In the beginning, the solitary Indo left five guilders on the aluminium kitchen counter each morning before he went to work. He was a draughtsman for a US oil company in The Hague. I did the shopping and learned to make noodle soup. After three days the pan was empty and I made more. Apart from that, we munched on Ryvita with cheese and snacked on peanuts, washed down with sweet unfiltered kopi tubruk. One evening he took me to The Hague to see a movie. It was strange travelling back on the bus to Voorschoten with him, a place where I was more at home than he was. Miniature bombers and fighter planes hung from his living room ceiling, model tanks lined the windowsills and the bookcase was brimming over with war books. I couldn’t help wondering where he had stashed his Marine dagger. On the wall was a framed official letter from the US State Department thanking him for his application to join their forces in Vietnam.
‘Look…’ he said with a devilish glint in his eye. ‘They rejected your father on the grounds of his age, but I still feel young enough to fight those filthy commies!’
When he discovered I was buying tobacco from the household allowance, the five guilders he left for me became two-fifty. This was no longer enough to make noodle soup, so I skimped on the ingredients. He did not believe me and suspected me of buying marijuana. Before long I woke up to find one guilder on the kitchen counter.
I went into his bedroom one day when he was out and found a stash of food in his wardrobe, including a tin of herring in tomato sauce. I took it back to the spare room with a few crackers and ate the whole thing. Sneaking back into his bedroom, I cautiously poked around his bed. Under his mattress, I found the dagger.
There would be no sleep that night. Getting up for a piss, I noticed his bedroom door was ajar. In the faint glow of the toilet light I saw him sleeping, saw my father sleeping for the first time in my life. To my horror, his eyes were half open. I knew he could not be awake or he would have growled, ‘What are you up to out there?’
It dawned on me that ex-marines who sleep with their eyes half open in peacetime are as vulnerable as every other human being. But another day passed and I found the door to his room locked and no money on the kitchen counter. I made an evening meal from what was left in the fridge. My father ate in silence. The next day when I got up, the living room door was locked too and the fridge and the kitchen cupboards had been cleared out completely. In fear, I left the house key on the kitchen counter and, yes, that is when I finally forsook him.
*
After a nomadic existence sleeping at the homes of former schoolfriends in Voorschoten and squats in Leiden, I ran out of options. One winter’s day I took the train to The Hague and walked all the way from Staatsspoor station to Scheveningen. I headed for the Circus Theatre and from there I found the street where Uncle Willem lived. I spotted his blue-and-white Volkswagen camper van parked by the kerb, went down the steps to his basement flat and knocked on the door.
I cannot remember ever being welcomed as warmly as I was by Uncle Willem that day. The man from Scheveningen yanked me into his shabby flat, sat me down with a smile and gave me fresh herring to eat. Then he stuffed me full of soup and fried egg butties. He referred to this feast as a ‘quick bite’, proving himself a man to rival Frau Eva. He let me doss down on a spare bed in his room. The rumbling snores of the man who smoked full-strength tobacco made me feel safe. When my mother dropped by the next day, she brought a tin of herring in tomato sauce and did not hold out her hand when she asked me how I was doing. I stared down at the tin for a very long time. The oval stood for endless memory. For my father’s hermetic hostility. The label for a mother I could not read.
Willem
When the Germans invaded in 1940, young Willem was put on a barge that left from Brouwersgracht and shipped off to Germany with other lads his age. He wound up operating a lathe, making the missiles that obliterated London in Hitler’s dreams. In exchange for his labour, Willem was fed and watered. But there was no herring. He escaped and made it back to Holland, where he was arrested and put behind bars in Scheveningen, a condemned man. His childhood sweetheart Corrie secured his release, perhaps by putting her body at the disposal of some officer or other. It was not a story she could tell now, even if she wanted to, as she sat in her chair all day poring over the Bible, under the yoke of Jehovah’s Witnesses who called round once a week and appeared to be unfamiliar with the concept of laughter. Corrie took pills for depression and anxiety and suffered bouts of incontinence which left the whole room reeking of urine. A wartime photo on the mantelpiece showed a pretty young Scheveningen girl. Without her, Willem would have been dragged off to the dunes to face a firing squad. After his death-row reprieve from the notorious German jail they dubbed the ‘Orange Hotel’, he had beaten a man to a pulp for a hunk of bread among those same dunes.
