The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  A portrait of the Queen

  Early in May, Mama heard from Jacob that he had found a place to rent in the Undaan Kulon district of Surabaya. For me this was welcome news, as I was bored stiff in Blitar, though I did enjoy my Chinese lessons. We packed our suitcases, said our goodbyes to the family and set off for the station. The steam train that took us from the mountains to the plains left in the afternoon and pulled into Gubeng station late that evening. Every platform was swarming with Japanese soldiers. At the exit we were all checked by members of the notorious Kenpeitai, the Japanese secret police. I showed them my Chinese ID, was greeted with a short bark and allowed to pass. We found ourselves a kossong, a horse-drawn carriage that could carry six.

  The streets of Undaan Kulon bore the names of Dutch naval heroes. Our new home was at No. 5 on a street named after Jacob van Heemskerk. The square where my brother Karel lived commemorated seafarer Piet Hein. And the street where my half-sister Nonnie lived with her husband Ang Soen Bing paid tribute to Maarten Tromp.

  With the help of Javanese police officers and acquaintances, Jacob and Karel had managed to salvage much of the furniture from our bombed-out home on Pasar Besar Wetan Gang IV and had put it in storage until the official permit to occupy the new place on Heemskerkstraat was issued. Among our salvaged possessions were some of my textbooks from Queen Emma School, so I was able to continue studying at home. I was given a room of my own, ten feet by ten. It contained nothing but a wooden divan with a kapok mattress, a pillow and a mosquito net, a chair and a small table. To my surprise I found a large roll of paper among my scant belongings. I removed the wrapping to reveal a colour portrait of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, which a teacher had once presented to me. I pinned it to the wall above my bed.

  ‘Arend, take that picture of Queen Wilhelmina down off the wall!’ Mama ordered.

  I refused.

  ‘It will cause us no end of trouble if the Japs turn up to inspect the house!’

  ‘Wilhelmina is our queen. Those bandy-legged bastards have their Tennō Heika, don’t they? Besides, what do they know about our House of Orange far away in Holland? I don’t give a damn about the Japs. They attacked my school, bombed our home on Pasar Besar Wetan and beat me when I refused to watch them mutilate that boy in Blitar.’

  Mama flew into a rage. ‘And where do you think that hostile attitude will get you? Are you planning to take on the whole bloody lot of them by yourself? Do what you want, only don’t come crying to me!’

  Bike, bricks and turtle meat

  A few days later, Karel gave me an old bike. Knowing I would have to find myself a job, I did what I could to knock it into shape. But the first trip I made was to see Uncle Soen, who lived in a little house in a kampong near Peneleh. He informed me about the movement of Japanese troops in and around Croc City and explained how life was changing under the heel of the Japanese jackboot. He told me about the Kenpeitai’s reign of terror and filled me in on how they operated. Uncle Soen was a member of two small-scale Chinese resistance movements and warned me once again not to confide in anyone. Dutch citizens had been herded into internment camps but Indos were still being allowed to work and move freely for the time being. Some Belandas had even smeared their faces with shoe polish in the hope of passing themselves off as Indos.

  I cycled around aimlessly for days on end. From Undaan via Genteng, Tunjungan, Kaliasin and Tamarindelaan all the way to Darmo. From there I headed north, turning back when I reached Gresik. On one of these trips I stopped at Karang Pilang to watch a couple of Indo boys spearing turtles on the banks of Kali Brantas. I got off my bike and went over for a chat. They told me they were labourers in a brickworks across the road and asked me if I needed a job. In no time they had introduced me to the head foreman, a Dutchman by the name of Huitink. I was taken aback to see a Dutchman running the place when so many had been interned in the camps. Mr Huitink took me into his office, checked my ID and jotted down my details in a notebook. He looked up in surprise when I told him that I was in fact an illegitimate Nolan. The family’s name was known far and wide, from Surabaya and the surrounding area to the far east of Java.

