The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  The guitar was mandatory, part of the furniture, a bare necessity for every Indo. I longed to hear music sounding in its belly, balm for the bloody tales of war you sent echoing around the living room night after night. There wasn’t much music in your head, to say nothing of your hands. Why did you never stop counting your victims? Why could you never be quiet and simply play your guitar like your friends did? Why couldn’t you live up to the cliché of the Indo? Oh, pardon me, you are not an Indo. Then what are you? An Indo-Dutchman? Congratulations on your title. Shame you had to fight so hard for it. But amid all the blood and guts, a decent yarn would cross your lips once in a while, thank Christ. Kids want to hear fairy tales, Pa, not war stories.

  Pah Tjillih

  Pah Tjillih was an old man. Lame, half-blind and always armed with a staff. He was known to possess special powers and in his younger days, it was said, he had learned the secrets of the martial arts from a venerable Chinese master. In line with the punishment he wished to dispense, one judicious blow from his staff was enough to paralyse the recipient’s arm or leg for a week, a month or three months. A slow death lasting anything from three to six months was also part of his repertoire. This was done with a blow to the chest. But the worst thing Pah Tjillih could do was dispatch someone to the great hereafter with a curse uttered in Javanese.

  Like all masters of the martial arts, Pah Tjillih also understood the extraordinary art of healing. With a laying on of hands he could work miracles. The potions and ointments he concocted were eagerly sought after throughout the region. And like all great minds, Pah Tjillih understood the art of being alone. He lived in a small house on the edge of Surabaya, where he tended his plants each day until the clock on the mantle struck six. Then night fell, and the jungle began to sing to him.

  Long after the war and his flight from Indonesia, the news of Pah Tjillih’s passing reached my father by letter. According to the old man’s neighbours, the clock on the mantle stood still at the hour of his death and the plants in and around the house died with him.

  Hello, Papa!

  We could have done with more stories like that one, Pa. The letter must have been addressed to our family hell, that cramped four-room flat of ours. Did it feel lonely not to be able to share the memory of Pah Tjillih with your heffalump, a woman interested in little more than canned-laughter comedies on a black-and-white TV? Where did you open that letter? At your desk in the forbidden zone? Was it really a bedroom you shared with your heffalump? Or was it more an office-cum-torture chamber that just happened to contain a bed?

  That room at the back of the flat, with its view of the perpetually deserted communal garden behind our block, was your domain. Ma’s was the Formica chair in the kitchen, where she smoked the cigarettes she lit on the pilot light of the boiler. We sat down to eat in the living room at six on the dot, not a minute later. If you were late we waited, even if the food went cold, and when you came through the door, we greeted you in unison. ‘Hello, Papa!’

  The greeting was compulsory. Just as you once had to bow to the Japs. We greeted you out of fear, as if you didn’t know. And, to be honest, we sat there waiting for the day when you would not come home at all. Never again. When you would drive your moped into a canal and be dredged up days later by the fire brigade, your coffin dispatched on a special Royal Air Force plane back to Java, where it would be lowered into the water from the Red Bridge in Surabaya. Crocodiles would swim towards your coffin, almost as if they knew who you were, what you had done and how much pleasure they were about to give your Javanese enemies, who would watch the wood splinter and your corpse being torn to pieces. A wonderful island indeed where such things were possible. Man in harmony with nature. All very different to The Hague, where us Indo kids had to find a way to survive, living cheek by jowl with those oversized Dutch lads. Ma was always kicking us out onto the street to play. She didn’t like children, doesn’t like children, will never like children, that child-woman who rattles on but never quite says anything. Did her father like children, I wonder? Strange how that man down in Brabant could feel so much more distant than our dead grandfather on your side, lying in his grave on Java.

