by Brian Aldiss
As I was rather loftily accepting the envious congratulations of my brother Nelson, Ernst Sontrop entered the waiting room.
Sontrop seemed to my eyes tremendously ancient. He was thirty-five years old. A neat straight spade beard fringed his jawline, sparse hair swept back from his forehead. The beard was brown, streaked with white; the hair on his head was blond. His eyes were grey-blue, his expression set. There were deep wrinkles round his eyes and lips, as if he had once clung to a sheer cliff-face by those features.
His clothes were ostentatiously neat: his bright civilian shirt, army trousers, socks and sandals, might have come straight from a shop that morning.
‘Good morning, Horatio, how do you do?’ He paused, then came forward and formally shook hands with me. I offered him a cigarette which he tucked into his breast pocket before showing me down the corridor to his office.
‘Firstly, I must apologise for keeping you waiting. The Dutch ship, the Van Heutsz, arrives tomorrow to take away many Dutch persons, so we are busy arranging documents.’
I assured him that I had enjoyed the wait.
‘Not so many Britishers come into our headquarters, Horatio. It is a shame that our peoples do not go along better together, when we are both European races, and have common interests. Now, please to take a seat and tell me what I can do for you.’
Time was I had done something for Sontrop. When I was still with my unit in Padang, I was given the job of establishing a RAPWI area. RAPWI was the Rehabilitation of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees organisation, also known unofficially as Rape All Pretty Women in Indonesia. Among the RAPWI personnel in Padang were several Dutch girls, whom I had to fetch from the hill station of Bukitinghi, where they had been interned by the Japs. I became involved with one of the biggest blondes, Addy Sontrop – a fine strapping girl, taller than I and milder than a pat of butter.
One day, I was drinking in a bar with a couple of my mates when I noticed Addy serving at the food counter. A taffy from the South Wales Borderers was pawing her and making himself generally objectionable. When he slapped a hand on Addy’s left tit, I went over and punched him in the guts. Some of his mates showed up, and we had a dodgy few minutes of it.
Addy was later shifted to Medan. I met her again when I arrived there, and she introduced me to brother Ernst. Ernst was unexpectedly friendly – the Dutch had a reputation for being stand-offish – and he continued being civil after Addy boarded the Van Heutsz and sailed for the Netherlands.
So I gave him an outline of my story, telling him just enough to explain why I wished to speak to Boyer over the radio link. Something in his face, an expression of disapproval, brought the blood to my throat before I had finished my story.
‘Don’t you go for the idea of my marrying a Chinese girl, Ernst?’
He dropped his glance to his neatly manicured nails.
‘Of course it is not for me to give any opinion about your private affairs, Horatio.’
‘Go on.’
‘No, it is simply that we found throughout many years of ruling in these islands that mixed marriages never turn out very happily. For you it may be different. Let’s proceed to the wireless room.’
Sontrop took me to the top floor of the building, where two Dutchmen were working a Jap transmitter of formidable size. While they were calling Padang, Sontrop summoned a uniformed native, who served us with glasses of fresh iced lime juice. I couldn’t see anything like that happening in Corporal Kyle’s lousy signal office.
After a certain amount of impenetrable Dutch had gone over the air, Sontrop came and said, ‘Our friends in Padang at the Netherlands Headquarters are unable to telephone to the British Division. Extremists severed the cable during the hours of night, and it is not yet – do you say, reinstated? Reinstalled. They will send a messenger on a motor-bike. Captain Boyer shall radio you back here in two hours’ time. Provided that he may be found.’
I checked with my watches. It was somewhere about midday.
As I thanked him, he said, ‘It is time for my lunch. You caught me almost as I left. Come to my house and eat with me. Let me first get my carbine.’
My Jeep was waiting outside, so I invited him to climb in. Some British troops were strolling by; one of them laughed and said something to his mates. If there was one thing regarded as more eccentric than associating with the Chinese, it was associating with the Dutch.
