by Brian Aldiss
Birds were settling down in the tops of the trees, already forgetting the excitement. One bird swooped in low and flew close by the launch, sometimes darting among the arched mangrove roots in its pursuit of us; it was grey above and white below – I caught the reflection of its breast in the water. It homed in on the scent of death and would not be deflected.
In my carcass, triumph burned. I had been initiated into a new mystery of Sumatran life. For a moment, I considered some of the consequences of my act. It was Saturday morning, and Margey would wonder where I was. I had, too, been missing from lines overnight, and was therefore guilty of a chargeable offence. I dismissed these considerations. I could make things right with Margey – she’d be proud of me – and Jhamboo Singh would see that I got into no trouble; after all, I had leverage on him. Thus reassuring myself, I turned my attention to the satisfactions of the present.
The sun broke through on the dark water, the mangroves cleared, the river banks became clearly defined. Soon, all too soon, the go-down and the jetty with the sunken ship showed ahead. We floated in to the jetty. There was no sign of Iwa. Sontrop jumped out and moored the launch.
Silence reigned. Beyond the go-down, jungle grew, surrounding us with a creepy privacy. The superstructure of the sunken river-boat, including the wheelhouse, was above water. Tufts of foliage sprouted on the blistered deck. The wreck added a sense of ruination in which my heart perversely exalted as we dragged the crocodile ashore. The kite-hawk which had followed us alighted on the funnel of the sunken vessel.
Sontrop drew out his parang and started to slice up the belly of the crocodile. Grey matter and red intestine bulged from the widening slit.
‘We must gut it to carry it,’ he said, looking up. ‘Fetch Iwa from the go-down. The old boy has gone to sleep – he will do this work. We must not wait about.’
Slinging my carbine over my shoulder, I walked briskly up to the concrete building. A sliding metal cargo door on one side of the building was open a few inches. I tried to budge it further, but it would not move. The metal almost burnt my flesh. Squeezing through, I found myself in near dark until my vision adjusted. Something slithered away from me, and I was immediately alert for snakes. I once encountered a cobra face-to-face in Padang, and hoped never to repeat the experience.
‘Iwa!’ I realised I had shouted in a whisper. Now I saw better, I moved forward with more confidence. The internal space of the warehouse was empty, except for offices and a WC in one corner, and some wooden crates piled in the centre of the area. The crates looked as if they had been standing there for years. Across one of them I saw an incongruous name stencilled: MANCHESTER.
I crossed to the lavatory, calling Iwa’s name again, and kicked the door open. Inside was a Chinese-style shitter and a wash-basin. Both were clogged with shit, Ancient shit, too old to attract many flies. I turned away and, as I turned, a movement caught my eye.
A soldier of the TRI stood in the doorway, levelling a sten at me.
He was without features, seen as a silhouette in the narrow rectangle of light.
He shouted a command, jerking the snout of his gun for emphasis.
Although I did not understand what he said, the message came across. I could jump into the office behind me, but the flimsy door offered no protection from bullets. The heavy Manchester crates offered better cover. They were too far away. I visualised myself diving for shelter behind them while a stream of bullets tore into my body. The image froze me. The moment for action slipped away.
The extremist took a couple of steps closer and was no longer merely a silhouette. His finger was curled round that well-known crude trigger which is a vital part of a sten. I slid my carbine off my shoulder and let it clatter to the floor.
He planted himself by the crates. He was a slender man with a hawkish face, no older than I. We looked at each other. A tension in his attitude told me he would fire if I did anything except stand still. I stood still.
He shouted another order.
‘I’m English, orang Ingris. No understand. Tida mengerti.’ I pointed to my shoulder flashes, to the div sign of the tiger coming out of the black triangle. ‘Look, Ingris.’
Not that I imagined that he would have any affection for the English as such, but it gave him something to think about. I just didn’t want any member of the Merdeka squad to imagine that I was Dutch.
He made no reply. Sontrop and his pals, I imagined, were still skinning the croc down by the water’s edge. My throat was dry. I did not cry out to warn them.
