The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  ‘Arto, my dearest son,’ Mama sobbed, ‘we both had to make this momentous decision but it was my will that sealed our choice. It is better for you to live far from me than here where death might come at any moment. You have sacrificed yourself for the Netherlands, a country entirely unknown to you, and now the Netherlands will receive you into its fold. Arto, once you are there, work hard to build a future for yourself. You have spent many years at war and have fallen far behind with your studies. Show the Nolan family that their illegitimate son is now the rightful bearer of another name and that you can succeed in Dutch society. In my prayers and in my soul, I will be with you.’

  With tears in my eyes I took Mama in my arms. All I could say was, ‘Oh Mama, I will not be gone forever. I will return. I want to be with you, Mama, to go on taking care of you. That is all that matters to me.’

  I knew it was a promise I could not keep.

  ‘Keep your heart strong, Mama. Pass on my goodbyes and best wishes to Ella and Poppy,’ I cried out at last.

  Babu Tenie and Kokkie Tas came to me in tears and I embraced them both. These servants were far better people than all those folk who bragged about their European blood.

  Once Ben de Lima had said his own fond farewell to my family, we took leave of our city with a quick walk through the streets of Undaan Kulon. Then we took a becak back to Tunjungan.

  It was already late afternoon. We had the driver stop outside the Marines Club and went inside to drink our fill of whisky and brandy. Ben and I were half-drunk when six marines from other units came in and got tanked up on beer and hard liquor. We had a fine old time with those Dutchmen, bursting into song after song, each man more tuneless than his mate. Then all eight of us staggered out into the street. Luckily we were not the only drunken marines around, though there were less and less of us in the city and passers-by stared in our direction.

  *

  Night had fallen, and Ben and I went looking for a Chinese restaurant. Following Ben’s directions we found a small place off Embong Malang, which he swore served the best pork in town. The first thing we did was order a large glass of strong coffee and wait until we felt a little less drunk before ordering our final meal: an elaborate selection of Chinese dishes, including a special pork dish I had never eaten before.

  After dinner, Ben suggested we go to Evelyn’s house to say goodbye. We left the Chinese restaurant and wandered listlessly down Embong Malang to the southern district telephone exchange near Hotel Sarkies. Jo Petten was there too and she ran into Ben’s arms and smothered him with kisses. I received the same treatment from Evelyn. It felt fine, even if she did begin with a playful slap in the face because I reeked of booze. Amid these caresses on the porch, Evelyn begged me to stay with her forever. No matter what, she wanted to bear my child so that I would always be bound to her. I almost cringed in fear when Evelyn said these things, choking on her tears, but I swallowed hard and regained my self-control. ‘I’m sorry, Evy,’ I said softly, ‘but I can’t. I love you very much but I am still under military discipline. If I stay with you, they will shoot me as a deserter. Later, if you have the chance to sail for the Netherlands, write to me and I will wait for you there.’

  It was close to midnight when Ben and I finally found the courage to tear ourselves away from the girls we loved. We kissed our sweethearts one last time, then ran all the way to Simpang. We were in luck: the good old Tapeworm Express was easing round the bend to Kaliasin. We raised our hands and the driver slowed her down enough for us to take a running jump. The linked trucks snaked their way past Willemsoord Barracks where we hopped off and strolled up to the guard at the barrier.

  *

  We were wakened at six the next morning. After a long bath, we dressed and immediately started packing. Each of us had a duffel bag and a suitcase. Breakfast over, we returned to our sleeping quarters in our khaki dress uniforms with cap, checked our baggage and humped everything to the parade ground, where some two hundred marines had gathered, ready for the overseas voyage. At the parade ground, Major Veenhuizen introduced me to Major of the Marine Corps Van Tielrooy, who was to sail with us as transport commander.

  Late in the morning, fall-in was sounded. All two hundred marines lined up, raring to go. The barracks commander gave a short farewell speech on behalf of the Commander of Naval Forces. We were then issued with every possible instruction and at last were able to march out onto Jambistraat, waved off by the few who remained behind.

