All Ships Follow Me

by Mieke Eerkens

  Sarangan Lake is supposed to be the highlight of our trip. But as we sit at the card tables in the dining hall of the hotel that evening, eating a pile of underseasoned bami, it just feels entirely depressing. I question everything about this trip and feel a mixture of grief over the loss of something I never got to see, confusion about the scars of colonialism that run as an undercurrent during our entire trip, and guilt for thinking that returning to the sites of his childhood would be an amazing experience for my father rather than highlight his lack of home. When I read my father’s travel notes later, however, I find the neutral tone remarkable, the disappointment I had seen on his face at the lake completely absent from his account. “We arrived at the hotel, which has a beautiful veranda that looks out over the lake,” he wrote. “However, this former superior hotel appeared somewhat poorly maintained since its heyday, and we decided not to stay there longer than for one night. The next morning we left for nearby Madiun, where Mieke reserved two nights at the modern Colton Hotel.” I’m consistently awed by my father’s persistence in looking forward and not dwelling on circumstances. While I’ve inherited several of my father’s characteristics, this forward-thinking agathism is a trait I haven’t mastered. I dwell. I marinate in pain and try to understand it better. My father gets on with living in the present, and perhaps this is something one learns directly only through life-or-death survival, through actually having weathered a traumatic experience firsthand and putting it behind you.

  * * *

  Madiun, Dutch East Indies, 1938–1941

  In 1938, Sjeffie is seven years old. His father works in the hospital on the Van Ingenluyfflaan, the broad road where the family’s house stands at number 49, surrounded by a shaded garden with tropical flowers and mango trees. Papa runs the hospital with Dr. Sajidiman, the Indonesian doctor with the tall walled villa at the end of the road. Sjeffie plays with Dr. Sajidiman’s boys, Dermawan and Suwarno. He loves to stand in the aviary in their garden, watching colorful birds flit from branch to branch while the parrots squawk and crack nuts with their black curved beaks. Sjeffie gets along well with Suwarno but less well with Dermawan. After playing in the garden until they are sticky with grime, the boys are told by Mrs. Sajidiman to wash up for supper, and they pour cool water from the basin over their hands with the pitcher in the mandi kamer, the tiled washroom. They scrub under their armpits with washcloths. Dermawan enters the mandi room with a grin and his hands behind his back. “Sjeffie!” he calls out. Sjeffie turns, and as he does so, a brown missile is propelled at his bare chest. It bounces off him and falls to the floor. A turd. Dermawan laughs hysterically and runs from the mandi. Repulsed, Sjeffie scrubs at his chest with soap and water and holds back his tears. “You’ll be in trouble with Father!” Suwarno yells after Dermawan. Sjeffie towels off and sniffs. “I’m going home,” he says, swallowing hard. “So go home, totok!” Dermawan yells. Totok. White boy.

  Sjeffie is excited to start “real” school again in Madiun. Time to learn big-boy things. In the fall, he enters second grade, where he will get to practice writing and learn the way that numbers stack up and order the world around him, a thing he will love religiously for the rest of his life. An ayam lays one egg per day. How many eggs does it lay in a week if there are seven days in one week? There are twenty mangas on a manga tree. If you pick two mangas every day, how many days until the tree has no more mangas? This math is a beautiful thing underlying everything. The school is only a couple of blocks from his house, and he is allowed to ride his bicycle there. Like every proper Dutch child, he has mastered the art of cycling by the age of five, and now he pedals his little legs, still rounded with baby fat, to and from the First Government School, where most of the Dutch and mixed-race Indo children go to school. Indonesian children who speak Dutch also attend the First Government School, as the lessons are taught in Dutch. Next door is the Second Government School, where the same lessons are taught to Indonesian kids in Malay, otherwise known as Bahasa Indonesian.

