The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  We still had a lot to learn, so we were told. The light went out and there was silence. The group leader disappeared into a little corner office at a diagonal to the rest of the room. A soothing glow filtered through a red curtain in the fanlight above the door. I lay awake for a long time wondering if, two chairs’ width away, Phil was awake too. And if he, like me, was crying silently to himself.

  Pleased to meet you

  At five to seven in the morning, a small bulb nudges the dorm into half-light. At seven on the dot, the two big ceiling lights snap on and you are expected to be up on your feet immediately. Anyone still in bed is landed with extra chores. You strip your bed, wash at one of a dozen taps above two troughs in the washroom, get dressed and take your place at the breakfast table at twenty past – no sooner, no later. Most of the boys keep quiet, but the oldest are in a foul mood and they show it: moaning about the dense brown bread and having nothing but rosehip jam to spread on it, about the meagre slices of sweaty cheese and the lukewarm milk we drink from mugs stained brown by our afternoon tea and our evening coffee. The grouches mutter that they can’t wait to finally see the back of this prison. Phil and I are stunned by their insolence. Our father would have knocked them from one end of the room to the other. But no one takes a beating in this place. Punishment here is different.

  Four from our dorm, including Phil and I, attend the secondary school in Voorschoten, a twenty-minute walk away. The other eight bike to the technical college in Leiden and look down their noses at the ‘four little piggies’, as they mockingly call us. The school lacks the warmth of my modest clerical school in The Hague, but the pupils are nice enough and keen to get to know us. These are small-town kids, not city slickers. Phil and I are put in different classes. A girl in my class is the spitting image of French chanteuse Françoise Hardy. She inks her thighs with mathematical formulas come exam time and hides them under her miniskirt. No teacher dares inspect the evidence. She visits us all in our dreams.

  One Friday evening, the head of the children’s home drives us to Leiden, where the owner of a gents’ outfitters opens his shop specially, locking the door behind us. With no other customers around, he is free to give us a hefty discount. He measures us up for Sunday suits. The next day, a female group leader takes us into town to buy a pair of weekday shoes and a smart pair for Sundays. We are delighted, but the older boys scoff and tell us we should have insisted on something more fashionable, the winkle-pickers all the rock stars are wearing. Their rebellious streak is lost on us and, proud as peacocks, we put on our Sunday best to attend the ten o’clock service. We are all given two five-cent coins for the collection. I see two Ambonese brothers from school put two-and-a-half guilder notes into the collection bags, looking around to make sure the godly Dutch parishioners have taken note of their generosity.

  In church, the girls from the home sit in the pews to the left of the aisle and the boys to the right. The girls are not allowed to wear the miniskirts worn by the girls from my class, girls who avoid church like the plague and spend their Sunday mornings in bed. We sit in pairs, just as we walk through the streets two by two. Gone are the days when hordes of orphans dressed in black were herded through the streets, marked out by an emblem on their chest. Thanks to endless pleading by the oldest boys, our morning and evening prayers have been curtailed and the punishment for swearing has been reduced to being sent to the dorm or, if that’s already occupied, to the shower room. Time was when swearing would have got you sent to borstal, a place called Valkenheide. The name strikes fear into all of us. One mention accompanied by the wag of a warning finger is enough to bring us into line. Someone even convinces us the place is named after a falcon that circles above the grounds, keeping a beady eye on every inmate.

  The children’s home is a place of rules, written and unwritten. Most of the unwritten rules have been instituted by the boys themselves. Never ask why someone’s in the home. There’s a standard answer: ‘Did I ever ask you that? Well, then…’ Never grass on someone, even if it’s you they’re picking on. One day, they’ll get you back. Never comment on an older boy’s taste in music. Don’t use fancy words when you talk to simpler lads from working-class backgrounds. If you hear someone wanking off in bed, play possum and ignore their heavy breathing. If someone sneaks over to the office door to spy on a female group leader, keep your mouth shut. If you’re sent to the kitchen on an errand and someone gives you a note for one of the girls, don’t come back with the news that you failed as a go-between. No one will believe you and, worse still, they’ll think you read the message and suspect you of all sorts. If you check out another lad’s dick in the showers, do it as surreptitiously as possible or you’re ‘bent as a corkscrew’. And so on and so forth.

