‘That father of yours is a selfish git. Buys fancy clothes for himself and leaves you lot to run around in rags and plastic sandals, summer and winter. Refuses to take a packed lunch to work. He’d rather pay over the odds for his sausage rolls. And if we’re lucky he has a few left over so I can cut them up and divide them among you, with a drop of Worcester sauce.’
‘Worse chester.’
‘Huh?’
‘That’s what Papa calls it. “Worse chester”.’
‘Oh, you can’t teach that man anything. It’s Wooster! Wooster!’
That’s not entirely true. The Eagle has adapted to the world around him. He has learned that sunshine in Holland means you go out instead of staying in. It’s Sunday in the photograph; I can tell by the clothes the passers-by are wearing. Building debris is scattered around the last of the grand architect’s housing blocks. They are still vacant and the lampposts are not yet in place, only a portacabin so that Uncle Broese can watch over them by night.
*
We have walked all the way to Lozerlaan. My little brothers are brandishing fishing rods, and I am carrying a bucket for the rock-bass to swim in, assuming we manage to catch any. The wide, round steps are hot beneath my feet and I scoop water out of the channel to keep them wet. My twin brother is standing up to his baggy pendek in the water, a stick in his hand, as if trying to gauge the depth. Our younger brother is two steps higher. He looks like a young warrior, holding his bamboo fishing rod like a lance in front of his chest. A few steps above him, a couple of well-dressed children are making themselves scarce…
The Eagle took this black-and-white photo. There is nothing to suggest that we chased the well-dressed children away. We never chase anyone away. If it comes to the crunch, we are the ones who get chased. Most likely the children’s mother has called them over in haste to help her fold the picnic blanket. Did she call them because a dissolute Indo family had turned up and taken possession of Dudok’s kali? Or was she mindful of the leeches the Eagle had warned us about? Of course, those bloodsuckers were nothing compared to the crocodiles that swam in the real kali when he was a boy. In the real heat. In a real city, not this no man’s land: Surabaya was a metropolis, The Hague is a hamlet.
Yet even in a hamlet like The Hague, you can indulge your urge to roam. His first stop was Parallelweg, board and lodgings with a money-grabbing Indo landlady. Then it was on to Alexander Barracks, living off whatever military pay was left. Then to Bilderdijkstraat with a heffalump from Helmond in tow. And then with twin boys to Schermerstraat, a place I barely recall.
A couple of photos survive from that time, kept in my mother’s shoebox. One shows me and my twin brother learning to ride our tricycles. Another shows the pair of us on our mother’s bike, my twin in a kiddie seat attached to the handlebars, me on the back with my feet in the saddlebags. Now there’s a memory that’s stuck: how safe I felt with my feet buried deep in the double pannier. I wanted the safety of those saddlebags. My twin wanted a view of the open road and would go on to get his driver’s licence ten years before I got mine. A third photo shows us sitting on a picnic blanket with our maternal grandmother somewhere in Zuider Park. She came to call once in a while. Grandad never did. He despised his son-in-law and wanted nothing to do with brown people.
Two years later we move to the joyless, endless Melis Stokelaan, where the air is so thick with ghosts that I begin to see what the Eagle sees. Corpses rise from the mud and take on fearsome shapes that swamp me in my dreams. When I wake up screaming from a nightmare, my father comes in and gives me a slap to send me back to sleep. Screams night after night, what must the neighbours have thought? Time to move on. Time to pack up the shame that hangs around us in the stairwell.
‘Why don’t the neighbours go to the police and report that man?’ my mother wonders out loud.
‘Why doesn’t she do it herself?’ Phil and I wonder in turn.
‘Are you talking about me? About your own mother? Don’t you fucking well know that the fucking police will just send your mother straight back to that fuck of a father of yours?’