Our Indian driver, ever glad of distraction, made a showy turn round the park, passed the de Witte Club, and bowled up past the old deserted children’s playground towards the RAPWI area. Buildings on either side of the road were shuttered and ruinous until we came to the little model village where the Dutch were now mainly housed. The guards at the gate were Japs, with the insignia removed from their uniforms.
Sontrop gave the driver directions.
We turned down a neat little side road. The trees were deciduous again, formally spaced, just as on the banks of the Zuyder Zee.
Ernst lived in something that looked like a shrunken version of an Odeon Cinema, with a strange multi-angle tower rising above the roof-line. Curved steps flounced up to an elaborate front door. Inside, the floors were marble and there was a Rembrandt reproduction on the wall. The Night Watch.
We met a couple of Dutch women in the hall, padding round half-naked with their hair in curlers. I was immediately interested – though they were ugly-looking cows – since Sontrop had not struck me as a ladies’ man; it was always hard to tell with foreigners. The women took no notice of us. They smoked and walked about while their hair set, presumably getting ready for some evening event. There were dances in the RAPWI area every night. Passing them politely, Sontrop showed me into his quarters. We entered a big room. A grotesque stone fireplace was the chief feature. His bed was here, and a table, some novels on a shelf, some ammo boxes under the window, little else. A door led off to back quarters.
‘I bring you a beer,’ he said.
‘What about the driver?’
‘He can have water.’ He brought me a Milwaukee beer and then disappeared. I walked round the room looking at photographs hanging framed on the walls. They were all views of some foreign town where it appeared permanently about to rain. By the bed stood snaps of Addy and an older female, presumably Mum.
Nowhere in Sontrop’s bare room did I see signs of female occupancy. Of course, owing to the emergency, houses in protected areas were always overcrowded. One heard funny things about the Dutch, but that did not mean that all the women in the bungalow had to be Sontrop’s mistresses. I stared out of the back window into a patch of unkempt back-garden, where unkempt bushes flowered. Laundered sanitary towels were hanging on a wire to dry, five of them in a row like rabbit pelts.
Sontrop came back bearing a plate with some big thick cheese sandwiches. I saw he had no beer for himself. Perhaps he had given me his last bottle. Hospitable people, the Dutch.
As we munched, he said, ‘You have heard that all the British forces are pulling out from Medan within four months.’
‘Is the date confirmed?’
‘Yes, as I understand. It makes our small Dutch force in a very difficult situation. But British politicians have recognised Soekarno’s Republic, which we cannot do.’
‘You’d be well advised to pull out, too. The Indonesians are determined to be independent. Support from Europe is a long way off.’
He shrugged. ‘The natives cannot manage administration. They are unprepared for autonomy, like children. They cannot run hospitals and telephone exchanges and banks and the mercantile aspects. They cannot build roads or keep down malaria. They can hardly cook a meal without Chinese help.
‘We must stay here. We made this place! There was nothing before we came here last century, nothing, you understand, just a few stinking huts beside the River Deli. Addy’s and my parents arrived here as a young married couple at the start of this century. By hard work my father became to own his own plantation, growing rubber and tobacco. He carved it out of the jungle with his own blade and
killed off the snakes and other wild life. He and my mother died here, defending their land when the Japanese invaded. I was born here. How, do we just disappear weakly because we are afraid of a few extremists like Soekarno?’
‘I can see how you feel.’ We ate the sandwiches in silence.
Sontrop laughed. ‘You know what? We get more volunteers now from the Netherlands. And I hear tell that after the German Wehrmacht disbanded, many of its officers join the French Foreign Legion to help them fight in Indo-China. They also enlist in the Dutch Army, to help fight here and in Java. So we have both our old enemies, the Nazis and the Japs, to give assistances now.’
Weevils had been baked into the spongy bread – just like the bread in the sergeants’ mess. I said, ‘I can’t see the British ever using German military aid. There would be a devil of a row if we did so.’
He wagged a finger at me. ‘You British got scared by Ghandi. You should have locked him up and throwed away the key. Suddenly, the war ends and you aren’t tough any more. You, Horatio, you are good at punching a man at the stomach when it is necessary, but I have a sense you do not want more fighting.’