  It takes us a while to get used to showering in one of the eight open alcoves of the granite shower room and, looking back, there’s something farcical about female group leaders in their early twenties walking around with a shampoo bottle and squeezing out the prescribed amount on your head. There are boys who swear out loud when a female group leader walks in, unless she’s a looker… in which case there are those who will happily greet her with a full erection, provoking a curt command to turn around.

  Our mother, sick with nerves, told us on arrival we would spend three weeks at this country estate. When she turns up for Sunday visiting three weeks later, Phil and I are waiting for her in the vestibule that separates the boys’ wing from the girls’ wing and functions as the only communal space. We are neatly dressed, in complete accordance with institutional guidelines: dark suit, immaculately starched white shirt, tie, Sunday socks and shoes. After church in the morning, it’s compulsory to wear your tie all day on Sunday.

  Our mother enters and holds out her hand.

  ‘Hello there, how are you doing?’

  This is odd. I have never shaken my mother’s hand before. It’s as if she’s introducing herself to us. She tells us how handsome we look in our Sunday suits and asks if we knotted our ties ourselves. And even before Arti and the girls have joined us in our day room, she asks us if we’d mind staying at the home a while longer. Three months at most.

  Phil and I shake our heads, happy to be free of the Eagle’s brutal regime. I can barely stand the thought of seeing our flat on Zuider Park again. But Arti and Mil start to whimper when they find out. Nana doesn’t make a sound. Our mother puffs on a cigarette and takes a look around. She strikes up a conversation with the young woman on duty as group leader, just as she always used to make conversation with the next-door neighbours out on the balcony. To us, she doesn’t have much to say.

  What we don’t know is that our crazy father rides past her house every night on his moped. Early on the evening of 26 November, detectives removed him from our home but not before he smashed the place up. He has lost all rights to his property, but he insists that the trunk that accompanied him on his voyage from Java to Holland is sent on.

  The chain-smoking woman racked by nerves stares out at the bare treetops during the darkest days of the year. She sees him again, at the other side of the road, riding slowly past Doornenbos hill in Zuider Park, and ducks out of sight below the windowsill. A short time later she hears him ride up the street in front of the flat. He stops but does not ring the doorbell. The next morning she finds an envelope in the letterbox. It contains a drawing in East Indian ink; he must have drawn it at work. A burial mound bearing six crosses, one for each of us and one for him. That leaves one person in an unmarked grave beneath the soil, our mother, in a coffin or then again perhaps not. The madman’s creative juices are flowing; he returns every day with a variation on the same theme. Our mother keeps the drawings and hands them to her social worker, who puts them in a file. The idiot has no idea that with each drawing he is digging his own grave, undermining his ongoing battle with Child Services and the endless series of court cases he will bring against his former heffalump. Perhaps he doesn’t care. Or is this a course of action they would have understood back in Suraba
ya, a clumsy attempt at guna-guna? The fishwife believes the madman is trying to drive her insane, to convince her that she does not belong with ‘us’.

  The raven’s tale

  No one from the neighbourhood or from our schools knew where we were. At most there were whispers that we had been taken to a secret address, off the Eagle’s radar. He had lost all rights to his former home and for him it was the start of a nomadic existence, moving from one dingy boarding house to the next.

  A hypnotic silence enveloped the tenement flat on Zuider Park. Migrating birds ushered in a new, lonely winter for Mama Helmond, who spent days, weeks, months, seasons in a chair by the window puffing on one cigarette after another, only leaving the house for her daily shop. Should she see the lengthy divorce proceedings through or work towards a reconciliation? She continued to find drawings of six crosses on a burial mound in the letterbox, committed to paper ever more adeptly in East Indian ink by the Eagle. It made her think of his strange world of hocus pocus, of all those exotic letters in Malay and mysterious parcels of herbs that no longer found their way from Java to her front door.

