Aunty Lieke
There was an air of distinction about Aunty Lieke, so much so, I used to think her name was spelled with a q: Lique. She lived on Regentesselaan, or was it Valkenboslaan? Two wide avenues that cut a swathe through the neighbourhood. I never could tell them apart. It was as if she lived in a shop window, complete with matt glass decorations bought from a defunct colonial shop that dealt in ‘knick-knacks from the Indies’. Why we called her ‘Aunty’ I have no idea. She wasn’t family, although there was some mysterious link to second cousins of my father’s, veiled in cryptic references to missed inheritances, loss of capital and unfathomable goings on between Holland and Indonesia. Aunty Lique’s skin was white but she came from Indonesia. From Surabaya, I assume, like my father.
She called round to see us until I was seven or eight. After that she stayed away, grew old and unsteady on her feet. It always took her an age to shed the many garments piled on to protect her from the Dutch cold: a see-through plastic rain bonnet, a raincoat with a fur coat underneath, a long scarf – her entrance was nothing short of majestic. Even my mother would attend on her by the coat rack.
In her shop-window house stood the trunk from her voyage from Indonesia to Holland, along with a wardrobe, a divan, a sideboard and a whatnot. The rest of the room was stacked with books and a variety of suitcases. Still packed, my father said, so she could high-tail it back to Indonesia, if ever the occasion arose.
‘And when will that be?’ I asked.
‘Never, numbskull! How many times do I have to tell you? That sleazeball Sukarno has grabbed the lot.’
I kept quiet. I knew who Sukarno was, but not what a sleazeball was. He used to call me and my brother Phil ‘a pair of sleazeballs’ too sometimes. I also knew that the war had made people come to Holland even though they didn’t want to. My mother told me my father had come because he had ‘done things during the war.’ But what could Aunty Lique have done?
Aunty Lique performed her ablutions at a washbasin, and always washed with cold water. Nothing odd about that, my father said, it was the custom in the tropics. We, his children, had to wash with cold water too, even if the temperature outside was ten below freezing. To toughen us up. It was a tradition he himself had broken with, and he liked to boast about the long, hot showers he took.
‘He’s a waster, that father of yours,’ my mother muttered. ‘Wallows in luxury like it’s his God-given right. How am I supposed to keep the gas meter running on the weekly pittance he hands me?’
In those days, the shower was heated by the kitchen boiler, which only worked if you fed the gas meter with tokens, special coins with a square hole in the middle. My mother would always complain when she was down to her last token and had to cut back on her Miss Blanche cigarettes. She suspected my father of slipping them into the satchel he took to work, as every now and then he would rummage around in it and find a stray token when he wanted to ‘have a soak’. That’s what he called it: soaking. He used to have a soak after a bowel movement too. He soaked himself silly, while the rest of us had to make do with one tub of water on a Saturday morning.
Sometimes I had to accompany my father on his visits to Aunty Lique’s. Perched on the back of his bike, I would feel his tread on the pedals, strong and steady, the little luggage rack above the back wheel tugging me along by the seat of my pants. He rode a bike like he was riding a horse.
I never knew what to say to Aunty. My father didn’t seem to know either. In her company, he was far less gregarious than he was at home. Was it because they shared a secret they didn’t want me to know about?
One day he sent my mother in his place. Protesting furiously and with a face like thunder, she set off on her bike with me on the luggage rack. Her pedal strokes were irregular and apt to make me doze, but her non-stop yammering kept me awake enough to stop me falling off.
It was a good day. Aunty Lique took a colossal jar out of her whatnot, full of delicious biscuits, a kind I had never seen before. They had a waffle pattern, some kind of filling and they were sprinkled with the finest icing sugar. And Aunty Lique’s orange squash was the sweetest I had ever tasted.
