by Nigel Barley
PM had not improved greatly in the few days they had been away but with Filet as their host, it offered soft beds and beer. Thompson gathered strength. The steamer connection to Padang was unsure and a glance at the passenger lists revealed a sudden and inexplicable rise in the proportion of unattached English ‘traders’, come from Singapore, unexpectedly flooding into this area at the time of year when there was no trade to speak of – and asking questions about strangers. Ah no. Siak it would have to be then.
“There is the matter of administrative costs,” mused Filet over lamplit dinner. “This is not a rich district you see and I can’t just take it into my head to wander off to Siak, which is outside my area, in the launch without due cause. The paperwork would be hell. The commissioner has an eye for these things and once he gets his teeth into administrative costs … A nice little riot in the market there, with me assisting, is the sort of thing we need.” He reached absent-mindedly for another of beer. Several had already been taken in the course of a long, slow, bibulous evening. It slipped from his grasp, smashed on the table edge as he unthinkingly lunged for it.
“Damn and blast!” He had a nasty, oozing cut and a big grin on his face. “There we are then,” licking fresh blood. “A badly cut finger risking turning poisonous and on my account-signing hand too, rendering me unfit for duty. The only hospital is at Siak. QED.”
Siak did not exactly bustle but at least it twitched with intermittant commercial and government activity. It was basically the usual collection of wooden huts stood on poles out over the mud, but had, in addition, a church, several stores and two miles of navigable road that had encouraged the importation, by a wealthy Chinese, of a single motor car. Above all, it swarmed with children and when Lauterbach looked on the local ladies, waving to him bare-breasted from the riverside he could see why. Thompson was back on his feet, staring goggle-eyed. He would have to arrange something for the lad.
They settled into one of the eating houses by the jetty, forking in fried rice in token fashion, while Filet went off to have his finger dressed and do the usual administrative rounds. He arrived back a couple of hours later, flushed and with his wound elaborately bandaged into a boxer’s hand in token of alibi, demanding beer, with two grinning native policemen in tow.
“Now then,” he sat and sighed, flung his hat wearily on the table. “Let me explain. The DO for here is not happy. The fact is he’s from too near the German border and doesn’t greatly care for your chaps, Lauterbach. Up this end of the Indies most people are scared to death of upsetting the British in case they just walk in one day and take over and then we’re all out of a job. But he’ll turn a blind eye as long as you move on straight away. So these two,” he indicated the policemen, “just happen to be here from the next district along and have agreed to take you back with them to Tratabula where the DO, my old friend Dahler, will take care of you. He’s German-born you see. If I were you I’d get out of town fast.”
And so it was. There was to be no escape from walking across Sumatra. They trekked every day from five in the morning till ten, then rested until the heat cooled off and set out again from four till ten at night. In the morning, they waded through steam, in the evening through swooping swallows. Around them everything smelled of rot and decay. The policemen, heavily laden as they were, streaked away and would pause, polite and uncomplaining, to wait for them at every junction of the path or river crossing. Whoever had done the calculations of time from one village to another had used supermen like these. Four days’ march stretched into over a week, then two. Whenever the policemen were asked how far they had yet to go they would smile, make a limp stone-throwing gesture and say “little bit yet.” They lived on fruit bought at the roadside and rice begged from villagers, slept where they could and tried not to give way to despair.
“Lauterbach, what will you do when we get to Padang?” Schoenberg did not usually ask questions like that. It was one of the things that made him an acceptable travelling companion.
“I will have a bath, a shave, drink a beer and have a woman. I contemplate the prospect with abated breadth.”
“No, no.” Schoenberg frowning, shaking his head. “I don’t mean that. I mean will you stay there? I know the others are planning to settle in Padang or Batavia rather than risk trying to get back to Germany through the English fleet. For myself I am a trader in an international house. I can always get work wherever I am. Thompson can get another merchant ship, even a Dutch one. But you know there is talk of Holland coming into the war on the British side. If they do, they might just let me be or intern me in some nice house, or – if things go badly – put me in a prison again but you – I think – they would give back to the British to hang.”
