The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  Eighteen plus five makes twenty-three. That leaves six missing prisoners: five shot while escaping and one caught in a barbed-wire fence and left for dead. The numbers in Pa’s version add up. Which makes me wonder whether the Military Police checked that tally properly against the paperwork Pa was supposed to hand over. The total of five suffocated prisoners who Pa says were dead on arrival at the final destination is one more than mentioned by the journalist. And what did the Military Police make of the six who never arrived at all?

  The journalist states that the facts surrounding the four deaths on Pa’s Ghost Train were known to the head of the Marine Brigade, the Commander of Naval Forces, the Public Prosecutor and the Minister for the Overseas Territories. Yet at the time, the minister claimed he knew nothing about the incident until he received a telegram from Governor Van Mook two weeks later, which suggests that the minister deliberately omitted these facts when informing parliament. The Memorandum on Excesses, published around twenty years later, makes do with a vague statement that on the day before the Bondowoso Affair another prisoner transport had run into problems but that no further attention was paid to the incident.

  *

  In short, the journalist’s reconstruction of Pa’s Ghost Train is as follows:

  Adjutant Mulder had decided that the prisoners should be transported by train and put Nolan (without a d), a ‘young man of twenty-two from the region’, in charge of the transport. Was this a job for an interpreter? That question doesn’t seem to occur to the journalist. Did he even know that Pa was an interpreter? The journalist names the three guards allocated to Pa as stated in the memoirs. He also describes how Pa’s request for an open cattle truck was denied by the stationmaster. In addition, Pa reportedly asked for permission to smash two barred windows in the side of the wagon to give the prisoners some air. Why doesn’t he mention that in his own account?

  At half past ten in the morning, the prisoners were herded onto the train in the blistering heat at Jember station. The wagon stood for forty minutes in the burning sun before the train departed. A survivor of the Ghost Train recalled that, even at the station, conditions in the wagon were unbearable and a few of the prisoners quickly lost consciousness. According to the journalist, Pa first assessed the situation at Klakah station, had the guards throw water over the prisoners, purchased rice and fruit with his own money and sent one of the guards to buy drinks. And not, as Pa says, only 19 miles further on in Probolinggo. The journalist says all of the prisoners were revived in Klakah, but one man suffered a nervous attack and Pa decided to hand him over to the Military Police to be admitted to hospital – a damn sight more humane than shooting him in cold blood. But in his memoirs, Pa doesn’t even mention Klakah as a stop on the journey, let alone handing a prisoner over to the Military Police. According to the journalist, a prisoner asked for more room in Probolinggo and Pa agreed, allowing seven sick men to lie down while he ordered twenty-one men to climb aboard another wagon. None of this is described in Pa’s memoirs either. From Probolinggo on, the wagons were left open, while the guards kept their weapons trained on the doors. In Pa’s version, one of the prisoners made a run for it and died hanging from a barbed-wire fence.

  As Pa tells it, when his Ghost Train arrived in Wonokromo – around seven-thirty in the evening after a nine-hour journey – he immediately made a phone call to report the incident. He was then questioned by two corporals from the Military Police, who drew up their own report. According to the journalist, he was then taken to barracks and ordered to make himself available for further questioning. In Pa’s version, he first went to see his mother and slept well into the next day. Then he headed for the Marines Club and downed a dozen stiff drinks. You know our father has never been able to hold his drink. One glass of fruit wine and his head was spinning. Maybe the Dutch climate sapped his tolerance for alcohol, who knows? From the Marines Club he returned to Firefly Barracks. Of course, the journalist might have dispensed with these details as irrelevant to the case.

  The wagon of Pa’s Ghost Train was some twenty-three feet long and made of wood. But a layer of asphalt on the roof caused the temperature to rise dramatically, especially at the smaller stations with insufficient cover. Pa was indeed heard by the same panel that handled the case of the Corpse Train. According to the journalist, he was not given a ten-year suspended sentence, as Pa writes, but was unconditionally acquitted with immediate effect, having taken every measure within his power. Contrary to his own account, Pa did not have to appear before the court martial. The journalist writes that only the suspects from the Corpse Train were summoned to appear, the aim being to hush up what had happened to the Ghost Train Pa cursed so bitterly.