‘I’ve had a belly-full. I was in Burma. One of the worst theatres of war in the world.’
‘No, forgive me, but Dutch New Guinea is easily First Worst. What did you do in Burma?’
So I gave him a quick run-down on the battle of Kohima, and how the fighting had raged over the DC’S tennis court. I told him how Charlie Meadows and I had climbed a cliff and thrown grenades into a Jap bunker.
‘Were you scared then, Horatio?’
‘At the time, I didn’t feel a thing. Afterwards, I got the shakes. They had to feed Charlie and me on rum. When we came out of Burma and were resting up outside Calcutta, I had a few bad nightmares. Where were you during the war? Here?’
He told me his experiences. It was quiet in the bungalow. Now and again, the half-clad women called to each other in Dutch. Outside, cries of children came faintly.
Ernst Sontrop’s family lived on their plantation some miles outside Medan. When the Japs arrived in 1942, a mortar shell landed on their bungalow. Ernst was knocked unconscious. His parents and an elder brother were killed and Addy ran away in panic. A faithful servant carried Sontrop to a native hut and hid him when the Japanese troops marched in. Then followed a few weeks of hell.
The world was alive with heroes after the war. Unexpected countries were suddenly thrown open like treasure-chests, their secrets bursting into the light of incredible truth. The most ordinary people had dramatic stories to tell.
Europe had undergone its terrible upheavals, but the upheaval that took place in the Far East was grander, more terrible, more far-reaching. That upheaval still remains largely misunderstood or neglected. From the splendour and havoc of the East, few stories travelled back to the West. Those that have done so are largely misleading. To give but one example: the film of The Bridge over the River Kwai, which dealt with the Death Railway built largely by British and Australian prisoners of war in order to link Burma with Malaya, was a tremendous success – because it glorified the white man. It showed him building a bridge which the Japanese could not have managed on their own. The truth was that the Japanese were masters of the jungle; they were ferociously brave and ingenious enemies and, as their post-war success has shown, they were fully a match for the European races at building anything from a watch to an oil tanker. Bridges were nothing to them. And they endured conditions that no white races had been trained to endure. As it was with the Japanese, so it was with the other teeming peoples of South-East Asia – then, and now. Perhaps the West dare not know.
There was another reason for not being eager to go home. As the women were beautiful, so the men were amazingly resilient. The Chinese in particular were to exhibit their capacity for endurance and for an unexcelled ability to flourish in impossible conditions. Four million of them fled from the Communist regime in their homeland and were cast upon the rock of Hong Kong. There, they made a world-success of what, under four million variegated Europeans, would have turned into a concentration camp on a grand scale.
Ernst Sontrop, the faithful servant, and a couple of friends, managed to launch a small boat from a desolate stretch of coast and sail up the Malacca Straits towards the Anderman Islands. They were picked up, half-dead after twenty-one days afloat, by a British naval vessel. They were taken to Colombo, where the servant died.
After some weeks in India, the three Dutchmen were given passage on a ship bound for England. The ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic by a German U-boat. Later, he was to discover that he was almost the sole survivor of the ship. Sontrop drifted on a lifebelt to the coast of France. He met up with members of the French Resistance and after some months made his way into occupied Holland, to fight with the underground against the Nazis.
‘You had a brave time in Burma, Horatio, but fighting in an occupied country, then you need a different sort of courage. Each time you have to go to sleep, you wonder if you will waken with a German carbine muzzle stuck in your stomach.’
‘Strange experience to get home and find it’s an enemy country.’
‘Holland is not my home. Sumatra is my home. That is why I come back here as soon as I can to fight for what is mine.’
We had another cigarette, smoking in silence.
‘We will go back to the HQ and find if your Captain Boyer has made contact.’
‘Will Addy return to Medan some day?’
‘Of course. Once we put down this bloody Merdeka movement.’ He took up his carbine from his bed and slung it over his shoulder as we made for the fancy door.
The Jeep driver had disappeared. We walked around and discovered him down by a little Chinese stall, sucking a mango-flavoured ice cream.
