All Ships Follow Me

by Mieke Eerkens

  These trips sometimes include visits to the jail in Bengkulu, and my father waits in the backseat of the car reading picture books and eating licorice while his father sees a prisoner patient. One afternoon, a warden walks by the car and sees Sjeffie. The warden raps on the roof of the car. “Little boy, why are you here? Have you been naughty? Are they putting you in jail?” He pokes his fat head in the open window of the Terraplane and chuckles from under a thick mustache, exchanging an amused glance with the tjoper, who leans against the driver’s-side door, fanning himself. My father’s five-year-old eyes widen. His lower lip trembles. “No, sir. My daddy’s the doctor and he’s going to see sick prisoners and then he’s coming right back.” “Is that so? Well, are you sure you’re a good boy? If you aren’t a good boy, we might just have to put you in jail.” The warden’s eyes twinkle with amusement, but the joke is lost on my father. He starts to cry. And he refuses to accompany his father to the jail ever again.

  Every four years, medical doctors working for the colonial Dutch government are given six months of paid furlough between appointments that take them to different communities in the Dutch East Indies, so in 1936, when my father is almost five, the family uses my grandfather’s furlough to visit the Netherlands. They sail for a month on a huge passenger ship via the Suez Canal to the “old country,” the motherland. My father is introduced to many relatives, including his grandparents, for the first time. His grandparents moved to the Netherlands from the Dutch East Indies before my father’s birth, and they are thrilled to meet their grandchildren.

  The family spends four months in the Netherlands. In the fall, as my five-year-old father witnesses his first red hues of fall and feels the first crisp breeze ever on his bronzed skin, the family journeys back to the perpetual summer of the tropical Dutch East Indies, where my grandfather is transferred to the city of Semarang, on the island of Java. He is appointed co-director of a large hospital there, and the family moves into a spacious house next to the hospital. Sjeffie thrills at the news that he’ll finally get to go to school. “I’ll learn how to do my numbers and letters now,” he announces proudly. “I’m going to learn how to read.”

  * * *

  Semarang, Indonesia, 2014

  Joko points to an old colonial building as we pass it. Its art deco architecture stands out, and at my request, he pulls over near the former colonial center of the city so we can walk around. I have particularly been badgering him about finding the “Hotel Jansen,” which I have seen referenced in the diaries of boys interned in my father’s former prison camp at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam, where I read their words, sifting through dozens of folders and boxes. The boys write of how it’s a thrill to be taken with an officer out of the camp to the stately hotel on errands. I have searched online for old photographs of Hotel Jansen. Joko says he thinks it was torn down a few years ago, but I can’t believe that the grand hotel, a spectacular example of colonial architecture and an important landmark of Semarang, would simply be demolished. Joko’s lack of enthusiasm about the destination of the “Old Town” I’ve been so excited to check out also doesn’t register with me, initially. After months of looking at antique photographs of pristine colonial city centers, with their wide roads and breathtaking buildings, each more ornate than the last, I naively expect to find Old Town Semarang’s architecture preserved as it was.

  I read about tempo doeloe everywhere on Indonesian websites, and even see restaurants with this name, specifically referencing the colonial era in a nostalgic way as “the olden times.” I expect the colonial buildings to have new functions in a modern, postcolonial Indonesia. I imagine they will be preserved as historically significant. I’m shocked to discover that this is not so at all, and that most Indonesian people I meet display little knowledge of the colonial era, especially the younger generation. At landmark after landmark, when people ask why we are taking photos and I explain the colonial history of a specific place, many of them express surprise.

  As we navigate through what is left of the Old Town, a decidedly conflicted relationship with tempo doeloe becomes evident in what appears to be the complete abandonment of Semarang’s former center of colonial life. There is not even a sidewalk, so we are forced to walk in the street, scooters and cars spitting exhaust in our faces as they rush past, just inches from us. I discover that with the exception of the spectacular railway station, still in use, and a couple of landmarks, most of the historic colonial buildings have not been preserved at all.