  Huitink took me to the office of the hanchō, the Japanese chief inspector. He was dressed in a white uniform with the five petals of the sakura emblem on his left breast pocket. I had to bow low before this man, and felt deeply humiliated. In broken English he told me I was to start the next morning at a rate of two cents an hour.

  Back home, I told Mama I would be starting work the next day. She was delighted, although she thought they were paying me a pittance. Every morning at six-thirty I set off for the brickworks in Karang Pilang, a trip of over 15 miles. First I learned to make bricks by pressing lumps of clay into moulds. As time went on, I helped out in the workshop occasionally, forging iron or working as a fitter and welder. We worked up to fifteen hours a day and when the bricks had to go into the furnace, we were on duty round the clock and left to snatch a nap whenever we could. The work was tough but at least I was earning a little money, which I used to buy food for Mama and the rest of the household. It was nowhere near enough, of course, but Karel and Jacob were also bringing in a wage.

  Karel had married his childhood sweetheart Wiesje Muller and they had rented a pavilion on Krangganstraat. Wiesje’s sister Erna was living with a Chinaman to avoid being sent off to an internment camp.

  When I was on night shift, I would go down to the river with the Indo boys to catch turtles and iguanas. We killed the iguanas with spears we made ourselves, sliced open their bellies, gutted them and rubbed salt into the cavity. The turtles were more of a challenge, but those Indo boys knew exactly what they were doing. Once all the bricks had been stacked in the furnace, we stoked the furnace room, first with firewood, then with coal. The boys laid the dead creatures on top of the bricks, within reach of an opening, and we would use fire tongs and sticks to turn them until the flesh was tender. The resulting meal saw us through the night. There was a strange taste to the meat but we had appetite enough and it never made us sick.

  I was cycling over thirty miles a day on bad roads to get to work and back, and one day the tyres on my bike gave out on me. Karel provided me with a set of solid crepe rubber tyres but all they did was turn the bike into a boneshaker, which meant an even earlier start in the morning.

  By this time, a bond had developed between the Indo boys, Mr Huitink and me. We kept one another informed about the war in the Pacific. Before long, another Indo lad by the name of Fred Verhoef came to work for us, without applying through Huitink. I couldn’t help but notice the preferential treatment he received from the hanchō, and I let Huitink and the others in on my suspicions.

  Huitink took the next day off and did some investigating. He returned with the news that Fred Verhoef was an informer for the Kenpeitai. The blood drained from our faces, but Huitink advised us to act as if we were none the wiser.

  In confidence I told my friends, ‘That guy has to go, whatever it takes. Do nothing and one by one we will fall into the hands of the Kenpeitai. One wrong word and you’re a goner.’ They nodded, but none of us knew how and when we should settle the score with the spy in our midst. The brickworks ran on the Japanese calendar, so there were no Sundays off. We were only allowed an occasional day’s leave when production targets for the building projects had been met.

  On one of my mornings off, I went to Pasar Turi to buy fish for Mama and bumped into Soedjono, a Javanese friend from Queen Emma School. When I had run my errand at the market, we set off for his house in Krembangan district. Since long before the war, it had enjoyed a fearsome reputation as the part of town where the toughest, most ruthless hoodlums would hang out. On our way, we met more of our former school friends – among them Soenarjo, Soetopo, Soemarsono, Soetjipto and Soemarno – and the whole gang of us ended up at Soedjono’s. We talked about the Japanese occupation and Soedjono told me that all the former members of the Destruction Corps at Queen Emma School were wanted by the Kenpeitai. A Chinese
boy called Lim Tan Ko-Ko had turned out to be a Kenpeitai spy and had betrayed a bunch of former pupils, all Indo boys, who were then arrested, interrogated and tortured. The teachers in charge of the school’s Destruction Corps – Mr Sonneville and the Trestorff brothers – had been arrested, tortured and beheaded. This could only mean that I was on the wanted list too.