“Thank you Schoenberg. You have given me pleasant thoughts to keep me going and make me walk faster.”
Dahler, when they finally arrived, was a bit of a disappointment, shrugging, unenthusiastic, steeped in tropical tropor, unwilling to make their problems his own. After a few days’ rest on short rations they set off again.
If the previous stretch had once seemed difficult, it now became an easy stroll through a noble park compared to this. Here, the mountainous backbone of the island towered up to over three thousand steaming feet and they lay in its full rainshadow. Every day it poured down and sometimes the rain felt warm and sometimes cold but always there was just too much of it. The earth was slippery clay, the rocks brittle meringue, crumbling between their fingers and under their feet. Lethal precipices lay on either hand, tricking eyes full of water and sweat. The tracks had been made by small men and for small men so that the steps they had cut into the rocks on the really dangerous sections were too tight for clumsy Western feet and invited disaster while the branches they had cleared to their own head height poked Westerners in the eyes and stabbed them in the mouth. They were charged by buffalo, taunted by monkeys. The peak of felicity was to arrive trembling from fatigue in an astonished settlement and collapse as a giggling Malay sent his pet monkey scampering up into the trees to rain down coconuts on their heads. Scorpions and snakes were abundant but worst of all were the innumerable insects that made war on them day and night, mosquitoes, ticks and leeches, that burrowed and gorged on their flesh, leaving wounds that festered and turned septic. Soon they were afraid to take their boots off at night. Putting them back on bleeding, blistered feet was torture. Fungus sprouted rapidly between their toes and then swarmed all over them in a suppurating itch that could only be called ‘athlete’s body.’ Worse yet, from sleeping on old mats, in abandoned huts, they were invaded by lice that crabbed and devilled into their pubes, itching and flaring their private parts like chilli.
“Look, Lauterbach, look!” They had scrambled to the crest of another rise, knowing, as always, that there would be yet another on the other side, and another after that. But instead there was a view of two smoking volcanic cones, Merapi and Singgalang, an apron of land that dropped away before them with a distant view of sea and hazy city, with pointed-roofed Minang houses in between. Schoenberg and Thompson wept and hugged each other weakly. The guides grinned, “little bit further” and pointed to the countless miles ahead.
“Moses,” thought Lauterbach, his head giddy. “I feel like Moses looking at the promised land.”
It was Padang on the west coast of the island. They had made it clear across. Lauterbach bent forward, admiring the rich, tended landscape, sucking it in through his eyes. Better yet, cutting straight through the lush plantations, he had spotted a railway line down there, just a couple of miles away. Unlike Moses, he could catch the train straight to the heart of the promised land – first class.
Lauterbach sat cosily on the cane settee, extravagantly cushioned on all sides, elegantly clad in fresh white linen, while the electric fans worked away overhead with the combined power of a dozen demented punkah-wallahs. He was preened, purged, purified and lightly perfumed. On the table before him stood a glass of cold beer, a new hat, a smoking ashtray. He looked for all the
world like a prosperous member of the Etappe. His paunch had been restocked by the German consul, yielding to his cries of desperate poverty. His salary would be ticking up nicely, untouched, in Germany. Across his knees lay the latest Singapore newspapers and he was mildly irritated by the ruffling draught of the fans. Urban colonial gentlemen, he found, could be irritated by very small discomforts indeed.
There was an article on the Singapore mutiny which was declared finally and officially “put down.” French, Russian and Japanese warships had converged on the harbour and debarked contingents of battle-tried marines. The ‘trim’ Japanese troops had particularly distinguished themselves while Japanese civilians had been sworn in as special constables to patrol the streets of the colony. So, the British Empire was saved by the rising sons of Japan. Lauterbach laughed aloud. Wars made strange bedfellows, not that he had had many of those lately himself.