  Weighing out nails

  My maternal grandfather grew up in a Brabant orphanage and became something of a celebrity in Helmond when he won the state lottery twice in a row. He used the capital that landed in his lap to set himself up as a cobbler. I remember the dimly lit workshop, the smell of leather and out in the street the glint of cobblestones baking in the summer sun. I was only ever there in the summer holidays and the sun always shone. I don’t remember it ever raining, nor do I remember Grandad Helmond ever coming to visit us in The Hague. He drove a black Citroën Traction Avant. Oh, the smell of that car! Leather upholstery, wooden dashboard, cigar smoke. The windscreen wipers were upside-down. Grandad Helmond always struck me as good-humoured and even-tempered, and yes, come to think of it, I do remember rain: a huge cloudburst above De Peel, where we had been swimming in the crystal-clear peat lake. The whole car shook as it battled through a thick curtain of rain. One of the wipers snapped and I stared at the sole survivor as it sent water arcing across the windscreen, on tenterhooks wondering whether it would give out before we made it back to the cobbler’s home.

  As well as outings to De Peel, Grandad Helmond kept us amused by tapping his boiled egg against his forehead at breakfast, before spooning out the contents seasoned with pinches of salt. He said nothing at the breakfast table, barely spoke a word at all. Instead, he played the conjurer.

  The eldest of the three boys, I was sometimes allowed to help out in the cobbler’s workshop, where the smell of shoes and polish and animal fat created an air of devotion in the diffuse light that filtered in through the small windows. I had the honour of weighing out nails, sold to customers in a paper poke for fifteen cents so they could hammer the soles of their own shoes back into place.

  The weights were ranked in order of size on a wooden block next to an intriguing set of scales. What a pleasure it was to be allowed to place one, two or three weights on the left scale, to scoop up the cobbler’s nails with a handsome metal implement and let them slide onto the right scale. I would spend minutes on end fiddling till the two sides were perfectly balanced.

  To begin with, Grandad Helmond would put up with my painstaking attempts to level the scales by adding or subtracting a single nail. But there always came a moment when he could stand it no longer. ‘It don’t have to be down to the last nail,’ he’d say, ‘long as it’s right more or less.’ And he would fill ten pokes in a minute where it would have taken me an hour. Gone was the enchantment of the gently rocking scales and the pleasure of calligraphing the price on the brown paper pokes with a soft pencil. I was crushed, my summer holiday knocked out of whack. What is a shoemaker without a heart for beauty and precision?

  Recollections of a heffalump (5)

  ‘The stifling heat had been building all day and that night a ferocious thunderstorm let rip. I was born amid thunder and lightning on 30 August 1928 and they named me Johanna Henrica van Kerkoerle. My mother was twenty-four and my father was twenty-eight. I came after my brother Jan, their first daughter. My father was overjoyed and tied one on, ’cause every bar in town had to hear the good news. My parents had a little shop and cobbler’s workshop on Heistraat. Helmond was a factory town and everyone worked hard for a living. My mother used to go round all the customers to ask if their shoes needed mending and my father was known as the best shoemaker in town and he worked day and night. It was his dream to own a big business one day. I was still a babe in arms when he won the jackpot in the state lottery: 100,000 Dutch guilders. He moved to bigger premises, bought a car, got his driving licence from the mayor in exchange for a box of cigars and the customers started coming to us instead of my mother having to chase them down. At the weekend, my father played in a band that performed in the surrounding villages. Accordion and fiddle he played, and he would give his bandmates a lift. He drove them home too, much the
worse for drink, and one night he ran his black Citroën Traction Avant straight into a canal, with four of his bandmates inside, that’s how drunk they all were. They crawled out and when my father came home he said his car had drowned. He bought a new one a week later, another black Citroën Traction Avant. Raised an orphan, he had been booted from one foster home to the next and he was determined never to scrimp and save again, especially when he won the lottery a second time and banked another 100,000 guilders. His band played polkas, mazurkas and waltzes, and of course they belted out a tear jerker or two. We had one of those old gramophone players at home with records by Mario Lanza and Caruso. You had to crank it up and the needle always needed replacing. Mies wasn’t long born when the Depression hit: the poor workers queued up at the soup kitchens pan in hand, and when Jan and me were driven to school, the poor buggers used to pelt the car with whatever they could lay their hands on. Money got tighter for us too, and we moved to a rented place with a shop on Mierloseweg. I was six and I had a swing up in the attic. We didn’t have it so tough. When Riek, our crazy Riek, was born, we moved to Beelsstraat. A busy street it was, with a butcher’s and a greengrocer’s opposite, and just down from us was Van Asseldonck’s bakery and the chemist’s, and right next door was a builder’s yard. There were some lovely lads working there and sometimes I’d climb onto the roof and call to them and when they looked up I’d duck out of sight. The contractor complained to my father and after that I wasn’t allowed on the roof any more and I had to help in the workshop.’