  The journalist argues that this is why neither the general public, parliament, nor the international press ever found out what had occurred the day before the Corpse Train drama. Even the Republic of Indonesia was never told about Pa’s Ghost Train. And if no one knows, then it never happened. At best, his story would always be dismissed as fiction. I should add that the journalist only managed to interview one Ghost Train survivor.

  Alan Noland

  No virus found in this message

  Esteemed Smart Arse (2)

  I received your email – epistle, should I say. I even read it. Counting corpses now are we? What’s got into you, man? You’ll be digging them up and dissecting them next. Don’t be taken in by some sanctimonious TV journalist who spreads lies for a living. Screaming bloody murder at the government by day, only to meet up with ministers by night to chow down on lobster at some swish brasserie. It’s a report churned out by an ageing hack who booked himself a tax-deductible trip to East Java fifty years after the fact, where he managed to interview all of one survivor and poke around in a bunch of so-called secret archives, which he labels reliable or unreliable according to whether or not they suit his story. Pa’s memory might not be all that clear, but at least he was there. So who has more right to the truth? You’d pick the journalist because, as he tells it, Pa didn’t shoot a single prisoner. But Pa was the man on the train. The man charged with transporting those prisoners. It could well be that they doctored the documents Pa submitted, altered the number of prisoners on the Ghost Train without his knowledge. And who says Pa had any paperwork to hand in? This was war: corners were cut all the time. Oh, and learn to read while you’re at it… Pa’s account mentions a procedural demand of ten years’ imprisonment. That was a sentence in name only and didn’t amount to anything. Why don’t you stick to music? Play guitar instead of lugging Pa’s past around with you. You’ll collapse under the weight of it if you don’t watch out. Be Zen… Zen, I tell you! But I know what you’re like, so let me dig around and see if I can’t find us some official documents. There’s something fishy about those job titles: guide, interpreter, marine, member of the Marine Brigade Security Service, informer, spy and what have you. None of it adds up. Watch this space. Amen.

  Philip Noland

  No virus found in this message

  Waiting

  As the missives from the Costa del Sol gradually peter out, I wonder if the Eagle is sitting there waiting for death. Literally sitting and waiting. Apparently there are people who consciously wait for their own death, and who wake up every morning deeply disappointed. Meanwhile others are locked in a constant battle to beat the shadow of death from their door. Take Ma, for example. She would wring death’s neck with her own bare hands given half a chance. It has never occurred to her what a hell eternal life must be. Not that I’m waiting for the Eagle to die; I would like to talk to him again. Not about the things we have never been able to talk about. Just about his life there, the little things that make up his everyday existence. How long has it been since we saw each other? Fifteen years? What kind of father and son are we anyway? I remember the last time I dropped by to see him unannounced in that desperate hole of his in Haarlem – he was happy as a kid to clap eyes on me again. That surprised me. Really surprised me. I had stayed away a long time, ever sinc
e that Christmas when he and Arti spread the festive cheer by threatening each other across the dinner table with a knife and a pair of scissors. As the eldest son, I stood up, walked out, drove off in my car and left them to stab each other to death. Phil was living in Switzerland by that time and wanted nothing more to do with any of us. I had no idea what was wrong with him, knew only that he lived on the 27th floor with a view of Lake Geneva. When you’re up that high, you’ve clearly had enough of other people’s crap. We called each other once a year, if that. The day after their festive face-off, the Eagle and Arti called me up. I was sleeping when the phone rang, lifted the receiver and my Boxing Day began to the sound of their voices on speakerphone. I listened and said nothing, left those two hardmen to wonder out loud if there was something wrong with the line. I felt relief that thank God their macho bullshit had not resulted in an actual stabbing, then crawled back into bed without a word, leaving the line open. I did not say goodbye to Pa when he was all set to trade one country for another for the second time in his life. I don’t remember why. Perhaps I didn’t want to say goodbye. Perhaps I didn’t want to believe he was actually leaving for Spain. Perhaps I’m incapable of goodbyes. They say it’s something you should learn at an early age. It’s not something you learn when you’ve been dumped in a children’s home from one moment to the next.