A message awaited me in the Dutch HQ. They could not contact Captain Boyer. He had left Padang. Nothing was said about where he had gone.
‘Thanks a lot,’ I said to Sontrop as I left his office. ‘I shall have to go to Div HQ and find out where he has gone. If he’s in Palembang or Singapore, I’m in trouble.’
‘It’s a disappointment not to help you more. I will see you again before you leave Medan, I hope.’
‘Sure.’
‘Perhaps a little celebration.’
‘That would be great.’
As we shook hands in the hall by the tiger, I said emotionally, ‘This is a great place, Medan, the heat, the bloody insects. I’ve got to go back to England, and the thought – it kills me just to think of it.’
He said, ‘The world owes a debt to your country. When you have returned back there, it will not be painful for you, I think. You will quickly forget the East – it is not inside you here.’ He touched his chest. ‘As it is with me.’
‘I somehow don’t fancy going back to that little dark bombed-out island.’
‘I was in England, Horatio. We had a vacation when my parents were on leave in the Netherlands, before the war. We spent some days in Hull, a very pleasant and historic city.’
I went to the door. ‘Oh, yes, Hull! Hull’s great. Well, thanks again for the lunch.’
‘You are welcome.’ He bowed.
Outside was the sunshine, the dusty road. My Jeep was there waiting, its driver a few yards away, chatting to some Rajput Rifles from the nearby British HQ. He strolled over affably when I emerged.
‘You want go back home, Johnny?’
‘Johnny …’ from a bloody naik! He was fresh out from India, as Kyle was fresh out from England. Someone else who did not know the rules. When I arrived in India, three years earlier – in Jan 1943 to be precise – no Indian would have dared to call any British soldier ‘Johnny’. Since then, American troops, with their easy money and habits, had flowed into Calcutta and Bengal in their hundreds, and from them the custom of calling everyone ‘Johnny’ had spread. Maybe the Yanks thought it sounded democratic; for anyone who served in the Fourteenth Army, it had a ring of contempt.
‘You can return to lines and re
port back jhaldi to Colour-Sergeant Dyer in “M” Section, Naik, thik-hai?’
‘Thik-hai, Sergeant.’ That was better.
‘And no side-trips on the way, malum?’
‘Acha, sir.’ He jumped into his vehicle and drove off, grinning.
A fucking great thing zoomed in from the nearest swamp and landed on my cheek. I struck it with unnecessary violence and almost laid myself out. I missed the fucking great thing.
Peering groggily at my watches, I decided that an average reading made it about one-forty-five.
The signal office shift would have changed. Corporal Kyle was no longer on duty. I strolled into the office and spent the best part of an hour trying again to contact Captain Boyer, only to receive the same answer as the Dutch. Boring old Boyer was on the wing. Maybe he had pissed off to Singapore on leave. Or India. You never knew with officers. By now, he could be bedding one of the memsahibs of Ootie, who slept only with lieutenants or above. I had had enough: I was going to see Margey.
I had some money on me – Dutch guilders and worthless Jap guilders which served as currency in the bazaars. In one of the Chinese shops along the Kesawan, I found a can of Argentine corned beef, heavily overstamped ‘NAAFI’, going for thirty guilders, or almost three pounds sterling. Some illicit quartermaster was making a fortune. I paid up, sighing. Margey loved corned beef; her tastes were very sophisticated.
As I emerged into the street, the sky was rapidly clouding over. Wind scurried down the pavement. In four minutes, the streets would be awash. Before I reached Margey’s alley, the first drops of rain smashed against the ground.
Brother-in-law Fat was not seated at the central table. That in itself was remarkable. The erudite Tiger Balm was also absent, to my relief. The morning had been fruitless enough without him. Someone was at the table, sitting there in the gloom over a packet of fags; it was one of the most-frequented tables in the NEI. The someone was one of the interchangeable little old wrinkled men who guarded the place and kept it well fumigated with cigarette smoke.
‘Tabeh, Bapai,’ I said. He returned the greeting by offering his fag packet.