  The conversation with my Javanese friends soon turned to the matter of Indonesian independence. ‘Nolan, we know that you are loyal to the Netherlands and the House of Orange,’ Soenarjo said. ‘We saw Mr Sonneville present you with a portrait of Queen Wilhelmina on behalf of the school governors, in appreciation of your patriotic spirit. Our loyalties lie elsewhere. Our goal is independence for Indonesia. This war with Japan will not last forever. One day this yellow peril will be driven from our soil. And then we will rise up to make sure that Dutch colonial rule does not return. It will be a bloody battle. But let us not get ahead of ourselves. We are here now to discuss ways of resisting the Japs. Are you prepared to join us, even though you are only a peranakan, Chinese of mixed blood?’

  I looked long and hard at each boy in turn, and then agreed. Soenarjo was a close acquaintance of Uncle Soen’s and he too had a good many contacts among the Chinese resistance.

  ‘From now on I am willing to join you in resisting the Japs, but when the war is over I will not be part of your fight for independence. Indonesia is not my country. Although I was born here, this is not my tanah air. It is not my fatherland.’

  ‘That is not true, Nolan!’ Soetjipto exclaimed. ‘You were born and raised in this country. Your mother is Chinese, but she too was born and raised here. You belong to this land and this people. We all accept you as our own.’

  I was thrown into turmoil by Soetjipto’s words. I thought of all the Indos who had looked down their noses at me because I was illegitimate, while this bunch of native friends accepted me as an equal, without question. It was a crisis of conscience that shook me to the core. My hatred of the Japs did not make things easier. I could team up with Indo boys to commit acts of resistance, but I knew that if they were arrested and tortured by the Kenpeitai, they would probably crack under the unbearable pain and betray everyone they knew. Even in those days I had little respect for the typical Indo’s character, not least because they had no sense of solidarity. Always ready to look down on one family while bowing and scraping to another, Indos squabbled more among themselves than they did with the Dutch or the Javanese. Ever since childhood, I had been fighting Indo boys who mocked me as a baldy little bastard. In such matters, they were all too willing to form a pact, while in everything else they were at one another’s throats. And yet there were Indo lads who gave me a strong sense that, as the son of a European father and an Asian mother, I belonged among them.

  Soedjono and his gang gave me a mission: to keep tabs on the Chinese traitor Lim Tan Ko-Ko, along with his contact at the Kenpeitai’s intelligence service, a Chinese detective by the name of Oei Boen Pong, formerly of the Political Intelligence Service. They warned me to steer clear of a red-haired Dutchman nicknamed Red Rose, a traitor who worked for the Kenpeitai. Highly skilled in espionage, Red Rose was known to be an exceptionally smooth operator who had already driven countless Dutchmen and Indo-Dutch into the hands of the Kenpeitai, where they had been tortured and beheaded.

  I wanted something in return, and told my Javanese friends about Fred Verhoef, the traitor in our midst at the brickworks. I proposed a plan to kill him, knowing that the Indo group led by Mr Huitink were in a tight enough bind as it was. It was them or Verhoef. Soedjono gave me his immediate backing.

  I began by keeping tabs on Fred Verhoef. He was in the habit of taking an East Java steam tram from the station at Pasar Turi to Karang Pilang. We set a date to dispose of the traitor. All I had was a penknife, while Soedjono was armed with a small razor-sharp dagger. I left home before sunrise, cycled to Soedjono’s and we set off for Pasar Turi on foot. There we saw our target board the tram. Despite the morning crush of travellers, we managed to squeeze into the same compartment as Verhoef. We said hello and exchanged small talk.

  By the time the tram approached Karang Pilang, we were the only three left in the compartment. Soedjono gave me the nod and I began to pick a fight with Verhoef, accusing him to his face of being a traitor and a spy. He turned white with rage and threatened to report me to the Kenpeitai. I grabbed Verhoef by his shirt, pulled him to his feet and laid into him with my fists. He hit back, but Soedjono attacked him from behind. I dragged him onto the gangway between the coaches and gave him a good kicking, while Soedjono threw open the safety barrier. Verhoef tried to struggle to his feet only to slip into the gap. I delivered the kick that finished him off. He fell onto the coupling between the coaches and let out a terrifying scream as his legs were torn off. We had already passed Karang Pilang and were heading for the next station. Soedjono took hold of me and together we leapt from the moving tram.

