The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  The intervals between Ma’s visits grow longer and one day she turns up with Uncle Willem to take us out for another drive. Puffing on cigarettes in the passenger seat, Ma turns round every now and then to fire perfunctory questions at us. How are things at school? Have we been punished lately? Do we still have to go to church? Phil, Arti and Mil provide the answers. I say nothing. All I feel like doing is strumming my guitar, sitting on an upturned potato crate in the back of the van. Ma is only in a good mood when Uncle Willem is around, or so it seems. What your life is like, Pa, we have yet to discover. The weekends at your Delft high-rise are few and far between, but they continue to be one big party: we gorge on German sandwiches, red fruit wine, cakes, TV, LPs and the addictive view of the trains and the distant lights of Rotterdam, not to mention the complete absence of rules. I am always last to fall asleep so I can stare out of the window alone with no one to disturb my dreams of time creeping past in slow motion; with nothing happening, no one telling me what to do, what to think, what’s expected of me; with no need to listen to someone else’s opinion of me, how I behave, what I amount to.

  I do not come to Delft for you. I come for Eva’s cheese, ham and mayonnaise sandwiches, for her fried potatoes with sausage and ketchup, for your portable record player and the view of the railway tracks. And best of all: the chance to play your guitar. If only you had let me do that eight years earlier, man! You never ask us how we are, simply inform us that you have fired off epistle No. 125 or No. 133 to your umpteenth lawyer and that you will continue to fight the good fight until we are back home where we belong. But time rolls on like the trains far below the windows of your high-rise flat, which rocks gently when the gales blow. And not one of your three sons dares look you in the eye and tell you it’s time you gave up on your letters and your court cases, because the last thing any of us want is to come back to you. Not that you would have listened.

  The park

  By the lake in the park in Voorschoten, there’s a massive bench made of stone. The stone bench is where boys and girls meet after school. These rendezvous pass us ‘four little piggies’ by, because we have to stay for two hours after class to do our homework. Care home boys shower on Tuesday and Friday afternoons, and some teachers – either unthinkingly or for a laugh – call out halfway through the homework session, ‘You lot can go home for your shower now.’ Amid classroom sniggers, we pack up our shame in our schoolbags and make a hasty exit. The park is on our way home and we always make sure we take in the stone bench. It’s usually deserted, but on the odd occasion we see older boys and girls hanging around, and God how we envy them: a room and a wardrobe of their own, the freedom to hang anything they like on their bedroom wall, parents who knock politely and don’t just come barging in. Kids who can lie on their bed whenever they feel like it, a level of freedom unknown to us. Sometimes they sit there making out, look up for a second, then carry on right where they left off, while we blush and walk on by. I am fifteen, have yet to smoke my first cigarette, and do my homework like a good little boy. When I enter the day room, the lads from the technical college are already lounging around the coffee table slurping tea and munching on the crusts from the loaves the local baker delivers to our kitchen first thing in the morning. Those crusts are reserved for us and spread with butter and sugar as a surrogate for cakes or crackers. At five o’clock we are sent upstairs to get cleaned up, which we do at the long rows of taps above the troughs in the granite washroom, unless it’s our turn to shower. Between five thirty and six we are left to cool our heels. We get bored easily and that’s when most of the fights start. After dinner, if we’re unlucky, there are household chores to be done. Exemptions are available to those who mop the corridors on Saturdays, sweep the square, clean the bike racks or rake the backyard. The best jobs are reserved for the gardener and the handyman. The gardener maintains the lake where the Maria House is situated: a separate building for foundlings. Some of those foundlings pass through every stage of the home: all three rooms as a young kid in the girls’ wing, then two rooms in the boys’ wing until they end up in the last room with us. By that time they’ve had dozens of carers and you can read it in their faces. I visit one of those boys years later, together with one of his former teachers, and he tells us bitterly how his father turned up on the doorstep on his twenty-first birthday – his first day of adulthood – to inquire how much money he had in his savings account.

