by Ruskin Bond
I remembered then the stories I had heard as a boy, of two spinster sisters—one beautiful, one plain—who lured rich, elderly gentlemen into their boarding house and suffocated them in the night. The deaths had appeared quite natural, and they had got away with it for years. It was only the surviving sister’s death-bed confession that had revealed the truth—and even then no one had believed her.
But that had been many, many years ago, and the house had long since fallen down …
When I turned from the mirror, there was no one behind me. I looked again, and the reflection had gone.
I crawled back into the bed and put the candle out. And I slept and dreamt (or was I awake and did it really happen?) that the woman I had seen in the mirror stood beside the bed, leant over me, looked at me with eyes flecked by orange flames. I saw people moving in those eyes. I saw myself. And then her lips touched mine, lips so cold, so dry, that a shudder ran through my body.
And then, while her face became faceless and only the eyes remained, something else continued to press down upon me, something soft, heavy and shapeless, enclosing me in a suffocating embrace. I could not turn my head or open my mouth. I could not breathe.
I raised my hands and clutched feebly at the thing on top of me. And to my surprise it came away. It was only a pillow that had somehow fallen over my face, half suffocating me while I dreamt of a phantom kiss.
I flung the pillow aside. I flung the bedclothes from me. I had had enough of whispering, of ownerless reflections, of pillows that fell on me in the dark. I would brave the storm outside rather than continue to seek rest in this tortured house.
I dressed quickly. The candle had almost guttered out. The house and everything in it belonged to the darkness of another time; I belonged to the light of day.
I was ready to leave. I avoided the tall mirror with its grotesque rococo design. Holding the candlestick before me, I moved cautiously into the front room. The pictures on the walls sprang to life.
One, in particular, held my attention, and I moved closer to examine it more carefully by the light of the dwindling candle. Was it just my imagination, or was the girl in the portrait the woman of my dream, the beautiful pale reflection in the mirror? Had I gone back in time, or had time caught up with me? Is it time that’s passing by, or is it you and I?
I turned to leave, and the candle gave one final sputter and went out, plunging the room in darkness. I stood still for a moment, trying to collect my thoughts, to still the panic that came rushing upon me. Just then there was a knocking on the door.
‘Who’s there?’ I called.
Silence. And then, again, the knocking, and this time a voice, low and insistent: ‘Please let me in, please let me in …’
I stepped forward, unbolted the door, and flung it open.
She stood outside in the rain. Not the pale, beautiful one, but a wizened old hag with bloodless lips and flaring nostrils and—but where were the eyes? No eyes, no eyes!
She swept past me on the wind, and at the same time I took advantage of the open doorway to run outside, to run gratefully into the pouring rain, to be lost for hours among the dripping trees, to be glad for all the leeches clinging to my flesh.
And when, with the dawn, I found my way at last, I rejoiced in birdsong and the sunlight piercing and scattering the clouds.
And today if you were to ask me if the old house is still there or not, I would not be able to tell you, for the simple reason that I haven’t the slightest desire to go looking for it.
Escape from Java
It all happened within the space of a few days. The cassia tree had barely come into flower when the first bombs fell on Batavia (now called Jakarta) and the bright pink blossoms lay scattered over the wreckage in the streets.
News had reached us that Singapore had fallen to the Japanese. My father said: ‘I expect it won’t be long before they take Java. With the British defeated, how can the Dutch be expected to win!’ He did not mean to be critical of the Dutch; he knew they did not have the backing of the Empire that Britain had, Singapore had been called the Gibraltar of the East. After its surrender there could only be retreat, a vast exodus of Europeans from South-East Asia.
It was the Second World War. What the Javanese thought about the war is now hard for me to say, because I was only nine at the time and knew very little of worldly matters. Most people knew they would be exchanging their Dutch rulers for Japanese rulers; but there were also many who spoke in terms of freedom for Java when the war was over.
Our neighbour, Mr Hartono, was one of those who looked ahead to a time when Java, Sumatra and the other islands would make up one independent nation. He was a college professor and spoke Dutch, Chinese, Javanese and a little English. His son, Sono, was about my age. He was the only boy I knew who could talk to me in English, and as a result we spent a lot of time together. Our favourite pastime was flying kites in the park.
The bombing soon put an end to kite flying. Air raid alerts sounded at all hours of the day and night and, although in the beginning most of the bombs fell near the docks, a couple of miles from where we lived, we had to stay indoors. If the planes sounded very near, we dived under beds or tables. I don’t remember if there were any trenches. Probably there hadn’t been time for trench digging, and now there was time only for digging graves. Events had moved all too swiftly, and everyone (except, of course, the Javanese) was anxious to get away from Java.
‘When are you going?’ asked Sono, as we sat on the veranda steps in a pause between air raids.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It all depends on my father.’
‘My father says the Japs will be here in a week. And if you’re still here then, they’ll put you to work building a railway.’
‘I wouldn’t mind building a railway,’ I said.
‘But they won’t give you enough to eat. Just rice with worms in it. And if you don’t work properly, they’ll shoot you.’
