The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  Incubator

  In the beginning my parents created the heavens and the earth. The earth was savage and then tranquil and the spirit of my parents hovered over the waters. ‘Let there be light!’ my father said and flicked the switch on his desk lamp. And he saw that the light was good, and he saw that his typewriter was good and he separated light from darkness. Light he called the tedium of day, darkness the playground of love. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. ‘I feel a vault within my body,’ said my mother. And so the heavens and the earth were separated. Neither she nor he had power over the vault within her belly and they both named it hell, for soon they would no longer be alone in that shabby, cosy little bedsit in the gloom of Bilderdijkstraat, where rain poured and snow turned the pavement slippery and passers-by saw this couple as strange, for they looked nothing like the couples with hats, headscarves and umbrellas who peopled the streets. They were the whore and the stranger from the East. They were slaves to their desires, worse than the Jews who had been driven in their thousands from the city’s streets to its cold, damp stations, where long trains stood waiting to take them to places far worse than hell, where they were gassed and incinerated and where years later swollen cabbages sprouted from soil made fertile by those who had choked to death in gas chambers.

  My father had another war in his head, a war no one in this city seemed to know. In Holland, the war had been reduced to the bitter winter of 1944–45 and the hunger and desperation that came with it. Not a word about the Jews. And the colonies were just far-off places where greedy Dutchmen gave Indonesians a taste of the lash, rode the native girls and fathered half-breeds who have been called many a name through the centuries. Coloured they were, blue even. They were creole, half-bloods and half-castes, injuns, East Indians, Indos and Eurasians. The words came thick and fast, in Dutch that bastardized Malay and Portuguese: klipsteen, liplap, sinjo, nonnie, petjoek, serani. Mesties they were, and poesties and kasties and toepas and cristietsen… until finally, in post-war Holland, they settled on ‘Indo-Dutch’. A label my father clung to for dear life. A label that sticks in my throat.

  He wanted to be like his wife, except for her complete lack of intellect, and he called this land of hers heaven, though it was cold as hell and he had to pile on thick clothes to shield himself from wind and weather. For his wife, Indonesia must have seemed like paradise, with its palm trees, blue skies and sunshine, but her husband no longer knew of such things. He spoke constantly of the war and when she asked him to stop he flew into a rage and hit her in the face. And when her belly grew so big that the heffalump began to resemble a beached whale, he kicked it. At times she denies this, at times she does not, depending on her mood.

  At these blows, the vault turned strange with fluid and noise, and we grew restless and wanted to escape the stifling belly. We fought for our place at the aperture and in the final struggle I ended up below and my brother above. I pressed my feet against the opening and pinned my brother above me, sideways so he had no escape. Someone yanked me out with a pair of forceps, then wrestled with the problem of how to shift that other unwanted knot of gristle from one hell to another. My mother was given a choice: his life or hers. She raved that they had to get him out – what would the neighbours say if she chose to save herself – and they sliced her belly open and freed him from that bomb shelter where it had never been safe. My brother lived. My mother too.

  My brother and I were unusual twins due to the enormous time difference of thirty-five minutes. Our astrological ascendants are not the same: mine is Cancer, his is Leo.

  In the beginning, it was formless, dark and full of shadows. Sometimes there was strange music, all echoes and humming dissonants. My mother later claimed that these sounds made me cry as I lay in my cradle. And my father kicked the cradle until I was quiet again. And so there was no difference between belly and cradle. The incubator, an aquarium without water, surrounded by the kindness of nurses… that I cannot remember. It is a fantasy at best.

  Once I was a fish.

  The fish is.

  Now that I am human, I shun daylight and would rather sleep on a couch by the radio than in a bed in a darkened room. I am a musician. I come to life in the evening, live by night. For years I could not bring myself to play jazzy dissonants on my guitar. They unsettled me, stirred up memories I could not pin down.