  ‘Grandad used to let me weigh out nails in the workshop.’

  ‘Did he now? The folk across the street were mad about you lot, you know. They thought you were so cute, a bunch of little brown kids, and they stuffed you full of sweets.’

  ‘Yeah. They didn’t hit us or yell at us or lock us in the cupboard.’

  ‘Oh, come off it! Who in Helmond ever locked you in a cupboard?’

  ‘Your mother.’

  ‘Well, you must have been asking for it.’

  ‘Was she in the habit of doing that? Locking kids in cupboards? Did your mother ever lock you in a cupboard?’

  ‘Not that I can remember, but then I did as I was told. I did well at school. No great shakes at Dutch and arithmetic, but I was good at geography and history. And yes, times were bad, there was still a lot of poverty, but as a little girl all that went over my head. When I was around ten, I heard talk of Hitler. As a child you were never allowed to hear anything about politics, it was nothing but say your prayers, go to school, say your prayers, go out to play and that was that. You had no idea what went on in the big bad world. It was a sheltered life we led at home, at school too. Till I came home one day and my parents were huddled by the radio, I’d never seen them so worried. I asked what was wrong but my mother put her finger to her lips, as if the Germans could hear us. “War’s broken out,” she said. I was twelve and before we went to bed that night someone on the radio said just go to sleep as usual, no cause for alarm. In the middle of the night we woke to the drone of hundreds of German planes and in the morning we heard shots fired in the street by a handful Dutch soldiers. What a useless shower they were! The Queen gave a speech on the radio and told us the invasion had begun. It was a week before we could go outside again. There were tanks and German soldiers everywhere. But they tried to build a bit of a rapport with us and in the first few months it didn’t seem so bad. Things got worse when they brought in a seven o’clock curfew: anyone who couldn’t identify themselves was shot dead on the spot. We were ordered to black out the windows and in the daytime Germans soldiers came to confiscate all our copper and brass: jugs, pots, vases, egg cups, tobacco jars… anything made of copper had to be handed over. If you hid it and they found it later, they stood you against a wall and shot you. I was in an awful state about our copper cigar box, ’cause Father always let me open it and fetch a cigar for him or if a gentleman came to call, and I was always so careful when I lifted up that lovely lid and then I’d lay eyes on those beautiful cigar bands and the smell was wonderful! So I hid that beautiful copper cigar box under the divan to keep it from the Germans and oh did I get what for – the only time in my life that my mother gave me what for. But I knew why, ’cause if the Germans had found it they’d have lined us all up and shot us full of bullets and you’d never have seen the light of day!’

  ‘God, if only the Germans had done that.’

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud! How can you say such a thing?’

  ‘It’s a joke, Ma.’