Some sepoys had got across the causeway to the mainland but not to make hay with civil order, only to surrender with due formality to the astonished Muslim Sultan of Johore. It had been a holiday with a little homicide thrown in rather than a coherent attempt to take and hold a military objective. Over 400 were now in captivity while a prominent Muslim civilian had been briskly hanged and some fifty sepoys shot by firing squad – almost the same number as the British civilians killed in the rising. A grainy picture showed crumpled bodies in British uniform lying against a long line of stakes with an officer administering a coup de grace to one of the sprawled figures with a revolver. Poor innocent Taj Mohammed! He would surely be among them. Born to be hanged for the best of motives. Lauterbach could see that it was all being tidied up and hidden away nicely. The documents would be neatly bundled up with string to be shipped home, stuck in the archives and declared secret for fifty years so that everyone could go on with the serious military business of declaring European superiority while quietly getting their promotions, medals and pensions. There had already been a number of strategic retirements and reshuffles and a certain Captain Hall seemed to have done rather well for himself out of the business.
Still, he had given the British a good scare. They had feared not only for the future of Singapore but the whole of Muslim India. Troop convoys had been disrupted. Self-confidence had been destroyed and a fatal wedge had been driven in the trust between the British and their Indian Empire. Now they would not be sending any more white troops back from the East to the Western front, at least not for a while. No, instead, they would hunt him down like a dog. He looked down at the bloated faces of the dead and abruptly felt his collar tighten around his throat as his bowels loosened. Shaking, he slackened his tie and popped his top button and gulped in gasps of air. The article ended by reminding readers that several dangerous German collaborators were still on the run and that all householders should remain vigilant.
Lauterbach too would remain vigilant. There was a European across the room, sitting in the corner, waiting idly, fanning himself with his hat and staring into space, watching the dust motes dancing. The other hand twitched rhythmically. In the sunlight, Lauterbach could see the unmistakable shape of a small bullet, a little jewel of lead, copper and brass, that he tumbled compulsively, base over tip, like a Muslim telling his beads. He had been at the restaurant last night and the draper’s shop this morning. When Lauterbach had come out of the cigar shop and abruptly turned left, he had nearly cannoned into him standing in a side street. From his complexion, he was fresh out East, maybe English. He wore old lady’s lavender cologne and only the English did that. The smell of it had transported him immediately back to his childhood – Lauterbach, six years old, sniffing a bar of Old English Lavender soap sent by a distant Manchester cousin.
Lauterbach shook his freshly-barbered head and turned to the Batavian papers. Von Muecke had created a sensation a few months before by himself appearing, out of the blue, in Padang in that old schooner he had stolen from the Cocos-Keeling islands, dodging lurking British gunboats and sailing off again to war like a romantic pirate of old. There was continued Dutch speculation as to his whereabouts and intentions. Lauterbach thanked his lucky stars he had missed that happy reunification or he would now be god-knows-where on the open sea, in a leaky boat, directly under the orders of von Muecke, probably planning the lone conquest of Australia. He himself had dropped from the headlines but the belated arrival of Diehn and the others in Padang was being made much of. Most of them had tried to march into town and ended up in hospital. Diehn would be furious to have a much smaller price set on his head by the British than Lauterbach.
“Oh. Herr Thompson. You poor lamb. You are so brave and so young.”
Lauterbach swiftly raised the newspaper like an armoured visor. It was the sound of cooing female enthusiasm that he had got to know so well in Padang and, though it had served him well enough initially, he was now heartily sickened by it. For Thompson it was all new and wonderful – food, drink, smart clothes, sexual initiation. You couldn’t blame the boy. He lowered the newssheet and peered cautiously over the edge like a submariner. Middle-aged merchants’ wives, faces hot and shiny with maternal lust, weevily enough hard tack for a boy to cut his teeth on but, once he had got his foot in their door, they would have more tender daughters for him back at the house.
“Tell me, my dear young boy, how you fought that tiger with nothing but your bare hands and your young courage and what happened when you were attacked by cannibals with blowpipes, like you told that man from the papers.”
