The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  ‘Hey Mam, do you know if Pa still has that dagger of his?’

  ‘That bloody Marine dagger? No, he tossed it. Told me in a letter once.’

  ‘Tossed it? Why would he do that?’

  ‘Conscience got the better of him, if you ask me. That thing could be lying at the bottom of any canal or ditch in The Hague. Damned if I know.’

  Had the dagger begun to haunt him? Sometimes you would hear tales of people from the Indies who were plagued by an ornamental kris that rattled on its fixtures. Or a copper lizard that crept off the wall when the moon was full and stood on the rug in the middle of the living room. One thing was sure: everyone who fled the Indies was haunted by memories of the war.

  Of all the first-generation Indos I have spoken to in my life – men who sided with the Dutch during the war of independence – not one admitted firing a single shot at an Indonesian. No one except the Eagle. One of his more graphic accounts was how, at a railway station, he fired a round from his carbine straight through a mother and the child in her arms, to take out an Indonesian freedom-fighter who was using them as a human shield.

  ‘You really did that?’

  ‘Yes. What else was I supposed to do? Let that pelopor blow my brains out?’

  ‘And your bullets went right through that kid?’

  ‘Of course they did! How else could I have hit the bastard hiding behind them? Numbskull! Now, get those dishes washed! Go and help your mother! Don’t forget your apron! And wear a dress to school tomorrow! You sound like some pathetic little nona from the kampong!’

  The dagger was always by his bed at night, within easy reach. Some nights I saw the outline of that murder weapon in the Eagle’s hand slide across my bedroom wall, a shadow cast by the bare lightbulb that hung in the hallway. Then I would shrink into the corner and call out to him from my bed, tell him who I was so that he would not mistake me for an old enemy. It was said that some Indonesians had stowed away on the countless ships that brought throngs of Indos to Holland. But those Indonesian stowaways could hardly be called anti-Dutch. For a long time I – like my white mother and your average Dutchman – could not tell the difference between an Indo and an Indonesian. Or between Ambonese and Indo.

  ‘That’s the first and last time you call your father an Indonesian, understood?’

  He points his Marine dagger in my direction. A threat of sorts, though it’s still in its sheath. He only bares the blade when he threatens my mother. Or when paranoia takes hold.

  *

  One day I was home alone with my kid sister. My mother was out at the shops and my sister was sleeping. She was much younger than the rest of us, almost an afterthought. She brought joy to our home. No one ever yelled at her. When the Eagle worked himself into a lather with his war stories, we kept her as far away from him as we could.

  When the bullets from my father’s gun ripped through that mother at the station, was the child in her arms the same age as my peaceful, sleeping sister?

  A soft afternoon light shone through the window, a rare moment of quiet in our household. I crept into the bedroom and picked up my father’s dagger. It was still in its sheath. A restless feeling took hold of me. What if my mother were to come in and catch me? But I wanted to try to feel what goes through a man when he murders someone.

  Standing by my little sister’s bed, I broke into a sweat. I ran a fingertip over her soft cheek. She was sound asleep and did not stir.

  And then I did it. I took the dagger from its sheath and held the blade to her throat. Not across her larynx but directly above it. Very carefully, I brought the point down. For a moment, it touched her soft skin. I did not understand. How could anyone kill a child like this? I slid the dagger into its sheath and, bathed in sweat, dashed back to my parents’ bedroom to put it back exactly as I had found it, knowing my father hardly ever missed a trick.

  I was twelve years old and still believed in God. I kneeled beside my sister’s bed and prayed. When my mother came home, she asked me what I had been up to and sent me out to play.

  I walked over to Zuider Park, but I could not find my brothers. There was a bench by a stretch of water. I sat down and imagined I was an old man with war crimes on my conscience. When I realized that such a man might never be caught, I wondered if he might have to punish himself and my gaze drifted up to the branches, in search of a hanging body.