Unlike my father, my mother always had plenty to say to Aunty Lique, who complained of chilblains and was always filling earthenware hot water bottles to warm her toes. My mother liked a good natter about ailments and every other misfortune that can befall a person, especially varicose veins and other indispositions reserved solely for womankind. I did my best to sympathize, but the biscuits grabbed my attention that little bit more. Aunty had urged me to eat as many as I liked. The conversation faded into the background as I loomed over the jar at regular intervals to take another one.
When we got home, my mother gave a full account of our visit, complaining to my father about ‘the filthy foreign smell’ that filled Aunty Lique’s house and how everything – the table, the chairs, even the ashtray – was sticky to the touch. She insisted he could pay his own house calls from now. What business did she have visiting some old relic from the Indies? They were his people, his kind, and that was all there was to it. There was a single ray of sunshine. As we said goodbye, Aunty Lique had whispered in her ear that I was such a good boy: I hadn’t eaten all the biscuits but had left one in the jar. My father didn’t see the sunny side. He thumped me all the way to the bedroom I shared with my brothers and sent my mother out the next day to buy a box of the exact same biscuits. They weren’t cheap.
On his next Saturday afternoon off, my father cycled over to Aunty Lique’s with me in tow. In my hands, the brand-new box of biscuits. It was cold, freezing in fact, and I wondered if Aunty would be wearing those creepy long brown stockings again.
Instead of stopping outside her front door, my father dropped me off at the corner and waited there. I walked the rest of the way alone and rang the doorbell of Aunty Lique’s peculiar shop-window house. Her gloomy curtains were drawn.
She opened the door. Delighted by my unexpected visit, she invited me in. I told her I had only come to deliver the biscuits. She took the box and I registered surprise in her old grey eyes. Then I ran away as fast as I could.
My father had been standing out of sight at the corner of the street. He poked me in the ribs and repeated the commandment he had already drilled into me: for the sake of decency, I was allowed to take one – and only one – biscuit. That was the way in Holland.
‘Understood?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes what?’
‘Yes, Papa.’
It wasn’t as cold when Aunty Lique died. It was raining, though. I had to go to the funeral parlour with my father and my two brothers. It was in a dark, brick building with a massive carved wooden door somewhere on Van Boetzelaerlaan, not far from Scheveningen harbour. The room was full of old people in long, dark overcoats. Women with folded, dripping umbrellas, men clutching their damp hats, all standing in a wide circle around the coffin, keeping as much distance as they could. No one cried. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, except look straight ahead and keep a straight face.
‘Do you want to see a dead body?’ my father whispered. He was bending down and his voice sounded oddly nervous in my ear. I had never heard him like this.
I quickly shook my head.
‘Follow your brothers over to the coffin. You have to see her corpse.’ His eyes lit up, and he became even stranger to me than he already was.
I refused to budge, but he pushed me in the direction of the coffin. I looked around. The people in the circle were staring into space, looking at nothing, not even at me. I was alone, and just tall enough to peer over the edge. Aunty Lique lay there, dead. She did not look frightening but she was certainly dead. Stone dead, white as a sheet. I only took a quick look, the briefest of glances, but it was long enough to fuel my nightmares for years to come.
‘Why did you have to make the boy do that?’ my mother asked.
‘He’s a wimp. His little brothers didn’t even bat an eyelid. He has never seen a war, he has neve
r had to fight. The boy needs to know what a corpse looks like.’
‘But it was his Aunty Lique!’
‘So what? A corpse is a corpse.’
‘Oh, so when my time comes, I’ll be nothing but a corpse too?’
‘Of course! All the life will have gone out of you.’
‘And what good is that to a boy his age?’
‘Death. Now he knows what death looks like.’
My mother turned to me and asked me what death looked like.
I said death was something to do with hats and umbrellas and people looking at nothing. She congratulated my father on my answer, adding tartly that now I was almost as mad as he was.
Guinea pigs
On one of his Saturday afternoons off, our fickle father surprised Philip, Arti and me by bringing us home two guinea pigs. The little brown creatures came in a hutch as big as the bunk bed in our shabby bedroom. For Mama Helmond, a highly strung housewife prone to volcanic bouts of housework, the flat was already several times too small. She yearned for her parents’ home in Brabant, where her father kept his cobbler’s workshop so spick and span that they’d never had need of a cat to keep the mice away.