Lauterbach snorted behind the personal column and forced his eyes to concentrate on the print. A young Batavian gentleman was looking for partners for tennis mixed doubles. A respectable, “almost white”, lady – fresh from the country – offered breast-feeding. Thompson cleared his throat and began his heavily embroidered yarn in a new, deep, confident, manly voice. Lauterbach smiled to himself. The lad was growing up, giving them what they wanted to hear. Better yet he had given him an idea.
“All his fellow countrymen will be saddened to hear that Oberleutnant Lauterbach, ex-officer of the Emden, is suffering from a bad attack of the fever as a result of the exertions made during his recent famous crossing of Sumatra. As soon as his condition permits, he plans a journey into the Sumatra highlands for his health. Let us all wish him a pleasant journey.”
It appeared in the Padang German-language paper the next day. But Lauterbach was very far from lying on his sickbed. Instead, he was in the rear seat of the publisher’s car, bucking and roaring along the motor road south to Bengkulu, where he would pick up the steamer to Batavia, the capital, and arrive before the news of his disappearance could reach a British ship. Arrived at the harbour, on the passenger manifest, there was, of course, no Lauterbach. But there was a portly and goatee-wearing Belgian, Eugene Gilbert by name, a gentleman who declared his luggage mysteriously and irritatingly lost at Bengkulu and was therefore treated by the shipping line with the greatest consideration and generosity. Monsieur Gilbert spent a great deal of his time on deck and was particularly interested in the British warships that cruised around the Sunda Straits, the narrow waterway that divides Sumatra and Java, always waving a friendly greeting to the sailors on board and executing a sort of exuberant and abbreviated nautical hornpipe to their departing sterns.
Chapter Nine
Batavia was the most modern and cosmopolitan city in South East Asia, at least the European quarter, Weltevreden, was. The native suburbs boiled in tropical heat and disease and steeped in foul water, but Weltevreden spoke of the optimism of pre-war years with bright new trams gliding along the tree-lined avenues and sparkling canals built by the Dutch to bring coolness and soothing motion to their crisp, white, residential areas. In the commercial quarter, the stiff, narrow fronts of Amsterdam had been preserved but out here in the suburbs there was enough space for the Dutch Landhaus to take their place. Fat dwellings sat securely in large grounds, pruned and watered by copious gardeners who fought a relentless battle against tropical exuberance, just as their owners waged war
on the manic disorder of the whole, vast colonial archipelago.
Lauterbach moved into the sprawled gingerbread villa of one of the Etappe merchants where the man lived with his pale wife and three big-boned daughters but he spent much of his own time in the gentlemanly atmosphere of the Harmonie, the famous club on the corner of the noisesome main boulevard where carriages, horsed and horseless, rattled up and down around the clock. In the early 19th century, the Harmonie had been completed by Stamford Raffles, under the British interregnum, so that Dutch and British should mix socially and they were still doing it. Its cool white pillars and luxurious clubrooms were one of the wonders of the East, panelled with every exotic oriental wood and paved with foot-smoothed flagstones that called softly but insistently to Lauterbach. The bar, dotted with potted palms, bore that sense of unchanging and well-patinated perfection otherwise found only in heaven. Oleaginous Javanese boys, with headcloths like flames, pattered deferentially among the drinkers while, in the leather armchairs, lounged the men who ruled this great swarming empire of millions of brown souls, mostly red-faced and foolish but certainly not evil. And mostly Lauterbach liked them as they did him and they brought him shelter from the burden of cosmic loneliness that nested like ice in his breast. Of an evening, his entrance roused a cheer and calls for a drink for good old Juli-bumm from German and Dutchman alike. Even some of the British joined in so that he preferred to sit in the main concourse rather than what was known jocularly as “the German lines.”
This morning he settled himself opposite the great tented lap of Potter, an English planter with a big spread of rubber up in Probolingo. Potter’s ghostly palour was odd for a man whose occupation should involve an active outdoor life but probably told sad truths about his style of management. It was only about eleven but there was already a sprinkling of dedicated drinkers round the room, complaining as always about the heat and the servants.