  Herring in tomato sauce

  Bickering over a granite countertop in a kitchen in The Hague. A clash of cultures. The madman wants rice, the fishwife wants potatoes. They find each other in their love of herring in tomato sauce. Soaked herring conserved in a slimy bloodbath, broken by their long wait in the half-rusted oval tin and spooned straight into hungry mouths. I can’t get enough of them; same goes for my brothers and sisters. Delicious on white bread greased with margarine. And at Christmas, the madman serves fruit wine in sticky glasses left to him by our old Aunty Lique from the Indies.

  Herring in tomato sauce vanished from my life when the fishwife hatched a plan against the madman, in cahoots with a local GP, Aunty Fien and a band of accomplices. The Eagle’s paranoia had taken on such grotesque proportions that living with him had become impossible. Life-threatening even, though it was unclear whose life was under threat. When one of the Eagle’s beatings winded me so badly I nearly choked, my brave twin brother Phil exploded with rage and shouted after him, ‘Next time you’ll get a knife between the ribs!’

  I don’t know if the Eagle only pretended not to hear him. He marched out of our bedroom, perhaps with a vague realization that this time he had gone too far. A few days later, Aunty Riek came up from Helmond to stay for a while. One evening, she and my mother found me in the kitchen, sobbing and shaking uncontrollably. I had run from my bed with a nightmare snapping at my heels. They gave me a drink of water but I was in such a panic that I bit down and broke the glass. Later they told me that every time the Eagle popped his head round the kitchen door, I began to scream hysterically. Aunty Riek alerted the GP and they decided to let me stay with a kind Indo woman who lived around the corner. She had the radio playing softly all day, grew chilli on her balcony, kept a little pet monkey in a cage in her living room and flung herself joyfully into her husband’s arms when he returned from his tour of duty in the merchant navy. Her husband was an Indo too, a quiet man with a moustache, who took me to see ADO play and made me sneak in under the turnstile – the old rascal – so he wouldn’t have to pay my ticket.

  When I came back home, the Eagle kept a low profile around me. I didn’t know then that my brother was sleeping with a knife under his pillow. Nor did my father. My mother found the knife when she was making our beds one day and knew that she had waited far too long.

  26 November 1964

  A mild autumn day. I cycled to school that morning, a small makeshift building I would never be able to find my way back to. Long since demolished, probably. What was it about that little school that made me so happy? I can’t remember exactly. It was half the size of my previous school, the teachers were stricter and my form teacher had a terrifying gift for noticing every last detail. He took an unaccountable dislike to my brother Phil, but reckoned I was ‘all right for an Indo’. Occasionally he took me aside in the corridor, when my classmates were already seated at their desks. Fixing me with his piercing blue eyes, he asked me how I got those lumps on my head. Or those scratches on my face. Or that black eye, swollen purple and green at the edges. I stammered that I had got into a fight with a bunch of local lads. I could tell from his face that he didn’t believe me. He knew I was no fighter and I sensed that he could see my father’s shadow at my shoulder. He had spoken to my mother at a parents’ evening and must have heard that my father hit me often and hit me hard. I was ashamed of the beatings he gave me. Ashamed of a shame that was his to bear. Ashamed of things that, as a boy of twelve, I could not even name.

  Our tenement flat opposite Zuider Park was too small for a family of seven and my father had placed a little desk at the
end of the hall where I had to do my homework. Every time he passed, he would lean over my shoulder and quiz me. Every wrong answer met with a sardonic Indo sneer. ‘Tell the school I want my money back!’

  My brother Phil was smarter. He had no trouble with algebra, my father’s favourite subject and one which, as it later turned out, he barely understood. The interpreter’s only flair was for languages. Mathematical formulas were meaningless to me. I could see nothing in them, no playfulness, no poetry. And how the hell was I supposed to concentrate with the Eagle looming over me?

  Thanks to our screaming, fighting parents, Phil and I both had to repeat a year. Unlike me, Phil struggled with languages. The omnipresent slave driver in our house wrecked his nerves too.

