The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  Such were the stories that had echoed round this place for years.

  *

  The nights were silent. For the first time in my life, I felt completely alone. I missed the snoring of the boys around me in the dorm, their mischievous whispers and sniggers, the soft light that filtered through the red curtain above the office door, where the leader on duty wrote their account of the day or updated the individual reports we constantly complained about because we never got to read what they said about us. It took me hours to fall asleep. The only sound was an occasional bang, perhaps the slamming of a pub door, followed by solitary footsteps that soon died away.

  Freedom is being able to open a door and close it behind you. It’s that simple.

  *

  At six in the morning I hear the key in the lock. The double security mechanism is disabled and the door swings open. The gym teacher at the door is tall, muscular and glowing with health. Anyone who isn’t on their feet within a minute runs the risk of solitary confinement in an underground cell over by the playing field. I stand by my bed awaiting orders. Strip the bed. Sweep the floor with the dustpan and brush. Wait beneath the window at the back of the cell, not by the door. My pals at the home will never believe all this.

  I am handed a PE kit and we are herded up to a gym on the top floor. We have to run circuits, do press ups, squats, vaults, hang from the wall bars… Gobs shut scumbags, filthy bunch of losers, you’re in here for a reason and none of you, and I mean none of you, will ever amount to anything! Be thankful you’re being looked after at all, you pack of weasels.

  One gym teacher grins at the other one’s patter.

  After an hour of this, it’s downstairs for a quick wash at the taps. Faster! Get a move on! The group file back down to the ground floor, I am sent to my cell. If I behave myself, I will be allowed into the common room.

  I behave myself and, on the third day, I am released from solitary and sent straight to the barber, who shaves my hair to the wood. At a storeroom, I have to exchange my clothes for a pair of shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. I am now one of the pre-war boy scouts who shot me strange looks when I came walking through the gate in my fashionable gear.

  There is no talking at the breakfast table. After breakfast, we are sent back to our rooms or our cells to make the bed. Then the floor is inspected. The gym teachers run their fingers along the skirting boards, show us the dust on their fingertips and order us to start over. I fail to make my bed properly, despite my reputation as champion bed-maker back in Voorschoten. Here in Arnhem, the top sheet has to be turned down exactly in line with the stripes painted on the bed frame, not a fraction more or less. The rigours of my father’s domestic regime mean I can take this madness as it comes. I’m not stupid enough to play the rebel around here. I can’t say I was stupid back at the home. What I can say is that they betrayed me, those group leaders who passed on their secret reports to a bunch of faceless officials in their government offices in The Hague. I step into line in a quadrangle hemmed in by high walls. Barbed wire snakes down the drainpipes. A vision from the countless war films that kept me awake at night. I look up to see a pigeon fly over. Where has that fat little bird come from? Where is it going? Does it have a ring around its leg? A place to call home? Is it welcome there? One of the gym teachers barks a command and we march to the workshop where a domineering foreman sets us to work.

  I learn to put a hundred square inkpots on a wooden tray and fill them with ecoline using a funnel. You have to fill your funnel by hand from big bottles in the corner, watched over by one of the boys. Someone whispers that the boy has been here six months, a record for Welcome, which explains why he’s the foreman’s helper. His knuckles are caked in hard skin. Other boys whisper that he does karate and practises on the walls. That he likes to challenge each and every newcomer. Get into a fight with him and, win or lose, they’ll add a month to your sentence. So watch out and keep your head down.

  The boy beckons me over, pours ink into my funnel and tells me to watch out for the foreman. If the foreman calls ‘crimson’ and you deliver a hundred pots of ecoline crimson, there’s nothing to stop him insisting it should have been ultramarine and docking you for the hundred pots it took you an hour to fill by the time you collected the pots, unscrewed the lids, filled the pots, screwed the lids back on and attached the labels. Got it, new boy? You make twelve cents a tray and if you work hard you’ll end up with ninety-six cents a day. Got it, new boy? By the end of the week, that means you can buy a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and a pouch of tobacco with cigarette papers. Got it, new boy?

  At ten o’clock we break for coffee in the yard. Tobacco pouches, each one with a name scrawled on it, are removed from the cupboard. We are allowed to smoke and talk till twenty past, but our reasons for being here are off limits. The gym teachers eye us from behind their desk but every now and then we manage to escape their scrutiny and tell one another stories. Short and not so sweet. A succession of cliff-hangers. To be continued.

  ‘One of the lads hanged himself in his underground cell. Over there – see the bars behind that matt glass? A social worker came to see him and I swear that guy must’ve had second sight or something. He was heading home but this feeling came over him between the first gate and the second. He ran back to the cell and found the kid. He’d used his clothes for a noose.’

  ‘Was he still alive?’

  ‘…’

  ‘Hey, fucker, I asked you if he was still alive.’

  ‘No swearing!’

  One of the gym teachers looks me up and down. I avoid his eyes, look left, look right, look down at my feet. Don’t come the fucking camp commandant with me, you bastard. If you ever cross my path out in the real world, I’ll get my brother to kick your head in. Yes sir, that’s right sir, I can’t flatten you myself. I play the guitar, that’s all I’m good for. What the fuck am I doing here? I miss my guitar.