  In his true forward-thinking character, Sjeffie thinks it is about time to find himself a girlfriend. There are two contenders. The first is Ingrid, a pale, serious girl with long black hair and dark, intense eyes, and the other is Dieneke, the blond, wholesome daughter of the local pastor. Ingrid quickly knocks Dieneke out of the running when she tells Sjeffie that she is actually a Russian princess whose parents fled to Indonesia via China to escape the Bolsheviks during the revolution. This may or may not be true, but either way, she’s more interesting than Dieneke to Sjeffie.

  When he gets older, Sjeffie sometimes bikes across town with Piet Kreijger, his classmate, to Piet’s home near the sugar plantation. Piet’s father works for the sugar plantation, so they get to live in one of the small wooden bungalows across the street from the giant processing factory where the sugarcane is transformed into crystal, to be stirred into the tea and coffee that originally brought the Dutch to Indonesia four hundred years earlier via the United East India Company. Sjeffie and Piet and the other boys whose parents work for the sugar plantation play hide-and-seek in the tall sugarcane. They break off stalks and chew the sweet ends into a pulp as they crouch down amid the cicada hum, waiting to be found.

  * * *

  Madiun, Indonesia, 2014

  Joko pulls over in front of the sugarcane fields at the edge of Madiun, still there after all these years, growing with the seasons as they’ve grown since the seventeenth century, impervious to their boys becoming men, to war, to the papers that indicate who owns or no longer owns them. My father and I walk to the edge of the fields. “When the sugarcane got higher than it is now, it towered over our heads, and nobody could see us. You could get lost inside a sugarcane field,” he says. I think this is the impulse of all young boys around the world, seeking out the spaces beyond reach, building their forts, the places they can hide from the eyes of others. Madiun is a playground to my father in the 1930s. The spaces are open, and there are trees to climb.

  My father and I walk toward the former sugar refinery. It is now abandoned, but the old mill is still in the open clearing of the factory, and I take a photo of the massive machine. Seeming to appear from nowhere, two men in uniforms materialize. They wag their fingers, speak sharply to me in Bahasa. I lower my camera. Joko, who has been leaning against his van and smoking, wanders over with a frown on his face and begins to speak with them, becoming increasingly loud. They yell at one another using words I cannot understand. My parents and I hurry to the van and get in. Eventually, Joko storms back to the car, calling things back to the men over his shoulder. We drive on. Joko stares straight ahead without speaking as I take photos of the small cottages where the sugar mill workers lived. I don’t dare to get out of the car again, so I take photos through the open window.

  “What did you say to those men back there?” I finally ask Joko, a little afraid of the response.

  “I told them they are stupid,” he says angrily. “You are trying to see this part of your father’s home. You just want to take a picture. So stupid, these men.” He waves his hand in their direction, shaking his head with irritation. But I know there is more.

  I have been afraid of encountering anti-Dutch attitudes, and everywhere we go, I feel the anxiety of representing the face of hundreds of years of colonial ancestors to an entire population of Indonesians. I don’t know how to negotiate this history that was never my choice, never my father’s choice as someone born into it. While I understand the anger and resentment, I am grateful for the generous attitudes of Indonesians like Joko, who seem to make up the vast majority of the people we meet. To be shut out of one’s nostalgia so deliberately seems terribly sad, though my father says nothing about it. I wonder how much of my sensitivity to this inherent tension is generational, though. I’m not even sure if my father understands the roots of these little conflicts we encounter, if he can inhabit a space where he understands why a totok is sometimes still resented or can feel himself to be an interloper. I am not even sure I want him to, given how h
e loved this place and how much he’s already lost. He doesn’t have the required emotional distance to take on the recalibration of his own history, the idea that perhaps the people he thought were his friends and neighbors didn’t love his being there the way he loved being there as a little boy. Maybe that’s my job as the next generation.

  Joko pulls to the side of the road when my father says, “Piet lived in one of these two houses.” Through the open window, I quickly snap photos of both cottages, the paint flaking off their sides, photos that will be sent to my father’s childhood friend, who has never returned to Indonesia himself.