  After one failed year of secondary school, my father declared me stupid and sent me to a vocational school to spend three years training to be an office clerk. I was far from unhappy there. Blessed be the dimwits! The school was a tonic! Phil and I, the eternal twins, were separated at last and no longer had to endure endless comparisons, which spared us all kinds of mutual aggro. My grades went through the roof and I was all set to don a smart suit, shirt and tie, start work at a posh office at sixteen, meet a nice girl at eighteen, get married at twenty-one, leave home, start a nice family of my own and finally shake off the terror of my father. I loved the little makeshift wooden building with its handful of classes. A place safe enough to dream of a bright future, a school where you could do nearly all your homework on the premises. The man who taught me English and bookkeeping was a good-natured Indo with horn-rimmed glasses, the kind of man I would have loved to have as a father. Mr Van Engelenburg was his name. Engel means angel, and that’s what he was.

  The morning of 26 November 1964 was glorious. A gentle sun low in the sky. Autumn leaves lining the curb. A windless calm. I breathed in the fresh air and seemed to grow taller. My classmates were the docile kind; we were well-behaved pupils. I was only ever goaded into one fight. Luckily, my first blow missed my opponent by a whisker, and he made a show of falling and stayed down. In those days, that was that: you stayed down and it was over. Now they kick each other half to death. I have no idea why we were so determined to fight each other. Friction between Hollanders and Indos no doubt. The cheeseheads versus the wogs. Nothing racist about it. Rivalry is all about equality, racism is the opposite.

  At school we all had to share an old-fashioned wooden desk with a fellow pupil. My deskmate was a mild-mannered Indo boy called Ricky. We hit it off immediately. His lean face and troubled eyes are etched into my brain. It was almost ten in the morning. At ten past, the school bell would announce a twenty-minute playground break. There was an unexpected knock, the classroom door inched open and Mr Van Engelenburg was summoned in a whisper. We looked up from our textbooks in momentary surprise and then went back to work. Less than a minute later, Mr Van Engelenburg returned and came straight to my desk. He leaned over me, told me to pack my bag and report to the headmaster.

  Without a backward glance, I slunk out of the classroom with my schoolbag over my shoulder. The headmaster was waiting in the corridor and told me I was to fetch my little sister Nana and take her over to Arti’s school. I left the building, walked to the bicycle racks and carefully strapped my bag to the back of my bike. The school bell rang just as I was about to cycle off. I looked back and saw my friend Ricky come charging out of the building only to stand at the top of the steps looking lost. Despite the distance, he held out his hand and stood there as if paralysed. He wanted to call out, but nothing came. I wanted to call out to him, but nothing came. Classmates began to crowd around him and the strange thing was, no one came down those few steps towards me. They just stood there, looking in my direction without saying a word. I could think of nothing else to do but cycle away. I waved to Ricky and he waved back hesitantly. And though I had never said goodbye to anyone for life before, I felt that I was leaving him, leaving the others and that safe school building behind, and that I would never see them again.

  When I reached Nana’s school, she was already standing outside holding a teacher’s hand. I couldn’t sit her on the back of my bike. She was only six and my schoolbag was too heavy for her to hold. But the autumn day was pleasant, so I wheeled my bike along and she walked beside me. She kept looking up shyly and asking me where we were going. I told her it was a surprise.

  Behind us a police car was driving at a snail’s pace, stopping now and again to scan the surrounding streets.

  The slave driver once punished me by making me run to and from school every day, four times a day for three weeks: from Hoogveen to Genemuidenstraat in the morning, home again on the lunchbreak – where my mother was waiting with a sandwich for me to gobble down – then straight back to school and a final jog home at the end of the day. Some days he patrolled the route on his moped to make sure Phil hadn’t secretly given me a lift on his bike. He rode past at an agonizingly slow pace without a glance in my direction, just to let me know he could appear anywhere at any moment, and he did, taking up concealed positions down side streets as if it was wartime. The police must have been tipped off, by my mother no doubt, that the Eagle was capable of showing up out of nowhere. Now, with my six-year-old sister at my side, I had no time to be afraid. I acted cheerful and she felt safe, even though I was constantly on the look-out and glancing back at the police car.