  Two four-truck Tapeworm Expresses stood ready to take us to the docks at Tanjung Perak. Our route led through the centre of Surabaya and I feasted my eyes on the city one last time, absorbing every detail. A deep sorrow came over me but I did not let on to my fellow passengers. In every neighbourhood, people waved as we passed. It was left to us to wonder why.

  After an hour or so, our column arrived at the docks and approached the quay where the Great Bear was moored. In no time, a bunch of us had christened her The Grizzly. She was a liberty ship, bought from the US by the Dutch government, and had seen her fair share of wartime action. We gathered our baggage and walked slowly in the direction of the ship. A military band had appeared and began playing a series of marches and patriotic songs. Many of the servicemen were over the moon to be sailing home at last, but many were not. I trudged sadly up the gangway to the ship. A crew member pointed the way to my bunk. I threw down my bags, returned to the deck and leaned over the railing, looking down at the quay.

  Among the crowd I spotted Evelyn in her lacy white summer dress, standing with her sister and brother-in-law. I was overcome with emotion and waved to her. I called out that I would wait for her in Holland, if ever she were able to make the passage. She stood there and did not move a muscle.

  I heard the ship’s horn blast once, then twice. Crewmen walked over to the hawsers and cast off. By the time the horn sounded a third time, their job was done. The Great Bear left the quayside and slowly sailed away. I went to the bow of the ship and took in the panoramic view of the city where I was born. Off in the distance I could still see the tower of the government building and far behind it the district of Undaan Kulon, where Mama lived.

  Suddenly I felt a hand on my left shoulder. I turned to see the sympathetic eyes of Major Van Tielrooy.

  ‘Let your tears flow, Nolan,’ he said, full of feeling. ‘I know what it means to say goodbye in such wretched circumstances. My men have informed me well. I know about your family. You have given your all for Queen and Country, and from this moment on the Royal Navy has a duty to take you under its wing. You are no longer safe on your native soil, as well you know, not only because of your allegiance to the House of Orange, but because you have given more than the Netherlands had a right to expect.’

  I nodded my thanks and kept staring at the spot on the quayside where Evelyn Preyers stood. I felt the urge to jump overboard and swim back to shore, but instead I continued to stare until I lost sight of her.

  *

  The Great Bear sailed north, full steam ahead through the narrow strait between Java and Madura. She then bore west, setting a course for Semarang. Early in the morning of 23 March 1950, we cast anchor in Semarang harbour. Navy motor launches ferried a few hundred KNIL soldiers, many with their families, from the quay to the ship. From Semarang our voyage continued westwards to Tanjung Priok, where the Great Bear was able to dock. Ben de Lima and I ambled across the deck and could just make out the distant city skyline of Batavia. I thought of my sister Ina, living her life somewhere beneath those roofs. The Great Bear lay at anchor for a full day and night to give more KNIL soldiers and their families the opportunity to board. It was almost evening when the old tub left Tanjung Priok, heading west past the island of Sumatra. She moored one last time at Sabang, off the coast of Aceh, where we took on drinking water and supplies. Lost in thought, Ben de Lima, Harry Rijckaerdt, Jonker Laperia and I gazed out across the city.

  V

  CODA

  Paper in a munitions chest

  Someone had tra
cked me down, sent me a letter enclosing photographs of a mysterious chest. I contacted the sender and travelled to a provincial town, where I was met by old acquaintances of my father’s from the Indies. They fed me nasi rames. The man was an Indo and told me my father was all swagger and bluff back in his Java days. This he knew from tales told by people from Surabaya, where my father had apparently enjoyed a degree of notoriety. Unfortunately, the man could name no one who featured in my father’s anecdotes or memoirs. His wife was a Dutchwoman who only cooked Indies-style, recipes handed down by her mother-in-law. I was taken aback to see a white woman taking care of her Indo husband in this way. Later, it was my own perception that struck me as strange.

  Once we had eaten, they fetched the battered chest from the attic. It was a faded navy blue, rather heavy and, not counting the two reinforcement strips on the lid, measured roughly eighteen inches by fourteen by twelve.

  On the lid and the back, bold white capitals, emphatically punctuated, read:

  TO CTD. DPT

  MARNS. ROTTERDAM.

