The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  *

  What about that manuscript of his? Is it a black book? A blue book? A black-and-blue book? A feeble joke, but then he was the one who told me the Indonesians tore the blue stripe from the Dutch tricolour and gave it to the Indos for their repatriation to Holland. Which is why we were dubbed ‘blues’ in the fifties and sixties. Relatively mild as racial slurs go, though less flattering accounts exist. Are his memoirs nothing more than a written defence of all the misery he inflicted in his homeland, an apologia that got out of hand? One long plea for more military honours than the single medal he ended up with? As I recall, the Eagle stopped carving notches on the butt of his rifle when his personal death toll reached a hundred. If even ten per cent of what he lists is true, it makes him a mass murderer and all his Dutch mates along with him.

  I let a couple of friends read the manuscript and asked them to gauge its truthfulness. Now it’s with Phil, who has yet to respond. I value his judgement more than anyone’s, more than the opinion of a couple of pals who reckon it’s half truth, half embellishment. If that’s the case, we might as well call it fiction. A novel based on real-life events. Something like that. Faction as a counterpoint to fiction. Of course, the Eagle would be mortally offended by such a label. For him it’s all about the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, a condition from which many of his generation suffer. Which brings us back to that old cliché: their story was never heard. No one bothered to listen. I hate to say it, but my father’s generation have a point, from the upper echelons to the lowest of the low. Holland loves the cliché of the ‘silent father from the Indies’.

  I once saw a TV documentary about a remorseful Dutch veteran of the war of independence. He visited some Indonesian village or other and assembled all the villagers. They stood around a podium while he blubbered his heart out, apologizing for what he had done.

  The Indonesian villagers listened in silence, asked him no questions. But if you looked closely, you could read the words in their eyes: What is this Belanda whining about? Didn’t we win the war? This man must be confused. He thinks he’s still the boss around here, that colonialism never went away. Kasihan, how sad for this man, yes indeed.

  I am so sorry I lost the war to you. I’m so very sorry, my esteemed victors!

  What an embarrassing spectacle. Even now, I can’t bring myself to laugh at it. In spite of it all, there’s one thing I have to give my father and his generation credit for: they never – and I mean never – apologized for fighting for the House of Orange. No Dutchman can fully understand what a motto like ‘In the name of Orange’ meant to people from the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia, with their sovereigns, sultans, princesses and goodness knows what else.

  Webcam chat

  AL: ‘Hey, have you dived into Pa’s past yet or are you still too busy messing about with that computer and synthesizer of yours?’

  PHIL: ‘I got the PDF of Pa’s manuscript you sent me and I’ll get stuck in one of these days. I never really read his memoirs properly…’

  AL: ‘Has a nice ring to it, Bro… get stuck in…’

  PHIL: ‘I scanned the odd page at random on the computer. Haven’t been able to find the original since I dumped all my paperwork in the skip outside the flat.’

  AL: ‘But you must have read how he bumped off one guy after another… Or didn’t you?’

  PHIL: ‘Yeah. But is that news? He told us that when we were kids.’

  AL: ‘And you believe that shit?’

  PHIL: ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  AL: ‘Why would you?’

  PHIL: ‘Look, if you don’t like my answers, don’t go twisting them into questions and firing them back at me. You know I hate that. Let me put it another way, Mr Smart Arse: to me his memoirs feel genuine.’

  AL: ‘Genuine! Ha! Since when did you let your feelings do the talking, Mr Inquisitor? Ain’t you supposed to be the man of reason, a disciple of logic? And still you believe that shit?’

  PHIL: ‘Like I said, I haven’t given it a thorough read yet, but Pa’s descriptions strike me as honest, candid and authentic. Spiced up a little here and there maybe. No law against that, is there?’

  AL: ‘But where does fact end and fiction begin?’

  PHIL: ‘Does it matter? If anyone’s life should read like a novel, it’s his. Am I wrong? What gets me most is that he only ever showed us one side of himself: the tyrant. But in the memoirs there’s a romantic side to him.’

  AL: ‘Yeah, a romantic brandishing an M1 rifle.’