  Some buildings still feature the faint imprints of their former colonial names, and their former grandeur is evident in their arched windows, tall double doors, and art deco embellishments, but they’ve almost all fallen into disrepair in Old Town Semarang. Plaster chips off their facades, and ivy creeps its leafy tentacles over everything, emerging from cracked windows. Roofs are caved in, red clay tiles dangling from the holes. Graffiti is scrawled across the art nouveau tiles lining doorways, and the pungent scent of urine emanates from the buildings. I have the unsettling feeling that I am perilously close to being colonialist myself in my thoughts about the neglect of these relics of my ancestry. It’s a feeling I won’t be able to shake for the rest of our trip. A feeling I know intellectually is problematic but that persists. A disappointment. A loss. A willful discarding of generations of heritage. Oddly, my father seems pragmatic in his response to seeing his heritage become a decaying ghost town. “It’s a shame, because these are well-built buildings, but I guess they just can’t afford the upkeep,” he says, missing the point, or perhaps wanting to miss the point. “The modern world takes over. This is how life is.” The immediacy of his acceptance of circumstance is remarkable. It’s a big difference between my father and me. My father is endlessly adaptable, focused on utility over sentimentality, relentlessly forward-looking, while I cannot stop looking back.

  * * *

  In the afternoon, Joko takes us to my father’s old neighborhood, and we search for his former house. What was once a village-like neighborhood is now filled in with concrete buildings, so my father does not recognize anything. “These were all fields,” he says, “and the homes all had huge gardens.” Now the neighborhood around the hospital is packed tightly with apartment buildings and small homes. Here and there, we find colonial homes, but they have little gardens, and it appears they’ve been subdivided multiple times for urban infill. The hospital too has expanded—right over my father’s former house, which no longer exists.

  While most of the hospital consists of newer architecture, the old hospital still stands as a separate wing, its colonial shutters and red clay roof tiles a distinctive feature. My father remembers visiting his father here, and I attempt to film him talking about his memories in the lobby of the old wing, but almost immediately, an armed guard in a military-like uniform appears and places his hand over my camera. “No photo,” he says, scowling. I try to explain the purpose of our visit, ask what his concern is, but he just repeats, “No photo,” wagging his finger at me. We leave the building, and he follows us out, hand resting on the butt of his machine gun, watching until we have left the parking lot.

  The church my father attended as a boy still exists, adjacent to the hospital. While the hill it sits on is no longer covered in alang-alang grass, the church itself is unchanged. I try to envision this hill as it was, but I struggle to reconcile the image with this urban environment. We hike up the church’s driveway and walk the perimeter, which is now covered in asphalt. The tall wooden doors are locked, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone around. We are about to leave when a man appears from around a corner—the pastor. He shakes our hands and invites us inside, considerably more friendly than the hospital employees next door. The wooden pews are the same as they were in my father’s day. He would have sat on these benches as a small boy, bored and fidgeting, thinking of the snakes he was going to trap later that afternoon. The thought is somewhat surreal, as though this structure was stuck in a time warp while the city a
round it grew and my father aged and built a life thousands of miles away.

  “Ayah … hampir … ummmm … dibakar … di sini,” I attempt lamely, using the English-Bahasa word translator I’ve loaded on my computer tablet to attempt to communicate in Indonesian. The pastor looks puzzled. “Dad almost burned here,” I’ve just told him. He shakes his head. I give up and switch to English. “Hello. My father almost burned this church down.”