  A. NOLAN

  Printed diagonally on the sides in the same colour and font and were the words:

  HOLD LUGGAGE.

  On the front was my father’s destination, an address in The Hague:

  A. NOLAN

  PARALLELWEG. 169.

  DEN HAAG.

  NOLAN, not NOLAND. Which means he didn’t go by the name of Noland back then, at least not in the eyes of the Marine Brigade. The chest couldn’t have travelled with my father on his voyage from Indonesia to the Netherlands, as he had docked in Amsterdam with a cabin trunk from which he claimed two samurai swords had been stolen in transit. This smaller chest must have been shipped to the Netherlands separately, through the port of Rotterdam.

  My hostess told me the chest had been left with her late mother-in-law, a woman from the Indies whom my father often visited. I had no idea who she meant and I can’t say it interested me much. The chest had never featured in my childhood. The bottom was lined with a musty, yellowed Dutch-language newspaper from 1950, the year my father arrived in the Netherlands. But what about its contents? Had the Marine Brigade simply sent it on as a memento?

  I wrote to my father asking him if I could keep the chest as a souvenir. I never received an answer. Strange, as he was usually quick to reply to letters.

  It was my brother Phil who identified it as an old-fashioned munitions chest, carried on the patrols the Eagle went on with the Dutch marines. He was in no doubt that it had once contained hand grenades, cartridges and the like. The Eagle had probably lugged that heavy chest, slung around his shoulders on two loops of rope. These days it holds the many letters my father left me before he departed for Spain – letters he once sent to the authorities with complaints about Child Services, about the governors of the children’s home in Voorschoten, about Ma, Frau Eva, Renate and the Spanish bride who did a runner two weeks into their marriage. I also keep old photos in the chest, the handful that escaped Frau Eva’s vengeance. And of course the manuscript I once deposited in his letterbox, yellowed and dusty now. He later rewrote the whole thing, a more concise account, which I keep in the munitions chest too. It was completed in 1985, the year the Eagle turned sixty. By coincidence a war monument was unveiled in Bondowoso, East Java that same year: Monumen Gerbong Maut A memorial to the prisoners who perished on a train from Bondowoso to Surabaya in 1947. In 1985 I was about to make the crossing to Indonesia myself, to stay with my Aunty Ella for a while. Not a single publisher, not even one of the six hundred Indies associations in the Netherlands, had shown the least interest in the manuscript my father never tired of sending out. These days I often feel like its custodian, especially when I plonk myself down on the old chest to strum my guitar.

  The manuscript is at Phil’s now. Typical twins we are: the younger primed to have a go at the elder, always on the offensive unless he happens to be in a good mood. My relationship with Phil is not unlike my relationship with Ma. Normal conversation barely gets a look in. It’s all friction, sarcasm and sometimes downright hostility, echoes of the old family home where the first-born son had to make sure his siblings were home on time and all the rest of it. I was little more than the reluctant extension of my father’s will. That makes me the Smart Arse in Phil’s eyes, the brother who always thinks he knows best. And I see Phil as the Inquisitor, forever poised to take up his hammer and chisel to chip my wavering character into a sculpture of steadfastness. We share a city, live less than half a mile apart, yet we seldom see each other in the flesh. Email and webcam are our channels of choice.

  Our mother too, after a vagabond existence that took her to Helmond and Zoetermeer is – to use the Eagle’s words – back in the ‘city of the damned’. When Uncle Willem passed away, she chose to spend her final years in Dudok’s housing estate of all places. Whenever I cycle through Zuider Park and see those streets looming up ahead, I feel a tremendous urge to turn around and pedal for my life. How I hate that place.

  Phil and I see Ma once a year at most, unlike Arti, Mil and Nana. Those three live up in Amsterdam, but still visit her more than we do. As for Ma, she visits no one. She sits there glued to the TV and couldn’t even tell you where we live. Pa refuses to return to the Netherlands to see his grandchildren. What a family! Mil is the only one who visits Pa down in Malaga. Our sibling relations are dominated by feuds: sister snubs brother who shuns brother who offends sister and on it goes. Being the eldest, I sidestep much of the animosity that divides the other four but, even so, it’s beyond my power to bring the five of us together. Looking back, Pa didn’t do too badly on that score. He never managed to unite the entire clan for Christmas or his birthday, but there was the odd occasion when he succeeded in gathering four of us around him in that grim little Haarlem flat of his.