  While Joko navigates us through the streets of Madiun, my father clicks back into his childhood momentarily as we near his old house and he suddenly recalls the route to school on his bicycle. Despite the vast changes to the neighborhood and its concrete makeover, he remembers each turn perfectly, instructing Joko and leaning forward to peer through the windshield excitedly. “Right here. Yes, left at that next cross street. Down this little road.” Memory, even when it has slipped into the darkest corners of the mind, imprints and emerges, unfolding like a map. Each street is seamlessly connected by the senses. We pull up in front of a low pale green building.

  “Yes! This is it! The First Government School. It’s the same as it was!” We climb out of the van and walk along the fence in front of the school. Children in uniforms are in the yard. They spot us and wave. “Hello! Hello!” they call, all smiles. A man sitting on a motorbike in the front scowls at us pointedly. The younger generation inside the school are surprised and excited to see our faces in their city, one rarely visited by Western tourists. They clamor at the fence, calling to us in the words they’ve learned from English class. They beckon us in, and we walk to the entrance, where school staff members emerge from the front office with bottles of water for us. They smile and chatter in Bahasa Indonesian while my father, whose Bahasa returns more and more each day, responds with broken sentences. The English teacher is summoned. The whole school is now gathered outside the office, curious students giggling and waving at our odd group. We awkwardly wave back, sipping our water. The principal arrives with the English teacher. It turns out the English teacher doesn’t speak English very well, but we manage to convey that my father went to school here as a young boy, and she translates this to the principal. He shakes my father’s hand vigorously and beckons us to follow him to his office. There, my father is asked to sign a guestbook, and as if by magic, the entire faculty has appeared with cameras. The principal poses in photo after photo, waving away faculty members who want to get into the picture. Only when he has finished do the other faculty members get photos with us. The English teacher brings forward her star pupils, who converse in their best English with us one by one. I am mortified by this attention and make lame jokes to cover my discomfort. My father accepts it graciously, posing with each person. He is taken to his former classroom. He folds his eighty-three-year-old body into the little wooden desk there, grinning at me as the children crowd around him.

  * * *

  Madiun, Dutch East Indies, 1940

  The news from the motherland is not good. At the Soce, Sjeffie’s parents huddle with other adults over a card table, drinking jenever. They pause their games of bridge to lean across the table and speak in low tones about the blitzkriegs over Rotterdam, offering their opinions on the Nazi occupation. Surely the Germans will be pushed back by the Allied soldiers from Great Britain and Canada. Surely this kind of inhumanity cannot stand. But the news arrives first as rumor and then officially. After only five days of fighting, the Dutch army surrenders to the Nazis. The queen has vanished, I heard. No, the royal family has fled. Yes, the royal family has fled to London, in fear for their lives. Confirmed. Heard it on the wire. I raise. Can I get another jenever over here? And some peanuts for the table?

  Questions swirl for weeks. Was the royal family right to flee? Did they abandon their citizens? Was it the only way to save their lives? Rotterdam is in flames. The charred bodies of nine hundred people bombed in their homes, pulled from the piles of brick, are all that is left of the inner city. Those people didn’t get a chance to flee. Those who have family in Rotterdam worry constantly. Are their loved ones in the rubble? Late at night, the Dutch in the colonies turn the knobs on their radios and hang on the scratchy words of the radio announcers. News comes by boat from loved ones back in the Netherlands, so slowly that their lives may be entirely different lives before their words even reach the Indies. Houses may have fallen in the interim as the letters crossed the sea, doors kicked in, people pulled from their beds in the night. In the thick midafternoon drone of the tropics, with its motionless geckos pressed against the walls to keep their bodies cool, the pregnant hours of silence eat at one’s nerves.

  On December 7, 1941, more shocking news comes. Sjeffie sits on the floor of the living room while his parents hunch over the giant wooden radio. The reporter announces that the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The United States has not been involved in the war to that point, though it has cut off its oil, steel, and iron supply to Japan in an attempt to thwart Japan’s intentions to invade countries in the Pacific. Japan has already run through China with a fury, and has made a pact with Germany and Italy as an Axis power for a “new world order.” The ambush attack on the United States is intended to destroy most of the U.S. naval fleet in the Pacific preemptively so that Japan can carry out its plan to take over Southeast Asia. To this end, at the same time that Japan attacks the United States, it attacks strategic military targets in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines.