The extremist kept me covered without moving. Filled with the blood-lust that whites imagined overtook all Malays, or just stupid?
‘Tuan Ingris?’
Thank God. Just stupid. And respectful.
I nodded. ‘Yes, Ingris. London. You speak Ingris?’
He just stood there, pointing the sten inflexibly. And listening.
I listened.
Footsteps were approaching from the direction of the wharf. It must be the Dutchmen. As soon as this bugger took his eyes off me to look round, I would jump him. I still had my revolver, but a quick Commando chop on the correct vertebra, right up under the occipital bone, should do him most good where it was needed most.
An Indonesian officer arrived in the go-down. Slick operation. In, back to wall, Jap machine-pistol aimed at all and sundry. Not a man to muck about.
He took in the situation at once, eyed the carbine on the floor between me and his man, barked an order. The sten man came forward, collected the carbine, backed out of harm’s way with it. I stood where I was.
The officer was solidly built with a heavy piggy face and blue jowls. A scar led down one cheek and puckered the corner of his mouth, giving him a quirky expression. It looked like a fresh scar. He had the red and white shoulder flashes of the TRI, and the two pips of a subedar or first lieutenant. There were rings on two of the fingers of the hand that held the grip of his weapon.
He moved round so as to command the door. In marched Sontrop, de Zwaan, and Nieuwenhuis, clutching the tops of their trousers. Two armed TRI soldiers hustled them in.
When he spotted me, Ernst Sontrop gave a ghastly smile and said, ‘Apologies for this misfortune, Horatio. Bandits generally take Saturday off.’
The lieutenant barked at him to be quiet.
The Netherlanders were made to line up against the rear wall of the warehouse. Their trouser-belts had been removed, so that they had to hold their trousers up. Their carbines and ammunition belts had also gone, and were now draped over the shoulders of their two guards. De Zwaan was still wearing his Jap aviator’s helmet.
I saw that the two guards were excited by their capture. The lieutenant spoke soothingly to them. They looked pretty nasty chaps.
They spent some time making my pals line up properly, caps of boots and foreheads against the wall. I watched for the moment to go for my gun, but the sten remained pointing unwaveringly at my belt buckle. I could only stare helplessly at three sweaty backs and the weapons that covered them.
At last they were arranged according to the lieutenant’s satisfaction. The sten-gunner said something to him, at which he turned the full power of his attention on me. He came forward, standing with legs apart and fists on hips, surveying me. An ugly and aggressive sod. His scar went white when he spoke.
‘You are Ingrish? No from Netherlands?’
I pointed to my shoulder flashes. ‘See these? 26 Div. English. London. Churchill.’
‘Make your gun down on ground. Be very care.’ He pointed to the floor.
Unbuttoning the holster flap, I dropped the revolver at my feet. He motioned me angrily to kick it across to him, which I did. He ignored it.
‘Where are you stay at Medan?’
An unbidden vision of Jackie Tertis swinging a golf club flashed across my mind. I saw the view of his torture house as glimpsed from my window in the billet. I thought of the fate of the Indonesians who had fallen into his hands. The thought occurred to me that it was the Japs wh
o set the fashion for all this cruelty. Now it was going to be my turn. For the first time, I was really afraid, afraid all over and all through. The fear expressed itself as severe chill of skin and internal organs. My bladder and bowels felt as if they were about to slip from their moorings. Nobody could ever want the Tertis treatment.
I felt my lips tremble as I answered, evasively, ‘Off the Serdenweg.’
‘Serdenweg.’ He studied me, keeping his machine-pistol ready. Time inside the go-down had solidified. ‘Show to me your pass.’
I groped in my upper left-hand jacket pocket and produced my battered old brown paybook. When I leaned forward to give it to him, he took it without removing his gaze from my eyes, almost as if he hoped to hypnotise me. Then he looked down at the book, riffling its pages one-handed. I drew breath, looking round in search of help. Nothing there encouraged me. The Dutch stood motionless facing the wall, holding up their trousers. The two TRI soldiers guarded them. My pal with the sten now stood in the doorway, where he had a good view of all of us, as well as keeping an eye on outside. No sound came from there. Inside, bluebottles buzzed endlessly under the asbestos roof.