‘Him or me,’ he said with an apologetic chuckle.
Willem was a restless, good-humoured man, unable to sit still for five minutes, born under Gemini. He had one of those typically Dutch noses that bloomed red at the end, an old-fashioned conk. A Scheveninger to his very bones, he bore a surname we all thought was hilarious: Toot. His wife Corrie was a Toot too. The custom of the time dictated that a widow or widower should add their deceased partner’s surname to their own. So if death did them part, one of them would live out their days as a Toot-Toot. I once saw that very surname on a front door in Scheveningen.
After the war, Willem spent a year in prison. He never told me why. By the time of his release, he had read the Bible twice from start to finish, pronounced God a figment of the collective imagination and knocked together a refectory table with a top made of burned-out matches, which now stood in his living room.
Long before the war, Willem had himself been a care home boy in Voorschoten, or the orphanage as it was then. In his day, the boys had to wear a black uniform with a yellow emblem when they went to church or school, while the girls stayed indoors learning how to be good little housewives. The summer holiday was short and sweet: a day trip to the seaside at Scheveningen. Willem didn’t have a single qualification to his name, not even a swimming certificate, but he brandished his driving licence proudly.
‘Listen, kid, this scrap of pink linen is a driving licence! And a driving licence sets you on the road to freedom!’
Willem never planned a single day in advance. After breakfast he would pace up and down for a bit, sucking on a roll-up and asking himself out loud what the day might have in store. One of his activities was driving from hotel to hotel buying up reject bath towels to sell at the street market. Before he left for the day, he would ask me to keep an eye on Corrie. ‘I’m off to hunt down some merchandise. A man’s got to make a living somehow, right, kid?’
Sometimes he would stay away for days. Working at the docks in Rotterdam, he said. Or bedding down in a caravan at a breaker’s yard in Leidschendam, looking after the place for a small fee as a favour to a friend. As my mother told it, he had married his life-saver Corrie, divorced her and then married her again, probably because she had begun to show signs of schizophrenia, living in constant fear that the German occupiers, long since gone, might come marching down Dirk Hoogenraadstraat any minute. When Holland converted to natural gas en masse, Willem went door-to-door as a gas fitter, adapting the boilers. By the time he turned up on the doorstep of our flat by Zuider Park, we were in the children’s home, the police had escorted my father off the premises and my mother was a bag of nerves living on her own. That was her story. The cheery gas fitter returned the same evening to see how that lonely woman was doing and the next night he was back again, bearing a meal of soup and herring. From then on, he visited whenever he was able to leave Corrie alone for a spell.
Now that I had found a roof over my head at Willem’s, the fifty-six-year-old Scheveninger was able to spend more time with his lover, my mother. I was around to keep Corrie company, calm her down every now and again, and play guitar for her if she asked me to.
My father had his own version of events, in which Willem
and my mother had met long before the boiler needed adapting. In the days when all seven of us were still crammed into that cursed Zuider Park tenement, she worked as a cleaner from seven to nine at the V&D department store on Leyweg. And it was there, in one of the toilets, that the two of them first started pawing at each other, or so Pa claimed. Phil, Arti and I sometimes wondered which account was true, but we absolved Willem of all blame regardless. We were so fond of him that Arti even began to look on him as his stepdad.
Oddly, when I attended a reunion at the children’s home in Voorschoten many years later, not one of our carers could recall a single thing about my mother or Willem. Some didn’t even know I had a mother. It was my father they remembered, every last one of them. Though he only had half the visiting rights, his appearances had made an indelible impression. Only then did I start to remember how my mother used to skip her visits. She later confessed that she and Willem toured around Europe, but only when Corrie was ‘on good form’ and able to make the beds and wash the sheets of the migrant workers who boarded with her. Ma and Willem drove to Germany and sometimes down to France and so there was no way she could get back in time to visit us. It was an admission that disappointed me. My father never missed a visit, not one. My social worker said it was to show our carers how loyal he was to us.