  *

  With the passing of time, a kind of indifference has come over me, one the Eagle must feel too. Neither of us sent a card when the year 2000 arrived. Does that consign our story to last century? I’m happy to say I haven’t feared him for a long time. He’s too old for that now. I practise the martial arts; he wouldn’t stand a chance. I am not the coward he was, the kind who hits women and children.

  Nor do I hit old people. Hitting back is something I should have done at twenty-one. I carried a pocket knife back then, tucked in my boot, ready to cut his throat. A deed I had already done in my darkest thoughts. I would catch the bus to Voorschoten, where he lived at the time and, standing at the entrance to his flat, I would take the knife from my boot and clasp it tight in my right coat pocket. Up the stairs I go, ring the bell, he opens the door… What kind of person are you, if you knife your father in cold blood?

  *

  At times I wonder what it will be like when he is dead. Will my hatred die with him? Will I become as witless as every other mortal, for whom nothing is simpler than honouring the dead? So cheap, so easy… It never meant much to him when someone he knew was buried six feet under and left to rot. Sarcasm was his standard response to another man’s death. In that sense too, he was more colourful than your average guy. Imagine everyone being as neurotic, troubled and traumatized as him and me – it doesn’t bear thinking about. Ha! ‘Him and me.’ The two of us in one sentence! I’ll need a moment to process that, Mr Ex-Marine! ‘Him and me’ but not quite ‘us’.

  *

  The dead live on in us, or so they say. But do we live on for the dead? If so, would he still want to hear me? See me? Read over my shoulder? Does it honestly make a difference to me if he is alive or dead? For us, I mean, for him and for me. He has still not replied to my letter about that munitions chest of his. He has stopped sending his racist newspaper clippings. His incessant urging to come and live in Spain has ceased.

  *

  At a Spanish hotel they once ushered him to the front of a queue of around thirty white Dutch people. That was before he moved there. A spot of preferential treatment he cherished almost as if it was a military honour. Do they still treat him that way, those Spaniards? His birthday cards have stopped arriving too. Not that I’m one of those loyal sons who sends his dad a card every year. Cards lie. They’re small change compared to genuine attention. What’s the big deal about sending a card once a year, prompted by the birthday calendar that hangs in your toilet? Nowadays it’s a digital calendar that does the prompting and, if Phil is to be believed, the whole process will be automated before long. Does Pa even have an email address? I doubt it. I will go and see him. It’s about time, even though I reckon a visit from him is long overdue. He has a couple of grandchildren he has never even seen, yet still he refuses to come. A worthless grandfather. Just like his own father, a drunk who lived out his last, miserable days holed up in a room at a colonial clubhouse. Even so, it’s time I went. Little Sister wants to come with me, but Big Sister is having none of it: Mil and her mysterious bond with Pa, based on nothing more than the fact that he named her after an old flame of his, a name I cannot find in any of his manuscripts. She kicks up a stink anytime she gets wind that we are planning to go and see him. If we can take her word for it, she and her two woefully neglected kids are down there all the time, at Pa’s side whenever we discuss our travel plans. After his worthless inheritance, no doubt. The family vulture circling above the battered figure of the Eagle as he drags himself across his lonely desert. Oh well, good luck to her.