‘They do that to soldiers,’ I said. ‘We’re civilians.’
‘They do it to civilians, too,’ said Sono.
What were my father and I doing in Batavia, when our home had been first in India and then in Singapore? He worked for a firm dealing in rubber, and six months earlier he had been sent to Batavia to open a new office in partnership with a Dutch business house. Although I was so young, I accompanied my father almost everywhere. My mother left when I was very small, and my father had always looked after me. After the war was over he was going to take me to England.
‘Are we going to win the war?’ I asked.
‘It doesn’t look it from here,’ he said.
No, it didn’t look as though we were winning. Standing at the docks with my father, I watched the ships arrive from Singapore crowded with refugees—men, women and children, all living on the decks in the hot tropical sun; they looked pale and worn-out and worried. They were on their way to Colombo or Bombay. No one came ashore at Batavia. It wasn’t British territory; it was Dutch, and everyone knew it wouldn’t be Dutch for long.
‘Aren’t we going too?’ I asked. ‘Sono’s father says the Japs will be here any day.’
‘We’ve still got a few days,’ said my father. He was a short, stocky man who seldom got excited. If he was worried, he didn’t show it. ‘I’ve got to wind up a few business matters, and then we’ll be off.’
‘How will we go? There’s no room for us on those ships.’
‘There certainly isn’t. But we’ll find a way, lad, don’t worry.’
I didn’t worry. I had complete confidence in my father’s ability to find a way out of difficulties. He used to say, ‘Every problem has a solution hidden away somewhere, and if only you look hard enough you will find it.’
There were British soldiers in the streets but they did not make it feel much safer. They were just waiting for troop ships to come and take them away. No one, it seemed, was interested in defending Java, only in getting out as fast as possible.
Although the Dutch were unpo
pular with the Javanese people, there was no ill-feeling against individual Europeans. I could walk safely through the streets. Occasionally small boys in the crowded Chinese quarter would point at me and shout, ‘Orang Balandi!’ (Dutchman!) but they did so in good humour, and I didn’t know the language well enough to stop and explain that the English weren’t Dutch. For them, all white people were the same, and understandably so.
My father’s office was in the commercial area, along the canal banks. Our two-storied house, about a mile away, was an old building with a roof of red tiles and a broad balcony which had stone dragons at either end. There were flowers in the garden almost all the year round. If there was anything in Batavia more regular than the bombing, it was the rain, which came pattering down on the roof and on the banana fronds almost every afternoon. In the hot and steamy atmosphere of Java, the rain was always welcome.
There were no anti-aircraft guns in Batavia—at least we never heard any—and the Jap bombers came over at will, dropping their bombs by daylight. Sometimes bombs fell in the town. One day the building next to my father’s office received a direct hit and tumbled into the river. A number of office workers were killed.
The schools closed, and Sono and I had nothing to do all day except sit in the house, playing darts or carrom, wrestling on the carpets, or playing the gramophone. We had records by Gracie Fields, Harry Lauder, George Formby and Arthur Askey, all popular British artists of the early 1940s. One song by Arthur Askey made fun of Adolph Hitler, with the words, ‘Adolph, we’re gonna hang up your washing on the Siegfried Line, if the Siegfried Line’s still there!’ It made us feel quite cheerful to know that back in Britain people were confident of winning the war!
One day Sono said, ‘The bombs are falling on Batavia, not in the countryside. Why don’t we get cycles and ride out of town?’
I fell in with the idea at once. After the morning all-clear had sounded, we mounted our cycles and rode out of town. Mine was a hired cycle, but Sono’s was his own. He’d had it since the age of five, and it was constantly in need of repair. ‘The soul has gone out of it,’ he used to say.
Our fathers were at work; Sono’s mother had gone out to do her shopping (during air raids she took shelter under the most convenient shop counter) and wouldn’t be back for at least an hour. We expected to be back before lunch.
We were soon out of town, on a road that passed through rice fields, pineapple orchards and cinchona plantations. On our right lay dark green hills; on our left, groves of coconut palms and, beyond them, the sea. Men and women were working in the rice fields, knee-deep in mud, their broad-brimmed hats protecting them from the fierce sun. Here and there a buffalo wallowed in a pool of brown water, while a naked boy lay stretched out on the animal’s broad back.
We took a bumpy track through the palms. They grew right down to the edge of the sea. Leaving our cycles on the shingle, we ran down a smooth, sandy beach and into the shallow water.
‘Don’t go too far in,’ warned Sono. ‘There may be sharks about.’
Wading in amongst the rocks, we searched for interesting shells, then sat down on a large rock and looked out to sea, where a sailing ship moved placidly on the crisp, blue waters. It was difficult to imagine that half the world was at war, and that Batavia, two or three miles away, was right in the middle of it.
On our way home we decided to take a short cut through the rice fields, but soon found that our tyres got bogged down in the soft mud. This delayed our return; and to make things worse, we got the roads mixed up and reached an area of the town that seemed unfamiliar. We had barely entered the outskirts when the siren sounded, followed soon after by the drone of approaching aircraft.
‘Should we get off our cycles and take shelter somewhere?’ I called out.