  Recollections of a heffalump (4)

  ‘Remember Ollie Plomp? She was from Suriname – not many of them in Holland back then – and married to a Dutchman from Gelderland. She lived next door on Schermerstraat by Zuider Park. One evening she came to the door with one of those wide prams. Over the moon, I was. It meant I could go for walks with the two of you. You turned brown as a berry in the sun; Phil was always paler. We knew a lot of nice people: the De Niet family, Aunty Fien, Aunty Lieke, Thea Buren or Bürer – never could remember her name – all from the Indies, except Aunty Fien of course. Everyone loved to see you and by that time we had more or less patched things up with my parents. But people on the street would stop and stare or they’d stop me and ask: are you married to one of them blokes from the Indies? I felt so ashamed pushing that big pram of yours. They looked at me like I was a whore. Not Ollie Plomp, of course, ’cause she was black and married to a white chap so that was different. And it was better to be a black woman married to a white man. She knew what she was doing, Ollie Plomp. That father of yours couldn’t stand your wailing at night but he wouldn’t let me pick you up. Sometimes he got so angry he’d shout, “For God’s sake! I’ve got to be up early!” And he’d go over and kick your cot. That soon shut you up. A man from Gelderland would never have done that. But when your father finally nodded off, I’d sneak out of bed every now and then and take a look at you. One day, I was feeding the two of you in the playpen when he came home from work. He had forgotten his keys, so he rang the doorbell. I didn’t know it was him, so I didn’t answer because he had told me never to open the door to anyone. But the bell kept ringing, so eventually I went to take a look. I opened the door and without saying a word he hit me right in the face. With his fist, mind! My cheek swelled up so bad I couldn’t go out for a week. Ollie Plomp did my shopping for me and took you out in the pram. That’s when he really began to scare me. He used to go to bed early, always complaining about his back, about falling into that ravine in his armoured car. Luckily, we knew the Van Mouriks, a big Indo family on Erasmusweg. We would go over there on a Sunday and there was always food on the go and lots of people chatting away in Malay, playing cards, singing, strumming guitars, not just Malay songs but Jim Reeves too – the Indos loved that soppy stuff, lapped it up they did. One of Van Mourik’s cousins married a Dutch girl, so I finally had someone to talk to. Marietje van Mourik had the gift of the gab and she’d picked up that mix of Dutch and Malay they all spoke. She nattered on at a rate of knots and one time out of nowhere she said: “Annie, you know why you had such a terrible time giving birth? Because the two of you aren’t suited.” She just came right out with it! Meanwhile, I was expecting again.’

  ‘Burst condom, right?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Pa told me.’

  ‘Oh, that father of yours is off his chump! But, fair do’s, it might have been. You had to rinse them out and re-use them. Useless bloody things.’

  ‘I remember them lying on the washbasin…’

  ‘What? At that age?’

  ‘Phil saw them too. I think we even played with them. But that was after the others were born.’

  ‘Bloody cheek! Anyway, that house on Schermerstraat was much too small, what with Arti on the way, so we moved to Melis Stokelaan on the other side of the park. Another tenement flat but with an extra room. The day before Arti was born I had eaten a whole bunch of grapes. And the next day it was thunder and lightning. Arti arrived during the storm. The heat was killing and I had the runs. Arti came into this world covered in shite, I swear, absolutely covered in shite.’

  ‘We say �
�shit” in these parts.’

  ‘Oh, do you now? Well, at home we always said “shite”.’

  ‘Not exactly an auspicious omen.’

  ‘Omen? What are you on about?’

  ‘A sign of things to come. That boy has spent most of his life in the shit, Ma. Figuratively speaking. Why did you call him Arti, anyway? One letter removed from Arto.’

  ‘I think he thought Arti would be our last. Something like that. I don’t really know, I didn’t have a say. He wanted to give you all American names. You know how he always wanted to emigrate to America. Come to think of it, he was the youngest, too.’

  ‘A family of five, like us. He was the fifth.’

