter, ‘Go on, take ’em.’
‘What you gonna do with ’em?’ they asked, but always too late. By that time the water’s edge was far behind us and we were sprinting home with our catch.
Rock-bass brought out the Eagle’s tropical ways. He washed the fish, sliced open their bellies and gutted them. Laying them out on the granite counter, newly scrubbed by his disgruntled skivvy, he rubbed them with salt. In the land of his birth, the scorching sun would have dried such tiddlers in no time, but in Dudok’s brick-and-mortar jungle it was a far lengthier process, even at the height of summer.
Summer holidays were hell for Mama Helmond. It was a blessed relief when her brown husband would take her brown childre
n off her hands for an afternoon. And her brown husband, happy that the damp chill of Holland had let up for a month or so, was even cheerful sometimes. Something that could never be said of ‘that fishwife’, our mother.
*
With another brisk stroke of his pencil, Willem Dudok set the boundary of The Hague Southwest at Lozerlaan. A portacabin stands on the untamed strip of grassland through which water flows to the dunes of Loosduinen. A distant steamroller appears to have seized up in the burning sun. The one rounded element drawn by Dudok’s hairy hands is the flight of steps leading down to the water at Lozerlaan. It resembles the paintings of terraced sawahs the Eagle’s Indo friends hang on their walls. A symbolic, sympathetic gesture by the architect perhaps? If so, it’s an awkward one: didn’t he know that Indos seek out shade when it’s hot? Even the sun-starved Eagle is sweltering, and rolls up his trouser legs. He has brought his camera with him. He likes to send photographs of smiling faces to Java, where his entire family stayed behind. Will they believe that life here in Holland is so cheerful? The fishwife is back home in her kitchen, free to smoke a half pack of cigarettes in perfect peace and bemoan a life that bears not even the faintest resemblance to the films she watched as a girl. That brown husband of hers has gone out wearing yet another set of clean clothes – it’s enough to drive her to despair. And as soon as he gets home he’ll take another nice long shower and put on clean underpants. If he’s off sick and home from work, he changes them three times a day. All she ever does is wash and wear out her wringer and her clothes pegs. He still insists on calling them pendeks, those underpants of his. Once he’s done with them, she has to adjust them for the children. There’s no money for new underwear.
The Interpreter from Java Page 17