  * * *

  Semarang, Dutch East Indies, 1937

  The tall grass flows like water, in gentle waves across the field. It is hot, very hot, the humid kind of heat that pricks your scalp and gets underneath your clothes until the stickiness itches under your arms, behind your knees, in the crease of your neck. It’s especially bad if you are a fair-skinned Euro, a colonial white boy, a totok. Sjeffie stands on the hill above his house in khaki Bermuda shorts, his blond hair and crisp white socks contrasting with his tanned skin in the tropical sun. He’s now six years old, curious and determined. The German neighbor boy, Friedl, stands beside him, swishing a bamboo rod back and forth through the grass. Friedl looks more like the local Indonesian kids than my father does. His mother is black, a Dutch woman from the South American colony Suriname. She works as a doctor in the hospital with Sjeffie’s father. Friedl’s white German father is an accountant. The crickets hum, and the boys are bored. They’ve caught and released chichaks for hours but have now grown tired of trapping the small geckos. Friedl’s eyes light up. “Hey, Sjeffie, let’s play cowboy and Indian.” The boys have read about cowboys and Indians in their comic books. They know that in America, there are cowboys and Indians everywhere you look. “OK! I get to be the Indian!” my father says enthusiastically. But Friedl wants to be the Indian too, so soon they are just playing Indians. My father says, “OK, but listen, if we’re Indians, we have to make a campfire for smoke signals.” Everybody knows that Indians are constantly making smoke signals.

  Friedl gathers twigs and grass and makes a pile. The boys crouch in the Indo sword grass, the alang-alang that towers and sways over their heads and blocks out the searing sun. My father lights the pile with matches he’s swiped from the kitchen. The twigs catch, and the fire crackles. The boys dance and whoop around the fire. But the grasses dip down in the breeze, and the fire licks at their edges. Soon the flames move up their blades. Blade to blade, the fire grows, moving outward. My father stamps at it, but it is spreading too fast. Friedl gets scared and runs home to his parents, but my father stays, stamping furiously as he watches the fire march farther up the hill toward the church at the top. In a panic, he sees that he cannot stop it. He is too little. He is just one boy, helpless against the advancing flames.

  Thankfully, the fire department is already on its way. The firemen spray the flames with water and save the church, though it’s blackened on one side wall. Sjeffie is overcome with gratitude for his rescue. But when he comes home, the mood is decidedly different. There is no gratitude; my father is grounded for many weeks by his father. Bungawati, his babu, scolds him in both Dutch and Bahasa Indonesian. He’s a naughty boy! How could he be so careless? “Stout, Sjeffie. Anak bandel!”

  Luckily, Sjeffie is now six and is going to school, where he can’t burn anything down. He has to sit on a chair and listen to the teacher. In school, my father learns to read and write letters and numbers. He goes to the Bible school, so the students have to sing and pray to Jesus at the beginning of each day. The school is integrated with Indonesians, Dutch, and Indos, the mixed Dutch and Indonesian kids.

  My grandmother, meanwhile, has been growing round again. She lets my father and his two little sisters put their hands on her taut belly. “Your baby brother or sister is in there,” she says. “Are you children ready for that?” They nod enthusiastically. When baby Kees is born a few weeks later, my father is ecstatic that he is no longer the only boy in the family. As Sjeffie sits on the carved wood settee in the family room, his mother lifts Kees from his bassinet and places him on Sjeffie’s lap. “Hold on to him,” she says, and she and the babu smile as my father grips his little brother nervously, kissing his downy head. “Ati-ati,” says the babu. “Careful with the baby.”

  When baby Kees is two and my father is in the second grade, my grandfather is transferred to a new hospital and given the position of director. Tearfully, the family says goodbye to the neighbors, and to the household staff who won’t be coming with them. They pack up the house and move five hours south, from coastal Semarang to the center of Java and a city called Madiun. There they settle beneath the massive volcano Mount Lawu, which rises green and lush from the landscape, its crown disappearing ten thousand feet into the clouds.

  2

  INFAMY AND INVASION

  Sarangan, Indonesia, 2014

  Hot magma from the earth’s core forces Mount Lawu perpetually higher into the Javan skyline. Joko winds his white van up the slope of its base, lime-green rice terraces flanking the road. As we move from sea level into the sky, the thick heat dissipates into expansive, cooler air. We’ve been sweating for days in the city’s humidity, and I understand why my father’s family vacationed here in his youth. It’s a welcome respite. Joko has promised to take us to an old colonial hotel overlooking the lake, the same hotel where my father’s family took their meals when he was a child. We’ve all been looking forward to this stop as a highlight of the trip. My father recalls childhood days of swimming, rowing on the lake, family walks.

