‘I’ll get you a full Dutch passport within a week,’ the clerk said. ‘A blue one. It’s a bloody disgrace, if you ask me. The emigration office in the Indies should have given you Dutch nationality on the spot.’
Before my first week in the boarding house was over, I received a phone call summoning me to see the paymaster at the headquarters of the Marine Corps in Rotterdam. I took the next train and after a long search finally found the place. There I met Piet Dikotta, my former commanding officer at the Marine Brigade Security Service in Surabaya, who had landed a cushy job at HQ. He escorted me to the paymaster’s office.
The paymaster was a lieutenant commander who had seen active service in the tropics. He invited me to sit down and asked me where I was staying and how I was doing. I told him I had to pay Mrs Essenberg 150 guilders a week for board and a humble breakfast. A bath cost fifty cents extra. On hearing this, he all but exploded. He grabbed the telephone directory, found her number and unleashed a barrage of maritime expletives down the phone at her. Fuming and red in the face, he slammed down the receiver. This did me the power of good. He ordered me to leave the boarding house immediately and to report to the naval barracks on Van Alkemadelaan in The Hague. There I could stay free of charge until I was able to pay my own way. And so I stumbled from one dubious adventure to the next, until I married one of the many girls who had written to me.
Recollections of a heffalump (2)
‘Ha! “One of the many girls!” He should have been so lucky!’
‘Ma, it’s his nationality I’m trying to get at. I always thought he had dual nationality: Chinese and Dutch.’
‘Yes, come to think of it, you’re right. There was that time – this was years later – when I got a visit from the immigration office. Knocked on the door of my little flat in Zoetermeer they did, suspected me of being in the country illegally. Showed me a paper that said I was Chinese. Me… a Chinky! So I pull my eyes back, all slanty like, and we have a good laugh about it, me and the two blokes from immigration. Never heard another word about it.’
‘That makes sense. When Nana went to the post office to apply for her ID card, the girl behind the counter asked her which nationality she wanted on the card: Chinese or Dutch… “What?” Nana says. “Am I Chinese?” “Yes,” the girl says. “Can I have both?” Nana asks. Yes, no problem. I always envied my little sister because I wanted dual nationality myself so I could travel to China without any hassle. Life’s all about the paperwork, eh Ma?’
‘Huh? If only! There you go, talking bollocks again! So you think you lot are Chinese, too? Wouldn’t that be something! Well, you’d pass for Chinese sooner than I would, that’s for sure. But to get back to my story: we got out of that filthy, whore-ridden neighbourhood near the station, thank God, and found ourselves a place on Bilderdijkstraat. That’s where the real trouble began.’
Matagora
The photo from Bilderdijkstraat was taken not long before my birth. It’s the only photo I have from that time. My mother is heavily pregnant with us, the twins. Near her stands a friend of the family. He and my mother are smiling broadly. Their smiles are real, not pretend; the mood one of mutual sympathy my parents could never attain. A length of striped cloth hangs from a rod at the window, an improvised curtain. The stripes are horizontal and make the place look shabby.
Before I was born, my parents were living in an obscure little hotel opposite the public library on Bilderdijkstraat in The Hague. The place was always full of actors, some of them famous at the time.
Years later, the hotel became the kind of seedy establishment where lovers meet during office hours. An attractive Indo woman with a paranoid streak and a deep-seated fear of parting with her address once proposed we go there together. The rooms were rented by the hour. But I was daunted by the idea of making love in the place where my mother’s waters had broken one sultry afternoon, to say nothing of doing the deed within sixty minutes at a given time of day.
As my mother tells it, she and my father only stayed there a month or two. The room in the photo bears all the hallmarks of my father: a bookcase cobbled together from old crates and stacked with ring binders; the bound, embossed volumes of an encyclopaedia; a stack of textbooks topped by a ticking alarm clock. A medicine cabinet on the wall. A batik cloth struggling to liven up the wallpaper, a light switch made of Bakelite. The smile the man and woman share is baffling.