The lieutenant finished his inspection of my paybook and my photograph. He shut it and handed it back.
As I put it away, he said contemptuously, ‘You good friend all Netherlands men.’
‘We were hunting crocodiles. Not military operation.’
The bastard still looked me over, his eyes bulging.
‘You speak Netherlands language?’
‘No.’
‘What your name?’
‘Horatio Stubbs. Sergeant. As written in paybook.’
‘Where you are borned?’
I named the East Midlands town written in my paybook. He stood there. I was aware that our fates were being decided. Jan de Zwaan started to call something in Malay. He was kicked viciously in the thigh, and fell silent with a grunt.
The officer ran a hand along the line of his jaw. The peel of stubble against his palm was audible. Then he came to a decision.
He pointed to the office door behind me.
‘You go in opis.’
‘Look, I’m going back to England next week. My friends are going back to the Netherlands on the Van Heutsz this afternoon. Okay? Let us go. We are all leaving Sumatra as soon as possible. Then it will be your island. Okay?’
The jaw angle became more pronounced. ‘Now is our island. You go into opis, lekas, chop-chop, like I say.’
As I moved, he moved, kicking my revolver to one side with his boot. It was a good heavy kick. The weapon went scuttling to the far end of the concrete floor.
Unable to think of anything else, I walked over to the office and entered, turning quickly in case the lieutenant shot me in the neck. I backed against a desk and we confronted each other across the intervening space.
He raised the machine-pistol and levelled it at my eyes, glaring at me across the barrel. He came nearer, each step a threat. His mouth became smeared across his face.
‘You wait here and no make move or I shooting you to pieces. Okay?’
I nodded.
The sentence was important to both of us. He repeated it with some relish. ‘You wait here and no make move. I shooting you to pieces.’
‘Yes, understand.’
He shook his head, scowling. ‘Ingris army finish at Medan.’
He moved out and shut the office door. The key turned in the lock. There was a frosted glass panel in the door, covered in dust. I had an impression of his retreating back, then could see nothing. I stood with my thigh against the desk, waiting as ordered, trembling, fuck it.
I could hurl myself through the window and run for the river, but they would be outside and firing before I made it. Besides, anything I did would only make the position of Sontrop and Co. more perilous. The lieutenant had all the power. We were helpless.
A discussion began on the other side of the go-down. It took place in Malayan, but I recognised the tones of Ernst Sontrop’s voice, caught the anger in it. The lieutenant started shouting. I caught the word merdeka repeated several times.
Looking back, I cannot recall that I held anything more than a simple soldier’s viewpoint of the political situation. The Dutch ‘owned’ Sumatra, and the Indonesians who were making trouble were ‘extremists’.
Parallel cases exist in Palestine and Northern Ireland and other countries today, though parallels, like analogies, never prove cases. But in those simple early days after the war, when the shutters of international business had only just gone up, the notion of colonial populations being fit to govern their own countries – or entitled to govern whether fit or not – had barely penetrated. Merdeka could not really mean freedom, since it was a native word – which was why the British troops used it among themselves, with their customary surly cheer, as a comic password.
The Indonesian state has survived for many years. On the whole, it prospers. It is remote from Britain. Our mutual trade is negligible. As for Sumatra itself, little is ever heard of it in Britain. The Times, only a week or two ago, reported an earthquake in West Sumatra without mentioning any names or reporting casualties. It was a four-line filler. Sumatra has sunk beneath the greater abstraction of ‘Indonesia’ and we know and care less about the island than we did a century ago. As a nation, we have largely lost interest in the world.
As I grow older, I regret that what was good and liberal in the British Empire is dead, and that the little, having largely overcome the great, remains obstinately little. Well, it is proper that my generation should regret – we were among the sods who shrugged our shoulders and laughed it all away. Like Steve Kyle, we forgot how to give or take orders.