‘I bet one of his slick city colleagues conned him into buying that stinking hutch and those shitty little animals for way too much money,’ she grumbled to the gleaming tiles by the kitchen sink.
The hutch was a rodent penthouse, with a little ladder that led up to a second floor with private bedroom. The guinea pigs were cuddly and communicative, a stark contrast to the inscrutable fish in Surabaya Papa’s aquarium. The sounds they made at night chased the nightmares from our dark bedroom, where the air could churn with ghosts, especially when Surabaya Papa had told us yet more tales of wartime atrocities on Java. His photograph album showed us the endless rows of white crosses that marked the graves of his fallen comrades.
After school we plundered sawmills for miles around in search of shavings and sawdust to keep the hutch clean. The guinea pigs gave us something to care for and made us less likely to be at each other’s throats when we played together.
Arti pointed out that the belly of one of the guinea pigs was getting bigger.
‘They’re going to have babies!’
Early one morning they arrived, nine of them. They lay snuggled up against one another, quivering gently. None of us said a word as we stared at them, experiencing for the first time the awe of nature we had been taught at school. We ran home faster than ever that afternoon, impatient to gaze upon the miracle again.
Miracle? What miracle? There was nothing to see but mummy and daddy guinea pig rummaging around as usual.
‘Huh? Were we dreaming?’
‘No way! We all saw them lying there!’
Mama Helmond was in no mood to talk. She had no time and other things on her mind: washing, ironing, polishing, scrubbing, dusting, more ironing, shopping, cooking, washing up and gossiping with the next-door neighbours out on the balcony. We had no choice but to wait for Surabaya Papa, due home at five.
By this time we understood and all we wanted to know was what Mama Helmond had done with the little ones.
‘Did you bury them?’
‘Bury them? What kind of fool do you think I am? As if I’d have time for that!’
‘Well, where are they? Out in the garden?’
Her answer was a mumble.
In shock, we rushed to the toilet and stared into the bowl for a long time, in the hope that one of them might resurface.
‘We can give it the kiss of life. At least then we’ll have saved one little guinea pig.’
‘And we’ll make sure nothing ever happens to him.’
‘Forever and ever. Amen.’
‘They’d never do that in China.’ Surabaya Papa grinned at the dinner table that evening. ‘They eat new-born guinea pigs over there. Dip them in boiling water one by one, while they’re still alive. Dunk them in soy sauce and then… down the hatch! Ha ha ha!’
‘Oh, don’t be disgusting,’ said Mama Helmond. ‘Now eat up your cabbage.’
After dinner, Surabaya Papa retired to his bedroom to hammer away at his Remington. We never thought to ask what he was typing. We assumed it had something to do with his engineering studies. We were fond of his rat-tat-tat. As long as he was at his typewriter, he kept a low profile, kept his hands to himself and no skirmishes broke out in the living room.