  The lunch break lasts an hour. We eat, have another smoke out in the yard and talk under our breath. Work continues till five, when they march us like soldiers in two groups to the cell block where we get cleaned up for the evening meal. Strange but true, there’s no kitchen duty after dinner. Instead, we are all allowed to go to the common room in the building opposite the main gate, above the underground cells where the heating pipes converge. We play cards. I’m no good at cards, I hate cards. Card games are for idiots. I want to strum my guitar.

  It’s Sunday before we are allowed to write a letter. Our letters are read by the staff and, once they have been censored, rewritten and approved, we are allowed to buy an envelope and a postage stamp. I describe my circumstances as matter-of-factly as I can and my letter makes it through the censorship committee in one go. The price of the envelope and stamp are deducted from the wages of my forced labour.

  A letter from my father is kept from me. In the office of the former KNIL officer, I am only allowed to see the address:

  My Son Alan Noland

  “Willkommen” Internment Camp

  Weerdjesstraat numero 26-29

  Arnheim

  Belanda

  ‘Did your father see combat over in the Indies, by any chance?’ the former KNIL officer asks me.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I reply.

  ‘We cannot allow you to read this letter. Its content is not suitable for a youngster. Some passages are unsuited for a man my age.’

  He looks me straight in the eye and rips my father’s letter to shreds. No matter. I know what it says, what all his letters say. That he will go on fighting until he has rescued his children from the clutches of those ‘filthy racists at Child Services’ and that one day we will be reunited and start a new life together, without ‘that fishwife of a mother of yours’.

  When my two weeks are up, they hand me the brown paper bag with my things. ‘You know, it’s funny,’ the former KNIL officer remarks to one of the gym teachers, ‘but you can pick them out just like that, the kids of ex-marines who fought in the Indies. The kids of our lads from the
KNIL never sink this low.’

  Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone

  It feels like a long time since I got into the car with my social worker. I look around me, surprised by all these people free to come and go, by the cars on the motorway, the trees, the fields, the cows, the shifting sky. I am free again. But when we drive through the gate and the home looms up ahead, it’s like arriving for the very first time. I am not returning. No, I am new, I come from another world. The boys have a good laugh at my shaved head, and ask what it was like, the food, the regime and the rest of it. I don’t answer any of them. The group leaders give me concerned looks. I look away.

  One sunny evening after dinner, when the boys go down to the yard to play volleyball with the girls, I stay put in my chair by the window. I light up a cigarette and look outside.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be out playing with the others?’ the group leader on duty asks. Martha is her name.

  I shake my head.

  Martha usually takes care of the younger kids but she has been called in to cover for a sick colleague. In her John Lennon glasses, jeans and baggy jumper, she sits with me for a while, an English book in her hand. The cover is a jumble of multicoloured pills and the title is a riddle to me. I get up, stand behind her and read a few sentences over her shoulder. Pointing to words I don’t know, I ask her what they mean and she gives me the Dutch translation with a smile. Three words later I know enough and have no idea what to say or do. It doesn’t even dawn on me that she’s the first person I’ve spoken to since I got back. I hope she can read minds. How could they have sent me to that hellhole? One of the inmates had tied his own mother to the bed and raped her, not once but five times. Another boy was in for attempted murder, two for attacking and mutilating young girls in the woods around Arnhem. I taught a boy to write his name; he turned out to be the one who had tried to kill somebody. The boys there told me Valkenheide was a walk in the park compared to Welcome. That only Het Poortje up in Groningen was worse. That no one from Arnhem was ever transferred to an ‘open institution’. No way, couldn’t happen. ‘You’re talking shit, man. You’re being sent to borstal. Don’t act like you’ve done nothing wrong, you stuck-up little prick. You don’t come from an open institution and you sure as fuck don’t go to school. No fucking way.’

  *

  Girls from my class stroked my hair and tried to comfort me. When they could find me that was, skulking around the bike sheds at break time. If a teacher asked me a question, they got no answer. My silence went unpunished. I got out of the homework sessions and sat on a bench in the park waiting for the other three little piggies to come past. Then I would join them and tag along back to the home. I sat down to do my homework straight after dinner and everyone left me in peace. After a week or two, the head called me in to ask me if I thought I might have outgrown the home.

  I said nothing.

  Weeks came and went, and arriving back at the home one day I was met by my sister Mil, screaming hysterically that Nana had been taken away while we were at school. They had packed her bag, put her in a car and driven her off to a foster family in Ede. Mil would not stop screaming and cursing the group leaders and the social workers. I did not comfort her, said nothing, listened impassively. When my father came to visit on Saturday and my mother on Sunday, I was nowhere to be found. There was always a hideout in the woods where you could vanish for a while, provided you made it to the trees unseen. I would find girls there smoking in secret, working-class girls from The Hague, tough talkers but kind-hearted. They cursed the ‘scum’ who had sent me to that ‘shithole’ and said if anyone ever threatened to send them to Arnhem, they would run away to The Hague. They knew guys who would look out for them, guys armed with stilettos and pistols, who drove American cars and who would take them under their wing till they turned twenty-one.