  ‘We’d have been better stopping at two, ’cause your father had more and more trouble coping with family life. He started evening classes to become an engineer and got a job as a draughtsman at the Public Works department. But he had a hard time working his way up the ranks. He thought Holland was like the Indies and it was all about who you knew, but of course that’s not how it went. There were bust-ups with his colleagues and he took all that out on us. When Mil was born, the house got too small for him, so he moved his desk into the bedroom and holed himself up in there. If you lot made a racket, he’d come storming out and bang your heads together or bang them against the wall – he couldn’t stand your noise. And then you’d be whining in bed and I’d have to tend to you with cold flannels. I don’t think I got to watch a single thing on TV without being interrupted. Remember how he knocked your mother out with a dumbbell? I landed on the girls’ bed – yes, it was after Nana was born – and Pa filled a bucket with cold water and threw it in my face, the filthy sadist. Another time he whacked me on the arm with the lid of the wash-boiler.’

  ‘I remember, all right. Phil and I tried to stop him and he belted us from one end of the flat to the other. And the next day it was, “Get the washing done, you two. Your mother’s got thrombosis.”’

  ‘Yes. The insurance man who came to collect the monthly payments said once, “Goodness missus, where did you get those bruises?” I said nothing, of course, or your father would’ve killed me. Things went from bad to worse at the Public Works department and he was on the sick for a while. By then we were living on Hoogveen, in that nice little terraced house where you had your own room. But he got more aggressive, even the extra space didn’t help. Always moaning about his back, not that it stopped him training with dumbbells and lifting those weights on a pulley. And tinkering non-stop with that filthy moped of his in the living room. The blue one. A Zone-dup.’

  ‘Zündapp, Mam. It was German.’

  ‘German? That greasy blue thing that stank of petrol? The whole room reeked of it. I could’ve sworn that man thought he was still living in the Indies. Garden doors wide open in all weathers.’

  ‘Nice house. It was quiet up in my room. Though I remember putting my foot through one of those glass doors, in a rage because my brothers locked me out. Spent all summer with my leg in plaster.’

  ‘Yes, I remember that all right.’

  ‘Pa knocked a gap in the hedge so he could drive his moped through. I remember him driving it right into the house and sitting there just gazing at it once he’d finished polishing. The local kids didn’t like us – we only had proper playmates after we moved to that evil little flat by the park. That’s where it ended. Where it all fell apart, I mean. We were never together again after that, not all of us. No matter what the occasion, someone was always conspicuous by their absence. The family curse, we call it.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘We, the children.’

  ‘Oh, and what does that make us?’

  ‘Who do you mean us?’

  ‘Your father and your mother!’

  ‘You’re you.’

  Heads

  One day my mother came out with a mantra she would inflict on us for the rest of our lives. ‘The two of you are from another planet.’

  From an early age, my twin brother was fascinated by the laws of gravity, by rockets and UFOs, while I turned to the Bakelite radio to help me forget the harrowing war stories my father told. As long as my brother and I played side by side, all was well. The moment we played with each other, a fight would break out and my father would bang our heads together.

  When I was around twenty-five years old, a woman told me she had seen stars once after her husband hit her. She told everyone. Till then she’d thought seeing stars was something that only happened in cartoons. This surprised me. Stars can take on many forms, depending how hard you are hit. Seeing stars isn’t so bad. When you see meteors coming at you and feel sick to your stomach, that’s when it gets hard to stay on your feet.

  The worst thing was the moment before our heads collided. In a split second you look deep into the eyes of your terrified brother. And he looks into yours. I can’t remember the last time we looked into each other’s eyes. I’m afraid we never really have, afraid we’ve avoided each other’s gaze our whole lives long.

  Seeing stars is nothing. Never daring to look your brother in the eye again is something else. It’s better when your head hits the wall. It feels different, harder, but you don’t see your brother’s terrified eyes coming towards you, becoming and then being your own. A wall is dead. A wall is not a mirror.

  My room has one window and four bare walls. The room where I am writing these words, I mean. I don’t know why I never hang anything on the walls. I don’t want to think about it. That’s just the way it is.