  PHIL: ‘Are you trying to tell me romantics are all about love? I thought you were our resident man of letters? Why don’t you go and pluck at your guitar or something? In fact, that’s exactly what you should be doing! I’ll give Pa’s document another read, a proper read this time. As you can see and hear, I’m loaded with the cold right now.’

  AL: ‘You’re just like Pa, with those colds of yours. Remember when we stayed in that filthy Indo boarding house and Pa bombarded us with letters asking us – no, telling us – no, commanding us – to come and look after him? The man came down with a new ailment every other day. And off we’d trot, back to dreary old Voorschoten to do his shopping for him. In winter, his place always reeked of cajuput oil, ginger, lemon, peppermint, liquorice and noodle soup. Do you remember how he used to make noodle soup? He’d fill a big pot with water, chuck in a frozen chicken and a whole pack of margarine, a stock cube, a few big onions quartered, chili paste, soy sauce, MSG and a pack of chopped mixed veg from the supermarket. Bring it to the boil, then turn down the heat and have himself a nice long shower. After an hour he added the noodles, dropped three raw eggs into the murk and a pack of beansprouts for good measure. And… God it tasted good! Delicious! Unbelievable how you can make such good noodle soup without so much as giving a toss.’

  PHIL: ‘I’d forgotten all about that! He always had the flu, didn’t he? Never missed a winter. Okay, have it your way, I’m Pa for a week. But before I collapse on the couch again, I’d like to say something about Ma, our wannabe sitcom star from Helmond who would have liked nothing better than to order us a UFO and send us back to whatever planet she thought we came from. When we were kids, Ma always told us Pa was schizophrenic. Split personality, she said, though she was never very clear which personalities she was talking about. I reckon I can shed some light on that. Basically, Pa was a man of feeling. But in the outside world he had to operate as a man of reason. Of course, that threw up all kinds of problems – he was going against his own nature. I’m not saying Ma was right. She was too stupid to be right, always has been, always will be. She didn’t understand Pa at all. Every night he sat there typing away at his Remington, but I don’t remember her ever being curious enough to sit down beside him. What can you do with a wife who never takes the slightest interest in what you have to say? Right then, I’m off for another lie down.’

  AL: ‘Get well soon, Bro. By the way, Ma and the rest of us always thought Pa was studying. She knew nothing about his memoirs. Anyway, let me know when you’ve finally read through that shit of Pa’s.’

  PHIL: ‘Shit? Smart Arse here continues to call Pa’s memoirs shit? Prose is what they are, brother.’

  AL: ‘Off you go and hang that head of yours over a steaming bucket of Vicks. You’ll see Pa’s phantoms rising up before your teary eyes soon enough.’

  PHIL: ‘Hey, there’s a thing: Vicks! Wasn’t that the stuff Pa used to chuck boiling water over? Then he’d hold your head above the bucket, throw a wet towel over you and clamp one hand around your neck, camp commandant style. It worked though, didn’t it? You’d be back at school the next day.’

  AL: ‘Hey, Bro, one more thing. Do you know what a buaya is?’

  PHIL: ‘Animal, vegetable or mineral?’

  AL: ‘Animal. Pa ate turtle meat during the war, so why not crocodile?’

  PHIL: ‘Is that what buaya means? Crocodile? Hmm, I think he told us once that he ate crocodile.’

  AL: ‘He ate everything, even rancid pork. To
toughen himself up for World War Three.’

  PHIL: ‘Was that why he did it? I thought he was just too tight to buy it fresh.’

  AL: ‘Could be. Or a bit of both. He would buy butcher meat for next to nothing when it was past its sell-by date. And he had this strange preoccupation with what he called the smell of corpses. Couldn’t eat a piece of meat without reminding us it came from a dead body. He got a weird kick out of eating that rancid pork. Anyway, the Indies had a few names for crocodile. There’s baya and there’s buaya. In the old Dutch colonial classics and Malay pantuns, verses which have made their way into kroncong music, buaya stands for womanizer. Suits him down to the ground, don’t you think?’