Three shots rang out. They rattled about the harsh confines of the go-down with petrifying din. As they died, one more shot re-awoke the echoes. Then silence fell, thick and dismaying.
As I crouched down against the desk, arms round my head, a rusty rain of dust fell from the ceiling. I thought of the great silences of the forest, of that awful neutrality.
For an unreckoned time, I sheltered against the desk.
There was no further sound.
Finally, I tiptoed to the window and looked out. My body shook with fear. Through the dusty glass lay a view of wharf and river. The launch we had used for our fool crocodile hunt had gone. The half-sunken boat still lay at its last anchorage. The door to its wheelhouse hung open; that was where the lieutenant and his men had hidden, waiting craftily until we returned.
On the wharfside lay our crocodile. Twenty or more kite-hawks fed on it, tearing shreds from its body and gobbling them down. They jostled and fought for positions in the carcass. The picture was picked out in sharp detail in the blazing sun. Of the TRI there was no sign.
The landscape lay there, impaled by sunlight. In the background, the felled trees and the standing trees reflected in the calm river. In the foreground, the terrible feast.
That magnificent land which has everything – food, cash crops, minerals – that magnificent land of mountains, volcanoes, rivers, jungles – why has it not risen to become one of the most enviable of all countries of the globe. Standing trembling in the office next to the stinking latrine. I seemed to know the answer to the question. The tribes of man became the dominant animal in temperate zones. In the tropics, where man began, his position remains less assured: below Cancer, the fevers of the equator work against him. The heat and its allies make a perpetual war, grinding him down. And some dreadful thing in human nature defeats human nature.
Tears came to my eyes as I stood at the window.
For I was innocent, I whispered. I loved Sumatra. I had been about to leave it against my will, as a soldier must take farewell of his wife. Now, my Dutch friends having been shot down, the guns were being reloaded for my execution. Over and above the fear I felt was an awful depression at the uselessness of everything, the bloody war, the fucking peace.
I stood and listened for them. Only gradually did it dawn on me that
the extremists might have gone, that fear of reprisals from the British might have caused them to spare my life. Silence. The buzz of flies nearby; outside, the occasional cries of the scavenger birds.
Sweat burst out upon me. Behind the desk stood a metal waste-paper bin. I picked it up, hurled it through the frosted glass panes of the office door, and ducked under the desk. After a clatter of falling glass, the noise of the bin rolling over concrete. Then silence again.
Making a great effort, I came out from cover, went over to the door, and located the key on its outer side. I unlocked the door and stepped out on to the floor of the go-down.
Ernst Sontrop, Jan de Zwaan, and Hendrick Nieuwenhuis lay huddled together by the far wall. A communal pool of blood spread under their bodies. Jan still wore his old Jap helmet. He lay face upward, his eyes open, looking sternly at the ceiling. His two friends lay face down. I could not see which of the three had needed the extra shot.
Weakness overcame me. I leaned against one of the old Manchester crates, feebly wiping my face. I broke into enormous sobs which rose from the centre of my guts. They came pumping up in reverse peristalsis, disgorging all that had to be suffered.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After midday in Medan. The city in its trance of sunlight. The smart native cop on duty at the Kesawan crossroads, with little traffic to direct except for a few leisurely bullock-carts making for the railway station.
I stood with Captain Jhamboo Singh by his jeep, in the shadow of the grim Dutch HQ. He was all concern.
‘Come back to the lines with me, Sergeant. Have a meal, take a rest, or I will drive you to the Field Ambulance and you can enjoy peace and quiet under observation for a day.’
‘I’m fine, Captain Sahib; thank you. I just need a drink.’
‘No, no, you come back to the lines and have a clean up. At present you are in a bad state, especially with regard to your appearance. Get in, get in.’ He tapped the side of the Jeep with one fingernail. He was himself immaculate as usual.
I climbed in behind him and we were driven back to the lines. On the way, I tackled him about my missing revolver: losing it was a chargeable offence. Jhamboo brushed the question aside. He would indent for a new one; no charge would be brought. He was happy that I had come through the incident with my life.