The trunk in the basement
A short flight of whitewashed steps led down from the street to Willem’s small front garden, with its assortment of dying trees, loose paving stones and car tyres. I would sit at a little table in his kitchen writing lyrics in colourful notebooks, reading books by the Russian masters or playing guitar. The kitchen window afforded a view of paint peeling off the wooden façade of the living room where Corrie sat and read her Bible, unless electric currents were coursing through her limbs, an affliction she insisted was the work of the Germans. Each morning, Willem put a fresh square of lino under her seat to stop the urine rotting the wood of her chair. She had her good weeks, when she was able to do the housework and wash the sheets of their migrant lodgers. The room the six of them shared contained three bunk beds and was at the end of a long hallway accessed through the kitchen. They came from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, and adored Corrie for taking such good care of them. When she was ill and unable to clean up after them, they prayed for her. If it was a bad week, they would each give me a guilder to take their sheets to the laundrette.
Willem’s room, where I slept, was next to the migrants’ room. I never once heard them leave for work at the crack of dawn; Willem liked his sleep and the man of the house was not to be disturbed. They looked tired when they came home in the evening. After a cold shower, they would come into the kitchen wearing grey-and-white striped caftans and take it in turns to cook an enormous pot of food: mutton usually, with potatoes, tomatoes and veg. Sometimes they invited me to their room to share a meal. No knife and fork; they ate with their hands. They taught me how to break bread and use it to lift potatoes and chunks of meat from the pot. They barely spoke to one another. All they did was work, cook, sleep, work and send money home to their wives and children every week. But if they came and joined me at the kitchen table, they were more talkative. One had a little book in which he kept a record of how often he had made love to his wife whenever he spent a couple of weeks in his homeland. Another taught me to write my name in Arabic. And another taught me an Islamic prayer. They told me they had worked in Germany too, but that conditions there were lousy. Life was good in Switzerland, they said, but they weren’t allowed to stay long. None of them had a residence permit and to me their lives seemed sad.
My favourite was the quietest of the six. The others whispered that he sent every spare penny to his family and permitted himself no luxuries at all. He liked to listen to me play guitar, until nine, when he would thank me and turn in for the night. When Corrie went to bed an hour later, I would wait a while and then go out and find a bench on the promenade, look out to sea and listen. Scheveningen was old, quiet and deserted back then.
*
One day Willem said to me, ‘Hey, did you know your dad’s name isn’t Noland at all? He’s called Sie, after his mother. Your father is a Chinaman. He typed up his life story and kept it in a thick file.’
I looked at him in surprise. Was that what my father had been doing at his typewriter all those years?
Willem led me to a room off the kitchen, where he stockpiled sacks of rice and tins of food ready for the outbreak of World War Three. I helped him drag the heavy sacks aside. Behind them stood the trunk from my father’s voyage to Holland.
‘What’s that doing here?’
‘The trunk makes your mother nervous. She asked me to look after it. I should really take it over to your father’s but… well, we’d have to do it together, you know?’
‘I wouldn’t if I were you. My dad can get pretty riled up.’
‘I know. I’m sure it’ll all work out one day. Go on, open it…’
I lifted the lid of the trunk and saw nothing but papers: books, documents, letters, photos and files. Willem pointed to the file in question and asked me if I wanted to read it. I hesitated, then nodded.
‘Have you read the whole thing?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, from start to finish. Just like the Bible.’ He chuckled. ‘You’re going to need nerves of steel my boy, ha ha! If you can’t stomach it, just give it back to me. We’ll keep it here behind the sacks of rice. And don’t let those migrant workers see it. Not that they’d be able to read it but, you know… it’s still an exceptional document.’
‘Didn’t my dad ever ask after it?’
‘You bet he did! But your mother told him she’d set fire to the lot. I’d have handled things differently, but your mother does things her way. Hey, you wouldn’t mind looking after Corrie tonight, would you? It’d give me a chance to go and see your mother. She’s all alone over there, you know?’