‘Who’s that guy again?’ I ask.
‘That’s Matagora. He was in love with me.’
‘Matagora… Christ, I’d forgotten that name. What do you mean he was in love with you?’
‘Just what I said! You’ve heard of people falling in love, haven’t you?’
‘Why would Matagora be in love with you? Who falls in love with his best friend’s pregnant wife?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say Matagora was his best friend. Sundahl was your father’s best friend.’
‘Was Matagora a marine, too?’
‘No, Matagora was with the East Indies Army.’
‘Did he kill Indonesians? I heard all those KNIL blokes did was shoot in the air.’
‘How should I know? God, you ask the daftest questions sometimes. Your mother was nowhere near that stinking war, remember? I was back here in Brabant. Besides, Matagora never wanted to talk about the bloody war, not like your bloody father with those non-stop bloody stories of his. He was a very nice man. Handsome too.’
Matagora is wearing a trench coat and woollen gloves, about to leave by the look of things. For this farewell snapshot, his elbow is resting on a stack of books and he is looking straight into the lens and smiling. Friendly are his dark, sculpted features, typically Ambonese traits. Bright are his teeth. Ma-ta-go-ra. His name has the ring of a magic spell. He was alone, no wife, no children. Thirteen years on, that hadn’t changed.
My mother is closer to the camera, her swollen belly rounding out a drab maternity dress. It’s around this time that my father begins to hit her. He kicks that belly of hers. I must have felt it; we can’t have had a peaceful time in there, my twin and I. We grow impatient, start hammering on the wall of her womb. My mother goes through hell and we are born early. Four weeks early according to my father, five according to my mother. Or one says six and the other eight, whichever number suits them best.
A black paraffin heater stands between Matagora and my mother. If the heater was burning, it must have been a cold spring; we were born in the summer. The corner of a bed edges into the frame. It must have been one of those bedsits where you do everything in one room, including washing yourself at a cold-water tap.
The photographer can only be my father. He loved taking photos, sent entire series to his family in Indonesia – independent of the Netherlands by then – in the hope they would arrive. My mother is looking to the side and smiling at Matagora, who in turn smiles at the camera.
‘He warned me about your father,’ she said.
‘What do you mean “warned you”?’
‘What do you think I mean? Lost your memory all of a sudden?’
‘What did he say to you?’
‘What do you think he said? That I should leave him, even before you two were born. He was willing to take me with him, to rescue me and the two of you from your father’s clutches. He knew your father was off his chump. Knew ever since they met in that stinking East Indies of theirs.’
‘And the war didn’t send Matagora over the edge?’
‘It’s nothing to do with the bloody war! That father of yours was crazy long before the war broke out. And he knew that, Matagora knew.’
‘So that’s why he hung around with Pa? Fancied being best mates with a guy who was off his chump?’
‘You can be friends with someone who’s not right in the head, can’t you? What about that shower you hang around with? Are they all normal? What if one of them commits a murder, what then? Would you just drop them?’
‘I wouldn’t run off with his wife and kids, that’s for sure.’
‘If only I’d done it! Think of the misery I’d have been spared with that father of yours.’
‘Maybe Matagora would have hit you too.’
‘Matagora?’
‘Isn’t that what they say? That Ambonese men knock their wives about?’
‘Not Matagora! He was gentle as can be!’
It’s true, he was a gentle man. I never saw much of Matagora. But I often heard his name, back when my father used to visit him. I never went along; my father never took any of his children to see Matagora. Perhaps Matagora lived in some ten-by-ten backstreet dive and was ashamed of his situation.
The last time I saw him was the summer I turned thirteen. My father had laid into me and I had run into the bathroom. Hunched over the basin, I watched the tap water carry off the blood that dripped from my face. Strange, but I saw beauty in my blood mixing with the water, the evidence diluted and draining away. Someone came into the room. I did not have to look up to know it was my father. Matagora appeared too. His voice was soft and calm, an incantation almost. My father left and I looked into Matagora’s troubled eyes. It felt safe with him standing there, as if to protect me from another of my father’s outbursts.