  *

  No, given the choice, I’d rather have the Eagle, who turns up at the gate faithfully, promptly, and on his best behaviour. Now he even has permission to visit every other Saturday afternoon. One of the orphans, Rico, accompanies us on our outings. We buy beer, cola, crisps and cigarettes in the town and head over to the park. We give the stone bench a miss, whiling away the Saturday afternoons with our father on the three wooden benches on a mound that overlooks the lake. Frau Eva never joins him; in fact, we never see her again. Eventually we discover that she’s done a runner and taken everything with her. The Eagle comes home from work one day to find the flat stripped bare, even the carpet and the lino gone, and, yes, when he opens the toilet door he finds the blackened bowl full of charred photos under a pile of her shit with a Dutch flag planted in it. One of those little flags from a souvenir shop. We have come to expect stories like this from him, but I cannot say that my father leads a strange life. No one at the home would say such a thing about their father or mother. It’s our life that’s strange.

  *

  In the world outside the home, divorce is taboo and a woman who works is pitied because her husband doesn’t earn enough to put bread on the table. The head makes a weekly appearance to bore us senseless with talks on the workings of ‘normal life’, its rights and wrongs, and the etiquette that keeps everything ticking over as it should. What he means is that when we get out of this place we’d better not mess up like our parents did. His pearls of wisdom come straight from Reader’s Digest. For our edification, he gets us to read Het Parool, an Amsterdam newspaper that says nothing about life in The Hague. We want to read about our own turf, about the battles between white gangs and Indo gangs, the Kikkers versus the Plu, rebels with girls in petticoats perched on the back of their souped-up mopeds. What do we care about wrinkly old Simon Carmiggelt and his wry sketches of life in the capital? Yes, the man can write and he was born in The Hague. But that only makes him a traitor for moving to Amsterdam, home to the head of our institution, a man who is a stranger to self-deprecation, and always determined to make someone else the butt of the joke.

  One day he summons the family to his office, all five of us. He breaks the news as if he is reporting a crime: our father has had the temerity to rent a flat a mere fifteen-minute walk from the home. We take this announcement in our stride, not yet knowing it’s the biggest blunder he could have made. In the eyes of Child Services, the Eagle had landed: a dodgy Chinaman with a shady past had infiltrated Voorschoten, a clear and present danger to peace and order at the home. Something would have to be done.

  The band

  It took a few years, but eventually I sussed out all the nooks and crannies of the children’s home, knew exactly where and when I could give the group leaders the slip and have a sly smoke or enjoy a few stolen moments alone with a girl. The girls were housed in a converted eighteenth-century manor with a driveway long since buried beneath the playing field. In our day, a smaller gravel driveway led up from a green wrought iron gate on Leidseweg and stopped dead at a hidden square bordering on a grove behind which rose the steeple of the Catholic church so vilified by the head. The boys’ wing was a perpendicular extension to the old manor and dated from the 1930s. The wings were linked by an asymmetric vestibule, which served as the main entrance for both the girls (to the left) and the boys (to the right). The broad stairs and marble foyer of the former entrance in the girls’ wing were now reserved for distinguished visitors only. I had been a distinguished visitor once. It was through that entrance that I first set foot in this place on the 26t
h day of November in the year of our Lord 1964.

  The stately main entrance gave way to a long, dingy granite corridor that ran past the kitchen, the scullery, the octagonal reception room, the three rooms for the girls and the boys under ten, and on to a courtyard at the back of the building. At the other end was the girls’ cloakroom and around a corner to the left, a set of granite steps led down to the door between the wings, which was locked at nine every evening. Beyond that door lay the vestibule, with the boys’ coat racks, a granite floor criss-crossed with cycle tracks, and the matt glass windows of my day room. A short hallway ran past a window on the left, overlooking a row of bike racks, then past the entrance to my day room on the right and arrived at the foot of the granite stairs to the boys’ dormitories, before passing the storeroom entrance on the left and the second day room on the right to end at the day room to which Arti had been allocated. From the storeroom, a narrow passage led to the conservatory of the governor’s house, which had its own driveway at the front and a lake at the back, teeming with fish. In winter, a fire crackled in his open hearth.