On to our next stop: the heffalump’s dream come true. An honest-to-goodness terraced house on Hoogveen, the best house we ever lived in, even if it was the work of Dudok. Friends around every corner. Not just boring old streets but ‘clearings’ and ‘gardens’ and ‘sidings’ and ‘fens’. Well, what do you expect with a writer on the planning committee? Het Oord has a bad reputation. You can’t pass through it without getting into a punch-up. A detour along Hengelolaan is one solution, but that means having to run to school. The sidings are home to sweet girls, while the gardens are vast underground passageways full of mystery.
From Hoogveen it’s not far to Meppelweg, which is home to ‘the rocks’: a giant caterpillar of massive boulders plonked down at random. Our mothers forbid us to play there; all too often we come home looking like the walking wounded.
Past the rocks are the meadows, where we form a pact with the lads from Het Oord against the yokel boys from Loosduinen. Jumping over ditches, we march to a wide canal and raft across. The water is almost black, so dark it’s scary. Up ahead, the Loosduinen yokels are waiting for us in their dirty overalls, pitchforks in hand. We turn and paddle back the way we came.
One day we arrive home with armfuls of wild rhubarb, harvested from behind the rocks. Our mothers immediately suspend the play ban and send us back to collect bags of the stuff. It’s a rhubarb feast for the whole block, until a bunch of workmen in blue smocks appear with a police escort and mow down the illegal crop with scythes.
Surabaya
Grainy footage. A chanteuse in a fluttering robe, singing her heart out in a decor that must have been shored up to withstand the blast of the wind machine. Surabaya Johnny. I didn’t know whether the title song was about a real boy from Surabaya, nor did my musical-mad mother. Chomping cigarettes in front of the black-and-white TV, a dangling slipper danced on the tip of her big toe. Wallowing in romance was a tall order when you shared a house with an oddball who could come storming out of the bedroom any second, screaming at everyone to give him some peace. The strains of ‘Surabaya Johnny’ were not enough to lure him from the bedroom to which he retreated night after night to commit his war to paper. But when another song came waltzing out of the television set one day – ‘Surabaya’ minus Johnny – he did appear. We called the Eagle to come downstairs, away from his desk. A unique moment: we would never have dared call him otherwise. He appeared at the doorway in his striped pyjamas and stood there hanging on every r that rolled off the tongue of Indo songstress Anneke Grönloh. Halfway through the lilting final chorus he turned to go and we heard him mumble his way back upstairs. ‘God, yes, my native soil.’
He began to discover the popular song as a balm for his overpopulated memories. But the time had yet to come when he could go out and buy a record player. Still too many mouths to feed.
At No. 168 Hoogveen, I had my own room for the very first time, a place where I could do my homework like a good little boy. Until, blind with rage at my brothers, I smashed my foot through a glass door. I hobbled through the summer holidays with my leg in plaster but this episode – my one and only attack of mata gelap – saved my life. Or someone else’s. I never let myself go like that again. To this day I keep control, no matter how furious I am.
Just our luck: the tormented ex-marine with eternal blood on his hands could only bear the house for a year and the whole family ended up back by Zuider Park – Loevesteinlaan this time – in a flat that was way too small and where you could hear the spectators roar when local heroes ADO Den Haag scored. Beautiful, the way the stadium floodlights lit up the park in the evening. In the space of twelve years, the Eagle had made his round through Dudok’s asphalt jungle. And it was there, by Zuider Park, that the interpreter from Java would meet his Waterloo.
What possessed the man to swap that roomy terraced house for a cramped four-room tenement flat? The fishwife from Helmond loses her rag over a birds’
nest on our little balcony overlooking the wonderful park and sweeps the whole thing over the edge: mummy sparrow, daddy sparrow and all the baby sparrows, along with every twig us kids had watched them weave with their busy little beaks. An animal killer, that mother of ours. With her cold father and her cold family. A cold province, Brabant.
A stray tabby cat wanders into our home and warms us as we fall asleep. But one evening the creature is carried off. No place for guinea pigs, no place for birds, no place for cats. We never find out who is responsible for deporting our cuddly ball of fur. For the first time we see our parents form a united front, a married couple wearing the same sanctimonious expressions. She stares out of the front window at the treetops of Zuider Park, he stares out of the side window at the grim brick-and-mortar blocks that surround us.