*
It took me one week to read the first instalment about his youth and the second instalment about the Japanese occupation. After that, I found myself putting it aside more often, taking aimless walks over the promenade night after night, wondering if I would be able to make myself read the whole thing. Some passages terrified me. In the end, I took the pages out of the file and divided them into three equal parts, taking care not to damage the photos and official documents he had pasted in. I tied the three parcels with string and put them back among the sacks of rice.
One evening, I put the parcels in a shopping bag and took the bus to Voorschoten. I walked down my father’s street and looked up at his flat. There was a light in the window and I could make out the shadows of his model warplanes on the ceiling. It didn’t feel like I was coming home; I couldn’t ring the doorbell. But for the manuscript, at least, it was a homecoming of sorts. I slid the three parcels through the letterbox, tossed the bag into the bushes and took the next bus back to The Hague. It was his war, not mine. Not yet it wasn’t.
IV
THE INTERPRETER FROM SURABAYA
From Baldy’s memoirs
Merdeka
When, on 17 August 1945, Sukarno declared an independent Republic of Indonesia, a cry went up for revenge against the Belandas. It was an evening of celebration and killings. I stood alone, the only member of my family to pledge allegiance to the Netherlands. Amid the chaos and violence of this new time known as Bersiap, I was sickened by the actions of my own flesh and blood, who showed themselves to be as spineless as they had been during the Japanese occupation. My elder brothers Jacob and Karel derided my loyalty to a Dutch queen I had never even seen. I paid them no heed and went out into the city the next day, armed with my fighting knife. At Genteng Bridge I spotted Harry Tjong. He showed me his knuckledusters and called me over to the Red Cross building opposite the Oranje Hotel, where fighting had broken out between Indos and Hollanders on one side and pelopors on the other. We rushed over to Tunjungan. The traffic was in chaos and policemen and Japanese soldiers were running towards the Oranje Hotel, where a brave
young Indo had raised the Dutch tricolour on the roof. A couple of pemudas armed with bamboo spears had climbed up after him, clutching the red-and-white flag of Indonesia. They skewered the Indo, along with a Dutchman who tried to defend him. We found ourselves among a bunch of Indos, outnumbered by bloodthirsty pemudas and pelopors armed with samurai swords, revolvers, klewang and all kinds of weapons seized from the Japanese. I drew my knife and plunged it into the throat of the first pemuda I encountered. A stone struck my head and I ran for the cover of a shopping arcade on Embong Malang, then crossed Simpang to reach Ketabang. I had hoped to stop and catch my breath but everywhere I looked I was surrounded by Javanese, killing, fighting and looting. Even women and children were not safe. Cars were sprayed with bullets and set alight before their occupants could escape. As I staggered down the street – head pounding, clothes stained with blood – a couple of pemudas came up to me. Seeing my Chinese badge, one of them took out a handkerchief and wiped the blood from my face. They asked me where I had been fighting. I came up with some lie or other and walked on. ‘Merdeka!’ they cried after me, and continued in the opposite direction. Sticking to the side streets, I avoided the fighting and reached our house in Undaan Kulon.
Mama was shocked to see me walk through the door with my head wounded and my clothes covered in blood. Wide-eyed with fear, our babu and kokkie took one look at me and began to sob. I grabbed clean underwear and slippers, took a cool bath and then slumped onto my bed. My whole body was shaking. Mama came in demanding to know exactly what had happened. I gave her a vague account of the fighting and she all but collapsed in a fit of nerves.
The next day my former sweetheart Ciska Wagner came to see us, in a terrible state. I took her in my arms and comforted her. She lived in Dapuan district, not far from the notorious Werfstraat prison, but was too afraid of the rioting pemudas to go home. It was already late in the afternoon. I fastened my knife to my belt and we ducked into the kampong behind Undaan Kulon in search of a friend of mine by the name of Soetardjo. I asked him to use his Javanese contacts to get hold of a looted car to drive Ciska home. Soetardjo rounded up his pals and around twelve of us set off for Peneleh, armed with bamboo spears, rifles and pistols.
The Interpreter from Java Page 25