  Twenty-one, the age of adulthood.

  *

  One night after dinner, the boy next to me at the table yelled, ‘Hey guys, don’t you think it’s time monkey nut here opened his mouth?’

  A second was all it took. Two perhaps. I shot out of my chair and cracked my left elbow against his temple. He fell off his chair and lay unconscious on the floor. The other boys and the group leaders – one male, one female – jumped to their feet in disbelief. I walked over to the window, leaned against the windowsill and lit a cigarette.

  It wasn’t long before the head responded to the alarm. He came in, motioned to me to follow him upstairs and locked me in the solitary confinement cell. As soon as the door shut behind me, I felt calmer. Here I was as much a prisoner as I had been at Welcome, only without bars on the windows and with a view of the girls’ wing. One of the bolder girls got undressed at her window in the evening and waved at me. I waved back. Phil came at intervals to slide cigarettes and flattened matchboxes under the door. My food was brought by one of the younger boys. No one from my group was allowed to have any contact with me.

  *

  After a week of confinement, they let me out to go to school, where I told everyone I had been ill. When I got home, it was back to the cell. In the dead of night, I heard a key in the lock. The door opened to reveal the shape of a woman, who turned and locked the door behind her. It was Martha, with her round glasses, jeans and baggy jumper. She sat down beside me on the bed and put her finger to her lips. Then she lay down. We shared a cigarette. The following night she appeared again, this time wearing only her dressing gown. We smoked. She took my hand and guided it across her skin. The next night, we lay there naked and she taught me to explore her body. In the second week, I cautiously learned to make love and by the third week I was a man. She held a pillow to her face so that her cries could not be heard outside the cell.

  When they let me out of solitary, I was taken to the head’s office. He told me I was to see a psychologist one hour a week and a psychiatrist once a month. Luckily for me, the boy I attacked had since been allowed back home, somewhere in Twente. Otherwise I would have ended up in Valkenheide. The other boys kept their distance, which was fine by me. I had Martha.

  Around the corner from the cell, in an extension beyond the washrooms, was a small corridor with three rooms for staff who stayed over. I would lie awake until the group leader on duty made their way back from The Club and went to bed, usually around eleven or twelve, though at the weekend it could be as late as one thirty. Unless I had drifted off to sleep, I would sneak out of bed, cross the landing and tap lightly on Martha’s door. She liked to be on top and ride me while she smoked a cigarette. Lack of sleep meant I would sometimes doze off in class and I scraped into my final year at school with a report card full of C minuses.

  One night I sneaked over to Martha’s door to find it locked. Same the next night. I couldn’t ask after her for fear of attracting attention. I heard rumours that she was on holiday and some of the boys began speculating about her replacement. Others said she had quit. We had barely exchanged a word. Apart from how to make love in silence, all she had taught me were three words, translated with a smile from the book with the multicoloured pills on the cover: ‘horny’, ‘nipples’, ‘climax’.

  At the psychologist’s instigation, I was allowed to visit a bunch friends from the town during the summer holidays. They made music together in a rehearsal space and let me play with their band. I learned to sing two- and three-part harmonies and slowly began to open up a little more around the home. Girls would hang around the rehearsal room, younger and prettier than Martha, but not as mysterious. Where had she gone? Where had she come from? Where was she living now? How old was she exactly? Would she find herself another boy at another home? Could the lads from the band sense a change in me? When we covered ‘Ruby Tuesday’ by The Stones they let me sing:

  She would never say where she came from

  Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone

  While the sun is bright

  Or in the darkest night

  No one knows

  She comes and goes

  The di
spersal

  Though my father’s flat was within walking distance, the authorities never caught him making impromptu visits or stalking the grounds. Not that it mattered: in the eyes of Child Services he was still the dodgy Oriental with a horrific wartime past that at any moment could make him go mata gelap – an expression with which they were familiar. Nana was first to be sent away, to the care of a foster family in Ede. Mil left one year later, transferred to a home in a remote area not far from the German border. After sitting our final school exams, Phil and I left to board with an Indo family in The Hague, while Arti was dispatched to a boys’ home in Delft. We were scattered across the country, as had been the way with Indos who had been kicked out of Indonesia.

  Our father became the only one left to visit in the dreary town of Voorschoten.

  I didn’t last long at that boarding house with the Indo family and their sickening colonial ways. We and another Indo lodger were treated like servants and given cold leftovers to eat once the family had left the table. Their eldest daughter was so spoiled that she screamed blue murder when one of us inadvertently dug his knife into her butter. I began to skip classes at our new school, a vocational college, cycling over to the promenade instead, where I spent hours looking out to sea, much to my brother’s disgust. My listless ways were really beginning to piss him off. Five years after the police had come to fetch us from school that day, I found myself standing forlornly with my guitar strapped to my back outside a messy four-room flat on the fringes of Voorschoten, home to a solitary Indo. He opened the front door with the bearing of a fighter who suspected an ambush any second, and greeted me with the words:

  ‘Why did you forsake me?’

  An accusation I took so much to heart that I spent years thinking it was justified.