  Little Sister, our Nana, is still afraid of him. Terrified that once he’s dead he will appear at the foot of her bed night after night and blame her for all kinds of things. Things that war-crazed mind of his has no right to blame on anyone. Strange, that fear of Nana’s. She was much too young to fall into his clutches, only six when we were deported to the children’s home, to use the Eagle’s words. Yet still she has that fear. He’s done a good job of stirring up anxiety in his children, or driving a wedge between them and the world. For Brother Phil everything – absolutely everything – is part of some conspiracy. He hates all things American and takes great pleasure in hacking into US websites. Pa must know what a website is by now, surely, or does he still wallow in front of the TV all day, like some washed-up sea lion? Mil says that telly of his is blaring away from six in the morning, which means he’s still living on Java time. Meanwhile Brother Arti is celebrating his third decade as a heroin addict, an achievement of sorts. Thanks to the scores of minor offences that come with a life of addiction, that boy has seen the inside of every jail in Holland. He keeps trying to kick the habit but abstinence almost instantly brings out the tormented adolescent in him. A life story made for the small screen! As we all know, the life story of the Eagle himself is beyond compare, even when rendered in the second-rate Orange-tinted Indo prose of a conflicted soldier. Perhaps that’s why he began to hate the Belandas: because they had no desire to read it. He used to look up to those loutish Belanda soldiers back on Java. For all their shortcomings, they came from the land of his late father, though the man was born in Jember and only went to Holland to attend high school and study law. Even so, the Eagle felt abandoned when his father died. But what’s all that about? What did he want to find in Holland? Footprints in the clay? Yes, he was forced to flee, we know that. But what drove him to the point where fleeing was his only option? That’s the real question. Try as I might, I cannot distil the essence from those writings of his. Was it being forced to be a baldy bastard up to the age of twelve? Whenever he’s at a loss to explain his actions, he resorts to the notorious ‘native’ state referred to in dusty old colonial literature as mata gelap. The dark mist of rage. Yeah, sorry, I went a bit mata gelap there for a minute, can’t be helped. What’s going on there? Try trotting that out at the war tribunal here in The Hague and see where it gets you! If his memoirs had been shot through with the motif of the son’s admiration for his father’s Eurasian origins and status, I might have understood it, to some extent at least. But raging like a madman simply because you’ve sided with the House of Orange? No, I just can’t buy it. What did his father really mean to him? That’s what he needed to write about! He was probably unaware that his father refused to speak Dutch when he conversed with plantation owners. I heard that from Daatje, with whom I share a grandmother. She is a granddaughter of Sie Swan Nio’s first marriage, while I am a grandson of Sie Swan Nio’s non-marriage to that father of Pa’s. When I visited Yogyakarta during my stay with Aunty Ella, Daatje told me that my grandfather preferred to speak English in the colonial Indies, and imported his own whisky. Our esteemed legal
practitioner saw himself as a Scot first and foremost. And he despised the Dutch. But why? The Eagle spoke Dutch because he felt himself to be a Dutchman born of the Indies and now hates the Dutch as much as his father did. And yet he fought for them… Let’s just say he wound up hating them and leave it at that. And truth be told, the Hollanders didn’t exactly shower him with gratitude. They wouldn’t even salute him in the street! If only he had been allowed to strut around the streets of Holland in uniform. Not far from where I live, there’s a first-generation Indo who does exactly that. He walks the streets in jungle camouflage gear with a red beret on his head. Paratrooper. Steeped himself in war for an additional half a century. The man is lean, with the hunted eyes of a predator, and he constantly mumbles to himself as he walks. Listen closely as he passes and you’ll catch him bad-mouthing both the Belandas and the Indonesians in Malay. Now and again he calls out to me, forgetting for a moment that I am second generation and worthy only of his contempt because we barely speak a word of the old tongue. I happen to know where he lives. His house, like Aunty Lique’s back in the day, has a window display. It hangs full of newspaper clippings about the conflict in Indonesia and his own face features in one or two, from the time when local newspapers still used to cover the colonial war.

  Forty years as an Indo, trudging through the muck and mire of the Netherlands, must have been a heavy price to pay for Pa, tantamount to torture. One by one his old friends vanished in the mist and no new ones presented themselves. Yes, there were women. They came and went. Until he grew dog-tired of this country, tired of all those women, and reached sixty-five and retirement at last. And when night after night his three sons stood as apparitions at the foot of his bed, it was time to flee again, this time to Spain. Dear God! Apparently he slept with an axe under his bed in that Haarlem flat with the two spare bedrooms in which none of us ever slept. One thing sent shivers up his spine more than any other: the delusion that Arti would creep into his flat one night and slit his throat. Why Arti? That boy missed Pa just as much as Pa missed his own father. Suppose our Arti had turned up one night, simply to tell his father how much he missed him, would Pa have buried that axe in his skull and sent his youngest son to an early grave? I thought we Indos were supposed to fight unarmed? At most clutching a girlfriend’s lipstick holder or a bunch of keys in one fist. Axes are for Russians. A man filled with hate should never betray his roots. The Eagle was a coward. He ran away from us, his own sons, his own flesh and blood. And from the wind and rain and chill of cosy old Holland… that too.