‘What in God’s name has become of me?’ the Eagle must have wondered. But I never heard him say those words out loud. What the lonely madman did do was ram it through our thick skulls on a daily basis that our childhood was nothing compared to his, nothing. And it was no good talking to that wife of his either. What did she know? Glued to her clueless television comedies, whining that she should have been an actress, not a skivvy. The news means nothing to her. The whole world mourns the death of the first president made for television, but Kennedy’s death leaves her cold. She can’t even cook, none of them can, the girls here in Holland. They can gut a herring and dice an onion. But they put milk in their coffee and look at you in blank disbelief when you tell them coffee comes from Indonesia. And when you go for a walk in Zuider Park with your white wife and your five children, everyone stares.
‘Well, they’re your kids. You shouldn’t have brought them into this world,’ the fishwife snapped in her worst moods. ‘I never asked for them.’
‘Ha ha ha!’
‘Are you lot listening? That father of yours thinks it’s funny. Get the joke? I’m off to the kitchen. At least there I’ll get some peace.’
‘Ha ha ha!’
The headlight
The Eagle must have been in one of his restless moods. He seldom took anyone with him but me, the eldest. That day he hopped on his bike and let me cycle next to him on the inside of the bicycle lane, giving me pointers all the way. We cycled to the end of Zuider Park and wove our way through a dizzying jumble of streets to reach the city centre.
Among the crowds, we walked our bikes to the narrowest of streets, Achterom. We parked them there and headed back to Grote Marktstraat. It was a strange sight: men of all shapes and sizes standing stock still in the middle of the street watching the news roll by on the electronic ticker at the Bijenkorf department store. The Eagle only glanced up to read the temperature that flashed between the headlines, too low as always. He swore that even the nights in Surabaya were warmer than the hottest days in The Hague. Well, most of them.
Near the swanky department store, in which he never set foot, was HEMA, the store for the common man. The Eagle bought a chunk of their famous smoked sausage for me, steaming in a leaky cone of greaseproof paper and slathered in mustard. My mother would have been livid, screeching that mustard was bad for my nerves. I was a jittery child, too easily unsettled by creepy films, scared of the dark, wary in traffic, always longing for the radio. Hustle and bustle were what my father was after; he missed the street life of Surabaya.
This was his Saturday afternoon off; in those days people still worked on Saturday morning. We retraced our steps to Achterom, that little old backstreet in the age-old city centre. It was quiet there, as if no one dared set foot on the cobbles between the blind walls of buildings so decrepit that bricks might conceivably come crashing down at any minute. The Eagle had just slid the key into his rear wheel lock when he looked up and saw someone standing there. A man roughly his age, same build, black hair almost dripping with brilliantine. He could have been a relative or at least an old friend from the Indies.
The man looked at the Eagle and his jaw dropped.
‘You, here?’ the Eagle erupted. ‘Damn you to hell, you bastard!’
The man turned and ran.
‘Watch my bike,’ the Eagle ordered. ‘Wait here.’
He grabbed his Marine dagger from his pannier, slid it into his pocket and set off in pursuit. Were enemies from Indonesia roaming the streets of The Hague, or was this man the only one? Babysitting a bike while the Eagle might be stabbing someone to death in a side street over by the Passage made me sick with worry. Knees trembling, I stood there hoping the ‘bastard’ would escape down a seedy back alley. But what if the Eagle failed to return? What if that bastard emerged victorious and came back to finish me off too? I looked around for an escape route. Was a human life worth less than this bike? It was a Raleigh with Sturmey Archer gears and drum brakes. It had been delivered as a self-assembly kit and the Eagle had put it together himself, no welding required. His ropes, pulleys and ceiling hooks were now installed in the cellar of our flat on Zuider Park. We knew the story of his sabotage at the bicycle factory in the steaming heat of Croc City. He had shown us the scars on his back.
Now, sixteen years later in a much colder city, had the Eagle gone tearing after the man he thought had betrayed him? Or was this about something else entirely? The Eagle told us so many war stories that just thinking about everything he had been through made my head spin.