  Soedjono and I walked the short distance from the tramway back to the brickworks. There I went straight to see Mr Huitink and told him I was quitting. He looked at me in surprise and asked why. I told Huitink I had sent Fred Verhoef to meet his maker and warned him not to say a word. Looking him in the eye, I shook his hand and returned to Surabaya with Soedjono.

  ‘Allah, Nolan,’ Soedjono said on the way, ‘watching you give him that final kick made me feel sick to my stomach. I am starting to feel guilty. What about you?’

  I told him the truth. ‘Man, for as long as I can remember my father and my brothers beat me till I bled. If I lost a fight at school or out in the street, they made me go back the next day and fight on, for as long as it took to win. That is how I was raised. Now war has come and here we are, fighting for our lives. When I fight, I go mata gelap. That is why I feel no regret at all.’

  Bamboo spears and Japanese lessons

  In a matter of days, I found a job as a mandor in the packing department of the Lie Sin sweet factory on Undaan Kulon, by a canal near our house. As a boy of seventeen, I was in charge of a group of thirty native women and had to monitor their production. The factory board consisted of five Japanese, two of them army officers. Each day before lunch, we all had to take part in a military drill. The company supplied everyone with a takeyari, a Japanese bamboo spear, and the exercises for the male workers involved plenty of lunging and stabbing. The takeyari was a vicious weapon: it went in easily but took your victim’s insides with it when you pulled it out.

  It was a good time to join the company, as we were forced to stay after work and learn Japanese. The classes were taught in Malay by a cane-wielding army officer. Anyone caught slacking would feel its sting, whether they were male or female. I picked up Japanese with little difficulty; my lessons with the Chinese girl in Blitar had stood me in good stead. The characters were different and simpler, but the system was the same. After six months I passed the exam and was awarded my diploma in Japanese with considerable pomp and ceremony. In addition to katakana and hiragana, I also knew over two-hundred kanji characters, enough to read Japanese newspapers reasonably well.

  Uncle Soen was delighted with this achievement, because it meant I could be deployed for espionage activities. He regularly supplied me with Japanese newspapers and messages from military operations in the Pacific and taught me how to interpret them. When the Japanese press wrote about heavy Allied losses, I was to assume they really meant losses suffered by the Japs.

  One day I arrived home looking deathly pale and bathed in sweat after cycling home at full speed. Mama asked if I had been in another fight.

  ‘No,’ I answered, ‘I was followed by an Indo girl. I don’t know who. It was very creepy.’

  Unable to contain herself, Mama burst out laughing. I failed to see the funny side and took offence. Mama mentioned the incident to Karel, who decided to investigate. He soon found out that it was his sister-in-law Emmy who had cycled after me. Mama advised Karel to fix me up with Emmy, so that I would have some experience with girls. Karel beg
an to find excuses to invite me to his house on my days off, and drove me into Emmy’s arms. She taught me how to make love to a girl but I didn’t dare do anything sexual. Custom dictated that a girl had to remain a virgin until she married.

  The Japs had banned us from listening to foreign stations but my Javanese friends kept their radios well hidden, so we were able to follow the progress of the war. We heard that the Japanese navy had suffered heavy losses at sea. Walking through the busy shopping streets of Tunjungan to Pasar Besar well before curfew, I picked up snatches of conversation between Japanese soldiers and could tell they were more than a little worried.

  In addition to my Javanese pals, I also had Madurese, Bugis and Makassar friends in the resistance. Many of the latter were seamen and fishermen. One Makassar boy owned a seaworthy fishing boat with a secret compartment, where he hid a compact but powerful radio transmitter and receiver. He was the only member of the eight-man crew who could understand English. I passed messages to him through a becak driver called Jopie Reuben, who operated as a courier.