  Older boys who had been at the home as long as they could remember never uttered the word ‘storeroom’ without pulling a face. True, the air there was stale and the shelves were piled high with bedclothes and hand-me-downs. The day after we arrived, Phil, Arti and I were sent to the storeroom for clothes to tide us over, handed out by two women in charge of sewing and laundry. We were happy enough with our new togs, but the older boys turned up their noses. If you went into town wearing storeroom clothes, they would refuse to walk down the street with you.

  One year later, a new storeroom was created in the girls’ wing when a plan was hatched to restore the old one to its former glory as a chapel. The chapel dated from a time when the children attended a service each morning before school. The governor rejected the name ‘chapel’ as old-fashioned and dubbed his new creation ‘The Ark’, a name as old as the Old Testament. It didn’t catch on; to us it was always the chapel.

  The restored chapel featured a stage, complete with wings and a sound system, but after an inaugural evening of songs and sketches, the place filled with dead air. The only sound heard there was the footsteps of the governor’s wife as she traipsed back and forth between her office and the kitchen to draw up the menu for the day. The governor was never heard. He limped along in his slippers and seemed to be in a perpetual state of ennui. We wanted to start a band and asked him if we could use the sound system. He turned us down flat. The sound system was reserved for the word of God. But wasn’t that covered by our trip to church on Sunday? This cut no ice with him: the sound system was for God’s word and God’s word alone. When a local band began rehearsing in the chapel, we felt betrayed. They brought their own equipment, played far better than we did and turfed us out of the room. We complained and the governor ruled that the band could only get rid of us if we disrupted their rehearsal. Eventually the band members, all at least five years our senior, got used to us and even asked us the odd question about the home and how we had ended up there. They would turn up every Saturday afternoon and trot out a repertoire that was dated but a damn sight more substantial than ours. While my bandmates drooled over their slick instruments and amplifiers, I studied the chords they were playing. We waged a war of attrition and were eventually allowed to rehearse in the chapel too, with our own crummy guitars and crappy equipment. The bass player had to be taught each song note by note, the second guitarist couldn’t make it to the end of a break without losing the plot, and since none of us could sing, the vocals were left up to me. Our rare performances only came about thanks to equipment borrowed from lads at school and the help of a local drummer.

  The lyrics we sang were rebellious and so I became a rebel, in the conviction that you should live what you sing. I railed against the church, our childish bedtimes, the restrictions on how we spent our clothing allowance, and soon we had a following among most of the older boys, my brothers in the vanguard.

  Arti had now come of age and joined us in the senior dorm, supposedly the portal to something that resembled freedom. The group leaders had a tough time coping with three Nolands in one room and hardly a day went by without one of us being banished upstairs. Phil preferred to sit out his punishments in the dorm, while Arti usually opted for the shower room.

  It had been a long time since anyone had been locked in solitary confinement. When they took me to the cell, they told me I’d been asking for it by stirring up trouble with my rebel songs.

  Welcome

  I spent only two days in solitary. The first was to cool me down and on the second I was to hear my sentence. On 1 May 1968 they fetched me from the cell and bundled me into my social worker’s car. I was to be disciplined at a secure unit. I remembered all my trips by car, so few in number: the taxi to Voorschoten, my encounter with the owl in Drenthe and the head driving me back from my mother’s, away from that gruesome flat by Zuider Park. This drive was my longest yet, to a town I would come to hate with every fibre of my being for the rest of my life. It had been built on a river and secreted in one of its dark, narrow, cobbled streets was a sombre building from 1900, a place called Welcome. It had begun life as a workhouse for the destitute, then became an orphanage and by the time I arrived it was a halfway house for juvenile delinquents. On the way, my social worker – a man who showed his face twice a year at most and whose role in my life I had never understood and would never understand – apologized that he had been unable to find me a place at Valkenheide. The borstal at Valkenheide was already the stuff of nightmares, and so I was left to conclude that an even worse fate awaited me at Welcome in the town of Arnhem.