  *

  I can’t help wondering how that old katjong keeps it up, knocking around his no-man’s land of a life, stranded between the past imperfect and a dead-end future. First thing tomorrow, in the concrete tourist trap he retreated to however long ago, will he toddle down to the kiosk on that unsightly Spanish boulevard for the thousandth time to buy the latest edition of that rag of a Dutch newspaper? And after downing a kopi tubruk at his regular haunt – some dodgy Chinese café – will he toddle back to his flat, put a magnifying glass to his worn-out eyes and while away the hours cutting out articles that expose racism in the Netherlands? How many of those have I received in the post? Photocopied snippets accompanied by his standard handwritten message:

  Leave that hateful country full of racists!

  Come and live here, in southern Spain!

  Boy, wouldn’t that be fun? A front-row seat for his tales of woe about the Queen, Child Services and Ma all over again. Granted, I moan about the Dutch often enough myself, but then I was never about to fight to the death for them, the House of Orange least of all. The Dutch understood that the day I failed to make it to the end of my National Service medical: that’s how quick they were to declare me ‘permanently unfit for service’. Sister Mil told me Pa now has scrapbooks full of clippings on racism in the Netherlands, the country where he never found his feet. I could tell him I have never found my feet here either but that would be no comfort to him, only his cue to trot out the same ‘at least you were born here’ bullshit I’ve heard more times than I care to remember. He and all the Indos shipped over from the colonies never tire of telling me and my generation we don’t belong among them because we were not born over there. So where exactly do we belong? As I write, thousands are flocking to The Hague to attend a festival called Summer of the Indies. Don’t ask me who it’s for. The organizers’ neocolonial mindset even stretches to dishing up the world’s biggest rijsttafel on the main square. When every last vestige of cultural sensitivity is gone, there’s always the Guinness Book of Records to shoot for. Do they even know the rijsttafel is the culinary symbol of colonialism at its most opulent? Beats me. My father never had much time for the upper classes in the Indies. And here
in Holland he much preferred Chinese cafés to Indo cafés – precious few of them left in The Hague these days. Most are being taken over by Indonesians; I wonder what Pa would make of that. For the average Dutchman there’s no difference between Indo and Indonesian food. And these days even us post-war children pass for Indos, genuine Indos – once an insult, now an identity – but of course we will always be fakers to my father’s generation with their tempo doeloe schtick. A while back, I read a book by one Wim Walraven Jr, a young man with an irascible scribe of a father by the name of Willem Walraven. Walraven Senior was a Belanda journalist who married a Javanese woman and lived in a house in the tropics, waited on by Indos galore. And in the stack of letters he wrote to a friend, ‘those Indos’ come in for torrents of abuse. Unfortunately the man could write. His own little Indo pride and joy, Walraven Jr, went on to scale the dizzy heights of professional lunacy. Wound up in America, a little house in the middle of nowhere. And when the memories of his father got too much for him he would head out into the desert and have himself a right old scream. I’m a screamer too. I scream when I practise a deadly technique at the dojo where I train. A scream the Japanese call kiai. At an age when tai chi would make more sense, here I am devoting myself to the martial art of jujitsu: a shrimp propelling myself backwards through life or so it sometimes seems. I put it down to a need to confront my fear of violence. At any rate I do not fear the Eagle any more. Luckily for him, I came to jujitsu thirty years too late to bounce him off every wall in that flat of his, with his shitty war books that stank of mothballs, his filthy obats on sticky little tables and his ridiculous Indo textiles on the walls. I appear to be a decent enough guy, even a high-minded human being in the eyes of a new-ager or two, nobly imbibing the principles of the I Ching. That’ll be what’s stopping me from boarding a plane even now and sending the Eagle to the eternal hunting grounds once and for all. He could be there already, for all I know. In which case he can give my best to that family of his and tell them what an almighty bastard he has been to his children, though if they’ve been paying any attention up there they’ll have worked that one out for themselves by now. Then he can brace himself for a flogging with his mother’s whip and her brother Soen can rub vinegar into the welts on his back, assuming acid has