  ‘Call that a joke? You’re a weird one, you are! From another planet… do you hear me? Another planet! Off your head, just like that crazy brother of yours, always peering through that telescope of his in Geneva or God knows where he’s hanging out these days. At least he was always civil to me, not like you. Always treat me like a stupid cow, you do. Like I’m a child, you little prick! Anyway, the occupation wasn’t so bad to start with. But then the rationing got worse and you needed coupons for everything. You had coupons for bread, cloth, shoes – though when that came in people went back to wearing clogs. I used to have to queue for hours with those coupons when I came home from school. Veg and potatoes weren’t rationed in the first year and a lot of black-market dealings went on and people hoarded like mad but the Huns put an end to that and then we were back to queueing up for a bunch of leeks and a kilo of spuds for ten cents a go. Meanwhile, my father would call on the farmers and exchange shoes for flour, milk and grain. The baker’s van was a moving target. They’d block the road, steal his bread and knock the living daylights out of him. After a while you had to queue from six in the morning to have any chance of a bite to eat. The Huns were hungry too, of course, and if they saw you walking along with bread and cheese they’d nick the lot and leave you empty-handed. They left the kids alone, which is why I was always sent out to run the errands. But then the British started bombing German targets at night and we had to take cover in the air raid shelters. They often warned us when the British were coming – I can’t remember how exactly – and the Germans began to fire off them V1s of theirs. When it was all over, you’d come out and find bits of rocket in the garden but a cousin of mine in Eindhoven was in a shelter – a trench in the sand covered with boards down at the bottom of the garden – and she got hit by a stray V1 and died on the spot. So your father can bang on about his family and his eight cousins beheaded by the Japs, but we lost a cousin too. And all the able-bodied lads were sent off to Germany to work in the munitions factory or on the roads. They made my father repair a lot of the soldiers’ boots. Oh, they paid him all right – they were good like that, the Huns. The winter of 1943 was bitter cold, twenty below freezing, and the moon and the stars twinkled in the sky. From the shelter, I would look up at the stars and keep very still and pray to God that no bombs would fall on our house. The schools were closed to save on fuel. One day a young German soldier – couldn’t have been a day over eighteen – came to pick up his boots and stood there crying in the shop. He showed us photos of his parents and his brother and his little sisters. “I never wanted this war,” he kept saying. “I love my family and I want to go back home.” Broke my heart it did, and after that I stopped hating the Germans. A lot of fancy houses had been commandeered and later it turned out they were houses that had belonged to Jews who’d been taken away and put on one of those trains. Never saw them again. And ordinary German families came and lived in those houses because things were bad in Germany too. British bombers were blowing everything to bits, so what else were they supposed to do? And you’d hear the planes coming over at night, heading for Germany again, so it was no picnic for them either. One day the Germans came and confiscated all our radios. No one, not a single one of us, was allowed to hear another word about the war, but lots of people had a receiver tucked away somewhere and at night messages were broadcast by some kind of secret service about how things were in Holland and that was when we heard how Rotterdam had refused to surrender and how bad they had it there. We
didn’t know till later that they’d borne the brunt of it – all those bombs, all those people killed – and that’s why some folk took to calling Rotterdammers “cockroaches”. Sick, isn’t it? Calling your own countrymen cockroaches because they were bombed to a pulp? And after the radios we had to hand over our bikes. Some of those Germans had never ridden one before and had to learn, but what did I care about my bike? I wanted to be an actress! At school we had a little theatre group but I fell off the high bar during gym class and sprained my ankle and my best friend got the lead part and I was miserable ’cause I was a damn sight better than she was – Jan Retèl saw that straight away all those years later in that hotel on Bilderdijkstraat. Oh, if only I’d wound up there without your father, I could have been a TV actress. What about that? Your mother on the telly? Of course, you wouldn’t have been around to see me, but still. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, 1944. Well, there were all kinds of rumours that the Tommies were coming. That’s what we called the British.’

  ‘After Thomas Atkins, a soldier who died fighting the French. Thomas perished in the arms of the Duke of Wellington and they say it was his doing that Atkins came to represent the British soldier. In both World Wars, friend and foe referred to the Brits as Tommies.’

  ‘How do you know all that?’

  ‘Listen, Ma, I’ve immersed myself in that bloody war of yours more than you ever did. The fate of a post-war kid who thinks his future is determined by the past of his forefathers.’