  The portrait of her Chinese mother-in-law from overseas no longer hung at the foot of the bed but had been taken away by a friend of the Eagle’s, sent over to inquire after his trunk and a few personal items that were most dear to him.

  Could that friend have been Matagora?

  The outline of the picture frame was still clearly visible, a patch on the faded wallpaper, and the old woman’s piercing eyes seemed to shine right through it. Until Mama Helmond was roused one night by a hint of a breeze and saw a raven swoop through the bedroom. A raven. She sat bolt upright, clicked on the light, stared at the patch on the wall and instinctively understood that the Chinese sorceress confined to her sickbed in distant Java had departed this life.

  I reminded Ma of this story, Pa. At first she said she didn’t remember it at all. Then she thought for a moment and gave a different version. Weeks before she planned her escape with the doctor and Aunty Fien, you had told it to her as a dream you’d had. So it was you, not her, who saw the raven fly through your bedroom. But that’s not all… your mother didn’t die until one year later, devastated by the collapse of our family according to my sister Nana, who heard it from Ma. So the raven was not a harbinger of your mother’s death but of your own divorce. Or the bird brought tidings of your mother’s illness. Ma, every bit as superstitious as you are, must have seen your mother’s weakness as a sign that she no longer had to remain spellbound and married to you. That’s what she had always believed: that some magic power emanating from your mother kept holding her back from divorcing you. Now I want to know once and for all which of you saw the raven flying through your bedroom. Ma’s memory is a fickle thing. Lying comes easily to her, I’m afraid, a complaint that regularly escaped your lips.

  ‘The woman’s lying!’

  Maybe so, but in your universe everyone’s a liar. I think it’s time I finally came to visit you, so we can put that raven to rest. If that won’t do, I’ll settle for a discussion on racism, that eternal bugbear of yours. And if that doesn’t cut it, we can listen to those old gramophone records you took with you to Spain.

  No warning. I’ll turn up on your doorstep unannounced. Perhaps then you’ll be as happy to see me as you were that very last time in Haarlem, when I appeared out of nowhere and you welcomed me with open arms.

  Liberated from the sorceress by a raven, our mother pulls up at the gates to the children’s home in a Volkswagen camper van one Sunday afternoon in spring. She marches cheerily up the driveway, turns right and flounces along the pavement by the canal that leads to the vestibule. I stay behind in the day room and Phil goes to meet her. Through the matt windows, I watch their shapes disappear into the girls’ wing. It’s a good fifteen minutes before Phil returns and whispers in my ear that she has a boyfriend and that the head has given her permission to take us for a ride through the countryside of South Holland. A Sunday drive is an unheard-of luxury. Elated, we sprint down to the Volkswagen camper at the gate. There’s a bed in the back, a gas stove and a big water bottle. The jovial man at the wheel introduces himself as ‘Willem’. Our mother says we can call him ‘Uncle Willem’ if we like.

  In walks a Chinaman…

  It was like seeing him for the very first time. The way the average Dutchman saw him, no doubt: an Asian chap with a peculiar gait, slightly bent at the knees and crooked at the arm. Not upright but a little hunched, the weight of a mournful soul combined with the awareness of a fighter ready to spring into combat mode at any second, to lash out with speed and precision. Three months it had taken for the authorities to grant him permission to visit his children. We had been sounded out on more than one occasion by the head of the children’s home in all his earnestness – a man who displayed an endless admiration for psychologists and did his best to imitate them. Surrounded by so many people and with the police station only a playing field away, we felt safe enough for a reunion.

  First, my father went to see the head in his office. Then we were summoned from our respective day rooms for a reunion that took place in the long, dimly lit corridor in the girls’ wing. He did not know whether to shake us by the hand or hug us, so he patted us awkwardly on the shoulder, stammering sentences he could not finish, close to tears. It transpired that the thug had missed us terribly, in contrast to his victim and her formal handshake.