a place in the sweet hereafter. And they can all praise the Lord that they’ve been spared this miserable Autumn of the Indies in The Hague, for you can bet your bottom dollar that the world’s biggest rijsttafel will be washed away by a Dutch monsoon. No one wants that to happen, of course. No one but me. Tragic how the depleted, rollator-bound platoon from the Indies totter into the spotlight time after time and let the Belandas make a spectacle of them. In that sense they really are the immortal film stars the folks back in Indonesia take them for: kow-towing to the director and saving their complaints for when they wipe off their make-up behind the scenes. Indos never form a front. Rival splinter groups are all they have ever amounted to, incapable of agreeing on anything. The Eagle knew that all along. But that hard-wired inferiority complex of theirs means they will always listen to a Belanda, even a Belanda who knows bugger all about the history of the Indies. Attention at last! Understood by the Belanda, the tuan besar. Those losers and their tempo doeloe. That said, most of my best friends are Indos. ‘Birds of a feather…’ as The Eagle used to say. It’s one thing Pa and I agree on: he always despised that tempo doeloe nonsense too. Not that his own taste was so refined. The daily dose of American drivel he consumed on his black-and-white TV was a legacy of the starry-eyed obsession he contracted in the damned Dutch East Indies. In that sense, the Eagle was a Belanda himself. The Australian radio stations in the pre-war Indies drooled over everything their American big brothers did and copied them by broadcasting Hawaiian music. It caught on and the Indos adopted the Hawaiians as their musical brethren. Uncle Karel played a damn good steel guitar and once came second in the Surabayan championships, if I remember rightly from the tales the Eagle told us back in the day. Then again, it might not have been a guitar at all but the sia, the three-pronged weapon he wielded with such skill as a pukulan fighter. Or maybe he was second best at both… could be. Karel made his little brother sweat on the high bar in the garden, taught him how to kick and punch, but I don’t think Arto was ever really one for hand-to-hand combat. A true fighter turns up his nose at pistols, rifles and cannon. Not the Eagle. He had no qualms about pulling out his stupid pistol and gunning down a Chinese martial arts fighter at a street market. An act that even made his brother Karel sick. Martial arts versus weaponry that has been refined over generations. The lone wolf versus the military industrial complex. No contest. But I will always take the side of the lone wolf who hones his martial arts skills year in, year out. Can I help it if my chosen tradition is Japanese? Am I honour-bound to make the Eagle’s old enemies my own? Of course he damned them all to hell, the bombers that reduced his family home to rubble, but his main objection seems to have been that they were Japanese. Never did I hear him say he was happy that his mother, brothers and sisters had survived the bombing. All he could whine about for years on end were the twelve man-sized Chinese vases that had been blown to bits. True, they were worth money, but his sisters’ beautiful bodies brought in the readies too, didn’t they? What a disgrace in his eyes, Ella and Ina serving in a restaurant where Japanese officers got smashed on sake every night, his own sisters letting themselves be used as hostesses. Oh, the shame! ‘Comfort women’ is the term they use today, at least when a woman was coerced by the occupier. A term off limits to a woman who needed to earn a crust by trading love for money, lest she incur the wrath of the society for the protection of comfort women. There are comfort women who have formed groups to demand an apology from the current Japanese government – an apology and a hefty payout. Who wants payment in arrears from their abuser? Keep your money and stick it where the sun don’t shine! I would not take the Eagle’s money. Not a penny. My sister Mil would be happy to, but then he only hit her once in her life. Pa’s sister Ella told me, as an old woman bowed with sorrow, that she had truly loved the Japanese officer who frequented their family home. She told me this on the porch of her home in Surabaya, where I stayed for a month in the hope of hearing something about my father’s war. What I heard was precious little, nothing at all in fact. ‘My little brother was always home with me,’ she said without blinking. As if she had never endured two years in a women’s internment camp. In the end, love pays no heed to war – just look at those films about the Nazi who loved a Jewish girl or the unrequited longing between a German officer and a French piano teacher. The Eagle’s romance was with Holland. He was crazy enough to hang a portrait of