Broese
(1)
Broese. The name alone… Mama Helmond often said it with a harsh inflection, as if she were spitting out an obscenity. ‘Oh God, if it isn’t him again. Broo-sss-ugh! There’s a lovely musical on the telly tonight! And I’ll be stuck listening to him drone on while that father of yours is holed up in his room again, banging away at that typewriter. I wish he’d put more money on the table so we’d have more bread and bacon in the cupboard. All he can think of is the stinking Indies and that bloody war of his. And Broese’s just as bad. Indies this, Indies that, there’s no end to it. If only I’d never written to that father of yours. How was I supposed to know the war had sent him cuckoo? I’m telling you, all those Indos have had the sense knocked out of them. They were used to servants bowing and scraping and doing everything for them, and now they’re over here and there’s not a servant in sight, all they can do is moan, moan, moan. They’re too idle to wash up after themselves – leave their dirty dishes till the next day caked in that muck they eat so the smell can work its way into every nook and cranny. They all act like they never left the Indies. If only they hadn’t! I mean, look at the stamps on those bloody letters your father’s family send him from that Indonesian stinkhole of theirs. Do you see a difference between your father and Sukarno? No? Me neither! All they did was fight their own neighbours, their own flesh and blood. Where’s the sense in that? Those Indos are nothing but traitors, your father among them. Oh yes, your father was a traitor! So now you know! Now open the door for Broese and tell him to hang that motorcycle gear of his on the coat rack before he comes marching in here stinking up the place with his dirty leathers and the smell of motor oil. There goes my peace and quiet…’
Broese. A name worthy of a pioneering motorcycle prototype. But the man rode an old Jawa with an odd egg-shaped fuel tank, a Broese-type Jawa you might say. He was a curious character, with the hapless mystery of a woebegone clown. Did Broese ride a Jawa because it was one letter removed from Java? Did he want a bike that embodied his nostalgia for that island? Java was his native soil, but I don’t think Broese had a drop of Asian blood. His parents might have been teachers who made the voyage to the Indies around 1920, only to perish there years later in a Japanese internment camp.
Broese had an extremely high-pitched voice for a man. Mama Helmond rolled her eyes at his corny jokes, but ever since he had whispered mischievously to us that we should call our father ‘the Eagle’, Broese could do no wrong in our eyes. Calling your father by his first name was out of the question, but nicknames were allowed. When we shared our astonishment at Broese’s squeaky voice with the Eagle, he was quick to explain. ‘The Japs lopped his balls off. How? With their samurai swords, of course!’
(2)
A boy in an old man’s body, Broese rode around on his Jawa in his faded brown leather biker’s jacket and matching leather helmet, which he only took off indoors. Purple birthmarks blotched the clearing on his head, ringed by flattened wisps of alang-alang, prostrate in lamentation.
Alang-alang was the tall grass in which Broese and the Eagle had played together as little boys. Broese loved to talk about those days, the Eagle did not. Broese was keen to conjure up scenes from their boyhood years before the war, but those years lay clotted on the blood-soaked, muddy battlefield of the Eagle’s memory.
Tigers prowled through the alang-alang in Broese’s recollection. Venomous snakes napped in the afternoon shade – ‘Don’t tread on their tails, or you’ll be in for it, ha ha!’ There was always a light-heartedness to Broese’s stories, and if you didn’t laugh at them then he woul
d, in that unnaturally high voice of his.
In the Eagle’s memory, the alang-alang fields are dark. The moon is new. Something is hovering in mid-air up ahead; it looks like a firefly. That’s what the Dutch marines think, but not the Eagle. He creeps towards it like a tiger, plunges his bayonet into the back of a Javanese freedom fighter, pulls it out and, in a single movement, slits the throat of a crumpled young man who has just smoked his last roll-up. Leaves him lying there for the ants to find.
Broese sang his refrain. ‘Won’t you forget these things? We are here now, in Holland.’
The Eagle would not forget. And if Broese would not listen, then the keys of his typewriter would have to do.
Mama Helmond is bored to tears by Broese’s stories, by the old boy and his shrill laughter. I lie in bed and tune into the dogged hammering of the Eagle at his Remington. There is a rhythm to his rat-tat-tat; at times it sounds like music. He goes through a typewriter ribbon a month. And although we do not know that he is punching his wartime memories onto those sheets of paper, my nights fill up with the ghosts of those he sent to their death. They come to visit me, to choke the life out of me, for I am a son of the Eagle, a man who went by many names back in the Indies, if Mama Helmond is to be believed. Some nights I am in luck: Broese outstays his welcome and his high, boyish laugh chases the ghosts away. I stay awake until I hear him drive off on his Jawa. Then the shadows pour back into the house, the shadows of that stinking war, as Mama Helmond calls it. I wonder if Broese sometimes burst into song as he roared home past Zuider Park on his Jawa. An old kroncong song perhaps? After all, a castrato can hardly bellow his loneliness at the top of his lungs.
The Interpreter from Java Page 15