  The thug has lost something, lost touch with something. He is a boxer who stands defeated in the ring. No need for him to introduce himself to anyone at the children’s home: everyone can see he is our father. And everyone nods at him with remarkable courtesy. Is it because the boys think Indos of his generation are indomitable fighters? Or do they simply see nothing unhinged behind his charming façade, his madness unseen by almost everyone who meets him for the first time?

  ‘Such a charming fellow.’

  ‘Handsome chap, that father of yours.’

  ‘What a nice father you have!’

  Our day room, Phil’s and mine, is earmarked for what my father will call ‘the reunification’. It is not a genuine reunion, nor will it ever be. For years he will fight court case after court case to get his children back and lose every last one of them. That day, the day we see him again, is a day without fear. We feel protected by a platoon of social workers behind the scenes, and by the proximity of the people who keep the home running, the folk we call group leaders, though to them we are nothing more than a job. Men and women with whom we will never form a bond because they can disappear from one month to the next and never work more than five days in a row or a weekend. And so later, when you go in search of yourself, there is no one who can tell you what you were like back then.

  *

  It must have been a Saturday. I glean this from one of the few photos to survive the vengeful farewell of my father’s second wife, Eva. We are wearing our weekday clothes. My father has obtained permission to see us outside the traditional Sunday visiting hours so that he and my mother can keep out of each other’s way. Many of the kids spend the weekend with one of their parents, so the dayroom is quiet. My father must have handed his camera to someone else, because all six of us are in the photo. Who would that have been? Another leftover boy with a talent for photography?

  In the corner of the day room is a storage bin we chuck our bags into when we come home from school. A couple of benches have been nailed to the front, facing each other at a ninety-degree angle. The rectangular cushions are made of foam rubber and covered in grey plastic. When it’s quiet in the day room, I put the radio on the storage bin, nestle in a corner with my legs tucked under me and listen to the Top 40 from two till four. I barely have any competition: none of the others can keep still long enough to listen to two solid hours of radio. The rest of the lads would rather be playing snooker, shuffleboard or ping-pong.

  My father spoils my fun with his first visit. In the photo, the radio is nowhere to be seen. Arti is sitting on the spot it woul
d have occupied. He has one leg pulled up in front of him, hands clasped around his knee. He is sitting upright, his left foot on the bench where I am sitting, my elbows resting on my knees, chin cupped in my hands. My father is sitting on the other bench, slightly hunched under the weight of Mil, who is perched on the storage bin with her legs hanging over his shoulders. Little Nana is on the floor between the legs of the man whose wrath she alone escaped. Next to my father, on the far right, sits Phil.

  I am looking straight into the lens with an expression that blends surprise with dreamy disillusion. Arti’s sad face belies his princely pose. Mil has her arms crossed and gives a cheeky little smirk. Nana’s gaze is inscrutable. Phil is flaunting the house rules with a cigarette in his left hand, blowing smoke through his nostrils and raising his eyebrows defiantly at the cameraman. The only one avoiding the lens is our father. He gazes pensively across the black lino towards an uncertain future or a ghost-ridden past. Out of all of us, he has the greatest flair for drama, no doubt about it.

  I am wearing jeans and a baggy shirt from the clothing depot at the home, cuffs unfastened, sleeves drooping. Arti is wearing jeans, a shirt and a pullover, Mil a Norwegian jumper and tight trousers. Nana has a white hairband. Phil is wearing a shirt under a sweatshirt. Our father is dressed to the nines, in a white shirt, tie and jacket. A version of him we have never seen before.

  A snow-covered street peeps through the corner window behind Arti and Mil. Three months have passed, give or take, since 26 November 1964. It must be the fag end of February 1965, the year in which our father will turn forty. We have found our feet at the children’s home. We have made friends and learned to give our enemies a wide berth though we occupy the same space. I do not think much was said that afternoon. What is there to say about something so broken?