Matagora at the bathroom door. About to leave, like the photo of him and my mother, taken thirteen years earlier. My mother shooting him a loving look. That’s what it was. She was smitten. With Matagora, who became a buffer between me and my father, until it was no longer needed or it no longer mattered. I never saw him again.
But wait, was there one last time? One Sunday a few years later, during visiting hours at the children’s home in Voorschoten. As we said goodbye, that father of mine suddenly started blubbering. An embarrassing spectacle, watching that brute bawl his eyes out. My friends obligingly turned their heads away. Matagora put his arm around my weeping father’s shoulder and together they walked away, out through the gates of a home where no war was raging. Was it Matagora who was with him that day? Whatever happened to that gentle man?
Recollections of a heffalump (3)
‘Pa was working full time by then. And in the hotel you had Jan Retèl and Sigrid Koetse – she was still under age, so there was some funny business going on there – and a whole bunch of other actors who hung around with them, you know what it’s like with those celebrities. Jan Retèl was a big name in those days, believe you me. They’d help me down the stairs, ’cause I could barely manage with that big belly of mine and Jan Retèl said to me, “Oh, what a waste – you should’ve been on the stage.” And he meant it, you know. I’d always wanted to be a comedy actress.’
‘Was your young man from the tropics still knocking you about in that hotel on Bilderdijkstraat?’
‘No, your father and me were getting on fine then.’
‘Are you sure? You told me once he kicked you in the belly not long before we were born.’
‘No, that was earlier.’
‘With you it’s a different story every time.’
‘By then your father was paying me no heed at all! Always out gallivanting. Had his papers by that time. He was safe here in Holland but in Indonesia they’d have chopped him up and had him for breakfast, he knew that for sure. But instead of leaving the war behind him, he was wedded to it. One morning at the crack of dawn he left for an air show in Ypenburg. You remember how ridiculously early he used to get up – never shook those idiotic tropical ways of his. He collected books about planes; obsessed with them he was. War planes of course, not passenger planes but jet fighters and bombers and helicopters and God knows what else. When he left I told him I wasn’t feeling well in that stuffy little attic room but he couldn’t have cared less. A little cot was all set up for you two and your little clothes were ready because by then we knew you were twins – your father had twins in the family, Ella and Ina, his sisters – and all of a sudden the blood started pouring out of me. I panicked, staggered out onto the landing and screamed, but there was no one around, no Alice, no Sigrid, no Jan Retèl. An old couple lived next door but even they weren’t home. And the hotel was closed on Sundays, so the owner wasn’t there either. I had to get down those steep stairs with that big belly of mine, one foot at a time, to get to the telephone in the hall. I slid ten cents in the slot and called Aunt Annie, ’cause she liked to move with the times and already had her own phone. It was seven in the evening by the time Annie came thumping up the stairs with a taxi driver in tow. We packed a few things and the cab took us to the maternity clinic on Prins Mauritslaan.’
‘Ha! Not far from the house where Tjalie Robinson would end up living, writing and working on his hopeless dream of turning a bunch of Indos into something that resembled a people.’
‘As if I’d know anything about that. There you go again, with your books and your writers. I never knew musicians read so many books. My father never so much as opened a book. He played his music and kept his mouth shut the rest of the time. Anyway, somehow the police managed to track your father down and give him the news and he arrived at the clinic just as you were being born.’
‘So he didn’t arrive till half past two in the morning? That must have been one hell of an air show!’
‘No, he turned up at one. God only knows where he’d been. Might have been half-twelve even. You were a breech birth, so I was already half-dead. You came out feet first so they shoved you back in and then you came out back first. Phil was lying crossways and you were already half an hour old when they decided to get him out by Caesarean. “You or the baby?” they asked. I can’t remember what I said. Later they told me the doctor thought I was a goner – it happened a lot in those days. At death’s door, I was. Phil too. It really was him or me. You came this close to having no mother and no twin brother. Your father all to yourself – how would you have liked that? Well, the clinic had just been reopened and you were the first twins and the whole ward was waiting for you. The pair of you were laid on a little bed with hot water bottles and a glass top. An incubator, yes, very high tech in those days and it had wheels so you could sleep next to my bed.’