  At the entrance to Arti’s school, a teacher stood waiting with Aunty Fien, the same aunt who had opposed my parents’ marriage from the start and who never came to visit, probably because my father could not stand her. We were led to a small meeting room that smelled of teachers, teachers and more teachers. Someone from the school was there to meet us, along with two police officers. Their caps were on the table. My mother, Phil and Arti were already there and my mother cried out in panic when she saw Mil was missing. Phil was ordered to go and fetch her. When all five kids were finally assembled, it was decided we would go into hiding at Aunty Fien’s for the rest of the day and see what happened next.

  I don’t recall how we got to Aunty Fien’s, all I remember is how beautiful she was. It struck me when we were in the living room at her house. In one supple movement, she reached down to take something out of her handbag on the floor without bending her knees. Through the veil of her long blonde hair I saw her breasts jiggle and a strange excitement came over me. Aunty Fien talked women’s talk with my mother and together they puffed away at one cigarette after another. Ma told us we would be going to a safe-house for three weeks and then we would be able to come back home. The Eagle was to be thrown out of the flat, she said. I don’t know if any of us felt sorry for him. I don’t think we did. Perhaps Mil, his favourite, felt a secret pang, not of love but of regret: she had always been able to wind the Eagle round her little finger. We all sat there quietly, barely speaking a word to one another. There was no telephone and in those days there was nothing on TV during the day. More than anything, I would have liked to sit with one ear glued to the radio but I didn’t dare ask Aunty Fien to turn it on. She kept us quiet with cakes and orange squash. Evening came and a taxi pulled up at the door. I had never been in a taxi before and I enjoyed the drive to a small town outside The Hague, a place I had never even heard of.

  Voorschoten

  My mother sat in front with the girls on her lap. The three of us were in the back. Just as I began to make out the shape of a spire, the driver said it was the Reformed Church in Voorschoten. It seemed a long way from The Hague, as if we had driven into an old Dutch picture book. The town was quiet and dark. We turned off Leidseweg and drove through the gates of a huge manor house with a driveway, a playing field and clumps of trees and bushes. The gravel crunched under the wheels of the black Mercedes. We pulled up at the bottom of a flight of wide steps and were welcomed by the head of the children’s home, with a female teacher at his side.

  The girls burst into tears when we found out the taxi was taking my mother straight back into hiding at Aunty Fien’s. The teacher did her
best to calm them. The three of us held it together, even when it became clear that the boys were to be separated from the girls.

  In the boys’ wing, Phil and I were shown to a common room full of older lads. Arti was sent to a room at the back of the building with boys our age. I assumed this unfortunate arrangement was down to lack of space. Either that or they didn’t want three brothers sticking together. The lads surrounding Phil and I all looked years older, and some of them were even smoking. The oldest eyed us with suspicion and disdain. It was after eight and coffee was being served. I had never drunk coffee before but didn’t dare refuse the plastic cup that was handed to me.

  The group leader, a man of around forty, asked us if we’d had anything to eat.

  Phil and I looked at each other.

  That told the group leader all he needed to know and he had sandwiches brought over from the kitchen in the girls’ wing. White bread sandwiches. They tasted good. The other boys protested because they had been made to eat brown bread at breakfast and they called over to us that from tomorrow it would be a different story. Phil and I took a timid look around at the ten boys we would be sharing a dorm with. At nine o’clock, orders were barked and the seventeen and eighteen-year-olds grumbled that it was too early for bed. Everyone took off their shoes and lined them up against the wall. We climbed the granite stairs on our stocking feet, past dorms where other boys were already sleeping.

  Phil and I were issued with a flannel, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a small bar of soap and two towels, one of which we were only to use for our feet. The group leader showed us to our beds, where two pairs of pyjamas were waiting. Phil was given wash number 99, mine was 173. We would remember those stupid numbers our whole lives. When it came time to undress, we turned shyly to the wall, much to the amusement of the others, who showed no shame at being naked.