  The next day, December 8, the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, declares war on Japan. A date which will live in infamy. Sjeffie hears the words come through the radio and they send chills through him, though he doesn’t understand what they mean. The gravity of Roosevelt’s voice says it all. Suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan … American ships torpedoed … severe damage. But even before the United States’ own declaration, the Netherlands declares war on Japan, knowing what is coming. They have to gather what little military power they have in the Pacific, and they have to do it fast.

  The Dutch East Indies readies itself to fight the Japanese. My grandfather is sent to the military base in Surabaya. As a military doctor, he was issued a gun when he enlisted, but as a physician, he barely knows how to shoot it. All military personnel, regardless of function, are now called back to base for a crash course in combat.

  My grandmother does her part as well. She and other women take weekend courses to learn how to drive trucks, climbing up into the cabs in their skirts and heels. They try to ignore the implication of the need for them to take on these nontraditional jobs as their husbands attend emergency combat training. At the Soce, members deposit all of their metal items in a collection box to be melted down for the war effort.

  While the adults have a period of adjustment and anticipation, Sjeffie, now ten years old, continues to go to school each day. No doubt the adults shield him and the other children from the fear that seizes them.

  By now my grandmother’s sisters, Jo and Ko, have both come to live in the Dutch East Indies. Aunt Jo has adjusted to the Dutch East Indies very well. She has begun a religious school with her friend, an Indonesian woman named Soeretna whom the family knows as “Aunt Soer.” Unlike Ko, Jo doesn’t live close to the family, though the family often spends holidays swimming in the pool near Aunt Jo’s mountain cottage near Sukabumi, a lush area abutting a coffee plantation. In a remarkable stroke of bad timing, Ko has moved from Bolivia with her husband, Jan, just before the war. Jan is immediately drafted and sent to the front lines on Java. My grandmother’s brother still lives in Bolivia, and has sent his eleven-year-old son to live with Aunt Ko and Uncle Jan in Java and get an education in a Dutch school like his cousins, since the war with Germany in the Netherlands has removed the option of his studying there. So Sjeffie’s cousin Kees has joined Sjeffie at
the Dutch school in Madiun, arriving just three months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

  Parents are understandably anxious about sending their children to school during this period of waiting for the other shoe to drop, scanning the skies nervously, startling at every sound of a motor. What will happen to them? How can they protect their children from bombs? Sjeffie and his peers are sent to school with pots, colanders, and soup tureen helmets tied upside down on their heads with ribbons and shoelaces, some brandishing pan handles like horns, a feeble but courageous army against the Japanese. My grandfather, home for the weekend before returning to the base in Surabaya, gives Sjeffie a rare military gas mask, something that fills my father with pride. He wears it to school, blinking at his classmates from inside it like a goldfish in a bowl.

  At school, workmen furiously dig three long trenches in front of the building to serve as bomb shelters. The teacher tells the students that they will practice air raid drills as soon as the shelters are completed, lining up and climbing into the trenches. So when the air sirens go off one afternoon, Sjeffie assumes it is their first drill. But as they crouch in the shelter with their pot and pan helmets clanging against one another, the situation becomes clear. The sound is distant but unmistakable: airplanes. It’s not a drill. Sjeffie and his classmates hunker down. The teacher shouts, “Heads down, children! Stay down!” Then the first Japanese bombers fly over them with a swelling, all-encompassing roar that fills every space, their black widow undersides marked with the red dot of the Japanese flag. The children look up as the shadows pass over their faces. The planes strafe the airfield nearby, killing the military fathers of several of Sjeffie’s schoolmates while they crouch beside him in the trench in front of the school, listening to the thundering rage of war and their teacher crying.