  “Black panthers here,” says Joko, waving his hand toward the dense foliage.

  “Really?” I ask, scanning the tops of the trees for yellow eyes. But a Google search reveals the critically endangered status of the animal. A relic of an era long past. As is their historical nature, humans have hunted them and taken their habitat for themselves. It’s not likely that many people will see a wild black panther on Java before these animals are declared extinct. Still, my eyes flit from branch to branch as we pass the forest. I continue to look for something I know isn’t there.

  The hotel, much hyped by Joko on the drive as a colonial beauty, is utterly depressing to me. It immediately becomes clear that it hasn’t been maintained at all. Joko pulls up and greets the owners warmly. They smile and clap their hands to one another’s shoulders, offer one another cigarettes. Joko leaves us in the lobby and vanishes into the night to visit friends in the village; he will reemerge in the morning as he usually does. The grand salon, once the center of colonial social life in this area, is vast and empty, with cracked and torn mismatched couches, folding card tables with plastic patio chairs in the dining area. I imagine it as it once must have been, upscale and filled with people eating at teak tables, a chandelier overhead perhaps, a piano in the corner, then almost immediately I feel ashamed of my romanticization of the colonial era. The owners of this hotel don’t have the money to replicate such opulence. I’m being a snob. But then my sense of aesthetics is again triggered and I lament that the good bones of the building are being neglected. I flop onto a couch in the cavernous lobby, irritated with battling internal voices, all of which feel patronizing and ugly, no matter what side they argue. Ugh. I’m a colonist. The only other guests in the hotel appear to be a French couple holding their cell phones in the air on the couch opposite, who immediately tell me there is no hot water and the Wi-Fi doesn’t work. “Forget it. No signal in this place,” says the man, standing and walking to different positions in the room with his phone outstretched before him. I get the key and walk to my room. A gray industrial rug repaired with duct tape at its frayed edges covers a cracked tile floor. There is no shower curtain in my bathroom, and the mirror has a crack down the middle. Stop judging. Good bones. I step out onto the veranda, which looks down over the lake. That’s nice. I imagine that in the summer, families sat on these verandas drinking coffee and reading the paper. My parents emerge from their adjacent room and we decide to walk down to the lake, since that’s what we are here for.

  When he sees the lake, my father’s face reveals a disap
pointment that gnaws at my conscience. My father misses the country of his youth. This is not a condition unique to him, certainly, but I have brought him here on a journey of nostalgia. Now his memories are being overwritten as he sees firsthand that the Indonesia he once called home, that he still thinks of as a fixed part of his identity, no longer exists. This is true for anyone who returns to a place they call home decades later, but there are many more layers to my father’s experience, layers that include being raised in a colonial system and ultimately ejected by force from the only home he knew, from a country of people who considered him and his family intruders. Colonial Indonesia doesn’t exist anymore, and there is no going back for people like my father. As his aunt Jo, interned in a camp near Jakarta during the war, wrote bluntly in a letter to her sister during the Indonesian War of Independence, before their repatriation to the Netherlands, “Pep wrote that you are disillusioned … I keep thinking about that. Had you expected gratitude from the Indonesians?… An uncomplicated, easy life like we had in the past here we won’t have again, but that’s not what you meant, is it, that you had expected that and now no longer expect it?” I think the war for independence shocked many of the Dutch in Indonesia. The loss was not only of their home but also of their illusion of harmony.

  Along the lakefront, where once there was only sand and grass, dozens of vendors now line the concrete shore, appealing to us as we walk. Costume jewelry, T-shirts, ball caps, bubble gum, yo-yos, pork rinds are on offer. Good price. There is a photo of my grandfather in a rowboat on this lake during the 1930s. He wears a conical thatched paddy hat, Bermuda shorts, and shoes with dress socks pulled up over his calves. He smiles broadly. My father and his siblings hang off the sides of the boat, likewise grinning. It’s the “before” photo of my father’s World War II. I don’t see this carefree joy on their faces in any postwar photos.