‘An aquarium.’
‘Aquarium? What are you on about?’
‘I suddenly thought of Pa’s obsession with that aquarium, a mania he passed on to me.’
‘I can barely follow you at times, do you know that? You and that brother of yours. Sometimes I think they beamed you down from another planet, I really do! I spent a couple of days in the delivery room ’cause I wasn’t breathing right. You were wheeled from one end of the ward to the other. Everyone wanted to see you, ’cause you were the only brown babies in the place, a sight to behold. Three weeks passed and then you came home with me, back to Bilderdijkstraat and that attic room at the hotel.’
‘Hey, Ma, did you know that hotel became a knocking shop? Number 12 Bilderdijkstraat. According to house numerology, one plus two equals three, and any house with the number three is a proper fuck palace.’
‘Less of the language!’
‘Come on, it’s only a bit of fun.’
‘But now you mention it… a knocking shop… I can’t say I’m surprised. There was nowhere to put your things and the beds took up half the room. That didn’t matter to the actors of course – they were on stage every night. During the day I had artistes rinsing out your nappies and waiting on me hand and foot. If you cried in the middle of the night, the old folk next door would come and complain. But what was the owner going to do, throw us out on the street? Pa wrote to the Queen, the Mayor and God knows who else. Never stopped banging away at his typewriter, telling them all how he had fought for the Dutch red-white-and-blue as a marine. Don’t you remember him typing away all the time? Sometimes I thought he’d type himself silly, and the pair of you into the bargain.’
‘There was a Dutch writer whose cat always lay next to his typewriter. That moggy got addicted to the tap-tap-tap. In the end it went doolally. I swear… doolally tap.’
‘I’ll take your word for it. Anyway the typing paid off, ’cause they offered us a house on Schermerstraat,
not far from Zuider Park. But it was still being built and one night I came down with a high fever. The artistes called a doctor and he said get her over here quick and two of the actors put me in a cab to the hospital on Zuidwal and went back inside to take care of you two. At the hospital they told me I had mastitis and they had to keep me in. They brought you over the next day and the whole ward went daft when they wheeled in two brown kiddies. They gave you a pink wristband and Phil a blue one, or the other way around, I can’t remember exactly.’
‘That’s important to Phil. He wound up believing they swapped us around at that place: that he became me and I became him, astrologically speaking.’
‘Him and his star signs. Does he ever see people as people? I knew damn well who was who – I didn’t need a wristband to tell me that. And what does it matter anyway? You get one life and that’s your lot. Those nurses fell in love with you two, by the way. Spoiled you rotten, they did. You slept in the same cot. And that father of yours didn’t know what was going on, came marching in bold as you please and demanded to take you home with him. As if he had the faintest idea how to take care of you. It took a whole army of nurses to calm him down and tell him that wasn’t the way it worked in Holland. Well, he swore he would come back every day, but of course he didn’t, the lying sod. Had to work overtime, or so he said. God only knows where he was hanging out. He was busy trying to sort out that house on Schermerstraat and when he did visit he always brought someone with him. Once he turned up with an Indo woman who said you’d have a sharp tongue when you were older because it had a deep groove in it. And another Indo woman said you had the second sight ’cause you were born with a caul and your fontanelle took ages to close. You were sickly and spent half the time sleeping, while Phil was a fierce one and could bite really hard. You had to take turns at the breast and there was a woman who’d had a stillbirth and she was allowed to give you the bottle, first one then the other. Cheered her up no end. Then they’d take you back to the baby ward and that’s how it went for three months there on Zuidwal. By the time they discharged me our house was ready, but I went back specially to the hotel on Bilderdijkstraat to say goodbye to those lovely actors. Kind folk they were, so kind.’
The Interpreter from Java Page 4