‘No, let’s race home!’ shouted Sono. ‘The bombs won’t fall here.’
But he was wrong. The planes flew in very low. Looking up for a moment, I saw the sun blotted out by the sinister shape of a Jap fighter-bomber. We pedalled furiously; but we had barely covered fifty yards when there was a terrific explosion on our right, behind some houses. The shock sent us spinning across the road. We were flung from our cycles. And the cycles, still propelled by the blast, crashed into a wall.
I felt a stinging sensation in my hands and legs, as though scores of little insects had bitten me. Tiny droplets of blood appeared here and there on my flesh. Sono was on all fours, crawling beside me, and I saw that he too had the same small scratches on his hands and forehead, made by tiny shards of flying glass.
We were quickly on our feet, and then we began running in the general direction of our homes. The twisted cycles lay forgotten on the road.
‘Get off the street, you two!’ shouted someone from a window; but we weren’t going to stop running until we got home. And we ran faster than we’d ever run in our lives.
My father and Sono’s parents were themselves running about the street, calling for us, when we came rushing around the corner and tumbled into their arms.
‘Where have you been?’
‘What happened to you?’
‘How did you get those cuts?’
All superfluous questions but before we could recover our breath and start explaining, we were bundled into our respective homes. My father washed my cuts and scratches, dabbed at my face and legs with iodine—ignoring my yelps—and then stuck plaster all over my face.
Sono and I had had a fright, and we did not venture far from the house again.
That night my father said: ‘I think we’ll be able to leave in a day or two.’
‘Has another ship come in?’
‘No.’
‘Then how are we going? By plane?’
‘Wait and see, lad. It isn’t settled yet. But we won’t be able to take much with us—just enough to fill a couple of travelling bags.’
‘What about the stamp collection?’ I asked.
My father’s stamp collection was quite valuable and filled several volumes.
‘I’m afraid we’ll have to leave most of it behind,’ he said. ‘Perhaps Mr Hartono will keep it for me, and when the war is over—if it’s over—we’ll come back for it.’
‘But we can take one or two albums with us, can’t we?’
‘I’ll take one. There’ll be room for one. Then if we’re short of money in Bombay, we can sell the stamps.’
‘Bombay? That’s in India. I thought we were going back to England.’
‘First we must go to India.’
The following morning I found Sono in the garden, patched up like me, and with one foot in a bandage. But he was as cheerful as ever and gave me his usual wide grin.
‘We’re leaving tomorrow,’ I said.
The grin left his face.
‘I will be sad when you go,’ he said. ‘But I will be glad too, because then you will be able to escape from the Japs.’
‘After the war, I’ll come back.’
‘Yes, you must come back. And then, when we are big, we will go round the world together. I want to see England and America and Africa and India and Japan. I want to go everywhere.’
‘We can’t go everywhere.’
‘Yes, we can. No one can stop us!’
We had to be up very early the next morning. Our bags had been packed late at night. We were taking a few clothes, some of my father’s business papers, a pair of binoculars, one stamp album, and several bars of chocolate. I was pleased about the stamp album and the chocolates, but I had to give up several of my treasures—favourite books, the gramophone and records, an old Samurai sword, a train set and a dartboard. The only consolation was that Sono, and not a stranger, would have them.
In the first faint light of dawn a truck drew up in front of the house. It was driven by a Dutch businessman, Mr Hookens, who worked with my father. Sono was already at the gate, waiting to say goodbye.
‘I have a present for you,’ he said.
He took me by the hand and pressed a smooth hard object into my palm.
I grasped it and then held it up against the light. It was a beautiful little sea horse, carved out of pale blue jade.
‘It will bring you luck,’ said Sono.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I will keep it forever.’
And I slipped the little sea horse into my pocket.
‘In you get, lad,’ said my father, and I got up on the front seat between him and Mr Hookens.
As the truck started up, I turned to wave to Sono. He was sitting on his garden wall, grinning at me. He called out: ‘We will go everywhere, and no one can stop us!’
He was still waving when the truck took us round the bend at the end of the road.
We drove through the still, quiet streets of Batavia, occasionally passing burnt-out trucks and shattered buildings. Then we left the sleeping city far behind and were climbing into the forested hills. It had rained during the night, and when the sun came up over the green hills, it twinkled and glittered on the broad, wet leaves. The light in the forest changed from dark green to greenish gold, broken here and there by the flaming red or orange of a trumpet-shaped blossom. It was impossible to know the names of all those fantastic plants! The road had been cut through dense tropical forest, and on either side the trees jostled each other, hungry for the sun; but they were chained together by the liana creepers and vines that fed upon the struggling trees.
Occasionally a jelarang, a large Javan squirrel, frightened by the passing of the truck, leapt through the trees before disappearing into the depths of the forest. We saw many birds: peacocks, junglefowl, and once, standing majestically at the side of the road, a crowned pigeon, its great size and splendid crest making it a striking object even at a distance. Mr Hookens slowed down so that we could look at the bird. It bowed its head so that its crest swept the ground; then it emitted a low hollow boom rather than the call of a turkey.