  The entrance was big enough to accommodate a lorry. Heavy gates clanged shut behind me, a sound I recognized from detective movies. A second gate lay ahead. It opened to reveal a dozen or so boys standing in a row. They had crewcuts and wore shorts, and looked for all the world like a troop of boy scouts from bygone days. A gym teacher was inspecting the ranks like a sergeant sizing up a bunch of new recruits. My social worker delivered me to the office and made a swift getaway.

  I found myself eye-to-eye with a former officer of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, who looked me up and down suspiciously. He ordered me to turn out my pockets, cast a pitying glance over my empty wallet, diary and pen – all I had with me – and dropped them into a brown paper bag. Just to be sure, he had a second gym teacher frisk me from head to toe.

  Once I had written my name on the paper bag, he looked at my handwriting and said, ‘Are you at school?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes what?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And what kind of school might that be?’

  ‘Senior secondary.’

  ‘Hmm. None of the lads here ever made it that far. Some can’t even write their own name. What did you do to wind up here?’

  ‘It’s in the report from my social worker. I caused trouble in the group, that’s all. I’m only here for two weeks.’

  ‘Report? We know nothing about a report,’ the man huffed. ‘And as for two weeks, that’s for us to decide. From this moment, you are under disciplinary orders. Dismissed!’

  They locked me in a cell with a peephole in the door, a polished wooden floor, a bed I wasn’t allowed to lie on during the day, and a wooden chair and desk without blotter, paper, pen or ink. I read the ten rules to be obeyed by inmates in their cell and began to cry, then scream. I pounded on the door but no one came. After a while, I calmed down. A small noticeboard above the desk was scribbled full of names. I wondered how those boys had managed to get hold of a pen. Or did those scribbles date from a time when writing in your cell had been permitted?

  As evening fell, the door was unlocked and a boy with lips pressed firmly shut brought me something to eat while a gym teacher stood in the doorway to ensure that not a word passed between us. I was handed a green plastic dish of cabbage and a dollop of mash with a spoon planted in it. The milk came in a plastic b
eaker, but I was used to that. With plastic or a spoon you were less likely to harm yourself or someone else than with china or glass or a fork. What kind of boys were kept within the walls of this bleak institution?

  At eight, I heard the other boys climb the stairs on stocking feet and I was called out of my cell to get cleaned up before bed. All I had been given was a towel. No toothbrush, no toothpaste, no soap. One of the boys gave me a squeeze of toothpaste, whispering that we had to work for our toiletries. A gym teacher stood in the washroom doorway, arms crossed, staring in our direction. Without soap, I washed myself silently with ice-cold water and returned to my cell. There I was given exact instructions on how to hang my clothes over the chair, without the slightest fold or crease. Once I had my pyjamas on – a striped cotton uniform worn by every inmate – I had to put my chair on the landing outside the cell, with my shoes beneath the seat and my socks folded inside them. The dustpan and brush, part of the cell’s standard equipment, also had to be placed under the seat. Later I understood that this was to prevent you using the brush to smash the window, as if that were possible given the thickness of the matt glass and the gap-toothed grin of the bars beyond. Later still, I heard tell of four lads who had beaten two gym teachers unconscious with the brushes, grabbed their keys and made a run for it. They opened the main gates to find two police cars waiting for them.

  The window slid open a fraction but was rigged to go no further. The cord was glued to the track. How could you ever escape from such a cell? And, supposing you did, where was there to run to in this gloomy river town? One inmate had managed to pull off a spectacular escape through the ventilation shafts and swim to the far bank, only to be caught in the beam of a police searchlight.