  Guitar Indo (1)

  Hey Pa, in that one photo you took of your pregnant heffalump on Bilderdijkstraat I see all kinds of stuff on the floor and on the walls, but no guitar. In those early years in Holland, did owning a camera and a typewriter mean more to you than owning a guitar?

  An Indo without a guitar is a weeping willow, Pa.

  From the house on Schermerstraat – our first official residence – only a few photos remain. Snapshots of the street, a picnic with Granny Helmond in Zuider Park, us twins in the playpen. But from the flat on Melis Stokelaan, our family hell at number 1394, I have a shoebox full of photos: black-and-white, many in the standard format of the day – 3.5 x 3.5 inches – the odd one enlarged, some with wavy edges. Almost every photo you took in that place features a guitar, a cheap thing that hung on the wall, opposite the portrait of your mother. The guitar on the wall and your mother on the mantlepiece, directly above the coal fire so she wouldn’t feel the Dutch cold. No laughing matter, eh Pa?

  You seldom strummed that guitar. I only remember one evening, sitting around your bed with the others, singing from the stencils you kept in that no-nonsense, grey folder with the black linen spine. One of the rare evenings when you were a father, not a camp commandant. Yet you didn’t play a single folk song from your motherland. There was no ‘Terang Bulan’. No ‘Nina Bobo’. No ‘Bengawan Solo’. None of that stuff. Your favourites came from Jim Reeves, the syrupy nostalgia so popular among Indos of your generation. Followed by a parade of corny American songs you must have picked up from your Allied buddies back on Java. ‘South of the Border’ serenades a lover in Mexico. Mexico of all places! You cherished The American Dream, but your heart was drawn to Mexico, perhaps because you thought an Indo might blend in better there. You had a point: today the world’s largest Indo community can be found in Los Angeles. The Indos there are mistaken for Mexicans all the time, so they grow a moustache, speak Spanish and borrow an identity more easily than they ever could in Holland.

  What a visionary you were, to want to emigrate to California. As a child, I shuddered at the thought. Ma and I were the stick-in-the-muds who wanted to stay in Holland rather than make the leap to the land of fairy tales where a bartender can end up president. If I’m honest, it’s something I regret when I look back. Sorry I was such a scared little boy, Pa, though I can’t say whether it was America that scared me or the ocean I would have had to swim to escape you. Escaping, getting away from you, that was something I longed to do before I could cr
awl, you worthless fuck.

  There I go again, hurling abuse. Sorry, Pa. But I swear with considerable restraint, don’t you think? Why did I hear the slug of your typewriter more often than music from your guitar? Perhaps you played quietly, something many Indos do, so as not to wake the kids or the neighbours. Sometimes your guitar was missing from the wall and I knew it must be somewhere in your bedroom. To touch it was forbidden. Even as a small boy, I wanted to learn to play but to you it was more important to keep it free of scuffs and scratches. Your guitar was barely an instrument at all, more of a showpiece, and that’s how it was treated. You rubbed it with teak oil on a regular basis, the worst thing you could have done. The moisture bent the neck out of shape. Well done you. You might as well have oiled your typewriter with Castrol GTX… Not that your failings ever stopped you making fun of me in front of the others. ‘Cackie’ you called me on a daily basis. Short for cack-handed. As if your fingers were so nimble. Were you really so afraid I’d end up dropping your guitar if I got my paws on it, or did you suspect I might outshine you as a musician?

  Your bedroom, the place where you raped and abused your wife, was strictly off limits. If I ever ventured in there, I would drop to my knees in front of the guitar, take it gingerly by the neck to make sure it didn’t fall over and run my thumb gently across the strings. That strange modern tuning was enchanting and frightening at the same time. E A D G B E… a world away from the harmonious kroncong or Hawaiian tuning. Even now, the sound of those open strings stirs memories in me of the war books stacked around that wide bed of yours and of the cold Marine dagger under your pillow, there in case some Indonesian freedom fighter appeared one night out of nowhere to slit your throat in revenge for everything you did back there, once upon a time on Java.