‘I’ll get him yet, that damned Javanese weasel,’ the Eagle muttered when he came back, slipping his Marine dagger back into his pannier.
I thanked my lucky stars he hadn’t caught the man. But why call him a ‘Javanese weasel’? The Eagle was from Java himself. It made no sense to me.
*
The Eagle might have a workshop in the cellar, but he’s no handyman. I am almost thirteen and I have my own bike. He sends me out one evening to deliver a letter to acquaintances of ours. There is not a breath of wind and the night sky is turning bluish black. On my way back home, I see a giant meteor streak across the sky above Zuider Park. A dragon-tailed diamond, snuffed out high above the treetops. I step on my brakes and absorb the memory of this cosmic miracle.
I go to cycle on, but my headlight refuses to work. I stop, check my dynamo and inspect the rear light. That’s still working. I start fiddling with the headlight and the whole thing comes away in my hand.
The Eagle explodes when he goes down to the cellar the next day and discovers my broken headlight. Of course he discovers it. He spends every moment of every day scrutinizing every inch of the world around him. Nothing escapes him.
Another Saturday – Saturdays are eventful, weekdays less so – he comes home tired from work, complaining about the pain in his back. Sometimes the pain is rooted in the torture he suffered at the hands of the Japanese, sometimes in the whippings his mother gave him, and at other times in the landmine that threw him clear of an armoured vehicle and sent him plunging into a ravine. Perhaps the pain felt different each time, like my head hitting the wall was different from my head hitting my brother’s head, or a straightforward thrashing with the belt.
A belt across your back leaves welts, that’s all. Your head hitting the wall makes you so groggy that you can’t keep up with the lessons at school for a few days. Strangely, your head hitting your brother’s head makes you believe that an enemy lives inside your brother. We were always arguing, Phil and I. Or else it was me against Phil and Arti. Or Arti against Mil. Nana was still too little to pick a fight.
I have to go down to the cellar, where the bikes are. The Eagle is wielding a soldering iron, Phil is holding the handlebars steady, and I have to hold the lamp casing against the bracket it was mounted on. I expect a quick fix. Soldering is a matter of seconds; it’s not supposed to take longer. But the Eagle doesn’t know what he’s doing and starts to swear. The lamp is so hot against my bare hands that I have to let go.
‘Hold that fucking lamp still, you spineless little prick!’
He tries again while the casing scorches my fingertips. I grit my teeth. My brother knows you can’t solder tin
to a steel bracket, you need a blowtorch for a job like that. The bike-factory saboteur ought to know that too. Phil looks on helpless. He has no choice but to keep his mouth shut, like the kitchen staff made to stand in the factory courtyard and watch as the Eagle, a young Indo of nineteen, was beaten senseless by two Japanese officers.
The dagger
The Eagle took the cool metal of his bloodthirsty friend with him everywhere, except to work. A heavy, black dagger with a blood groove to lighten the blade. It looked like it could stop a tiger in its tracks. Etched into it was the name NOLAN, one letter short of our surname: Noland. My father always made a great mystery of that final d.
It was an American fighting knife, given to him by a marine in Indonesia in exchange for two Japanese samurai swords. Phil and I used to think he’d cut a lousy deal, but later I read that the swords issued to Japanese soldiers were rudimentary affairs, not a patch on the legendary weapons forged by Japan’s foremost blacksmiths. The soldiers’ mass-produced swords were rusty and cumbersome. They lacked the beauty, the extraordinarily keen edge and cult status of the classic Japanese longsword, the katana. How the Eagle got his hands on two samurai swords was never explained. Philip and I decided that Gurkha soldiers fighting for the Brits had crept up on two Japanese soldiers in the dead of night, slit their throats with their curved blades and robbed them of their factory-made weapons. The Gurkhas must have given the swords to the Eagle as a souvenir and, idolizing all things American, he swapped them for a marine’s fighting knife.
The Interpreter from Java Page 18