Queen Wilhelmina on his bedroom wall in defiance of the Japs. His whole family berated him and waited wisely for better times to come; he was the only one to side with the Dutch. The fact that his mother was nothing but his father’s concubine turned out to be a blessing in disguise, allowing him to walk the streets with his Chinese ID and a Chinese badge on his lapel. Chilling when you think about it, the double role he played, like his Uncle Soen come to that, who went about his day-to-day business with Indonesians while helping his nephew fight them. It’s hard to grasp. Pa and his schoolmates signing up for the Demolition Corps, I get that. Unfortunately, he was captured by the Japanese and tortured. Yes, I know what they did to him, he showed me the scars on his back often enough. Was it just a cowardly case of siding with the big boys? Once the Americans had dropped their atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and long-faced Japanese soldiers were roaming the streets of Surabaya, he skewered them with his takeyari under cover of darkness. The city had been in chaos ever since Sukarno had declared the Republic of Indonesia: the Javanese were crying out for their Merdeka, their freedom, and anti-Belanda and anti-Indo slogans were daubed on the walls. But what was going on inside the Eagle? His Javanese friends never tired of reminding him that the Indos – or at least his late father’s highbrow coterie – had always looked on him with contempt. Amid the throes of revolution, surely his ch
oice should have been clear? But off in the distance, the cannon of the British Royal Navy could be heard. With a red-and-white emblem on his shirt, he misled the Indonesians and offered his services to the British. He went out on patrol as a truncheon-wielding constable first class. And then the Dutch came blundering back onto the scene in the naive conviction that Indonesia was still theirs. To the Eagle’s regret, the revived Municipal Police offered him little chance to kick up a rumpus, but then came the Allied marines, trained in Carolina. The next best thing to American cowboys, the real deal. As a young katjong, he fell in love with their uniforms and their high-tech weapons. There were more boys like him, interpreters all. They too spoke Chinese, Japanese, Javanese, Malay, Dutch, English and goodness knows what else. Many were childhood friends of his: Indos, Chinese, Ambonese, Manadonese and even Javanese with personal motives for fighting against the Indonesian freedom fighters. Indonesian captives were interrogated by the Eagle and his mates, beaten and tortured. Nice work if you can get it. The Dutch delegated the torture to the interpreters. Interpreters? Talk about misrepresenting the job! The Eagle even climbed the ladder, became head of Prisoner Interrogation, which means he must either have been exceptionally cruel, or smarter than his fellow interpreters. In the meantime it became clear that the world was turning against the Netherlands, with the Americans leading the way: after all, a return to the Dutch colonial monopoly could only be bad for business. While the Eagle and his mates were playing the thug, beating one prisoner after another till they could barely walk, the top brass were sitting around a conference table with their filthy hands sheathed in immaculate gloves. Arto was but a common soldier and it began to dawn on him that he had backed the wrong horse. And still he didn’t want to know. With the hatchet buried and decolonization looming, even his Dutch mates told him he’d be better off staying put. There, on Java! He never committed it to paper, but he did let it slip to me once. But what are you supposed to do when you’re second on a blacklist signed by Sukarno? The Indonesians were always going to hound him, and hound him they did, all the way to his bedroom in Holland. I hope he packed up those phantoms and took them with him when he left for his Spanish costa, though sometimes I wonder. Especially when they visit me in my dreams. I am in my element alone with a guitar in my hands or with a pupil sitting opposite me. My father thrives alone with a typewriter on his lap and a framed portrait on the wall opposite. I am the captive guitarist who turned the tables and interrogated him endlessly on my visits to his flat in Haarlem, almost as persistently as he interrogated his prisoners, minus the physical abuse of course. His response was to hand me his memoirs, the rewritten version no less. For years I pushed them aside, simply could not bring myself to read them. And now the time has come. He always thought it was Arti who shoved those three parcels through his letterbox that night. I never told him the truth, that I was the one who had returned his original manuscript to him. Because I wanted to find out how often he got things wrong. Completely and utterly wrong.